She offers a vision of engaging with life, even in the midst of grave difficulty. “The first thing we must learn from this vision is the bluntness and directness with which she faces Jesus’s—and, correspondingly, our—suffering. She is teaching us not to sentimentalize, cover over, or (like many politicians) go into denial about the suffering we are undergoing as we face both the coronavirus and climate change. We should not run from the sorrow, fear, and grief, but we should stay connected to our feelings. Only the truth will make us free, and we must confront that truth directly. James Baldwin put it this way: “Not everything faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Fox, commenting on Julian and the lessons she teaches, reminds of the importance of discovering a ‘new normal’ that takes account of what we have been through and the opportunities for learning that it has provided. Pandemics do have their positive side, and the risk is that we don’t see the important things that are staring us in the face.
“It is not enough to
“return to normal” after this coronavirus, even if it does finally go away.
That “normal” was far from healthy to begin with. It brought us climate change,
the extinction of millions of species, with our own species on the cusp of
extinction as well, and, of course, lots of denial in the name of those whose
gods are Wall Street and multinational corporations. It brought us racism and
sexism as a way of life, and it has distorted education and religion, politics,
media, and economics. Who wants to return to that? A pandemic is too important
to waste. This pandemic is here to wake us up. To what? To a “new normal.” One
that honors the sacredness of the earth and of all its life forms. One that
honors the divine feminine alongside a sacred masculine. One that honors the
human body and its basic needs, along with those of the earth’s body, and on that
basis gives birth to a new body politic. One that does not put billionaires and
the structures that create them on pedestals. And one that does not elect
narcissistic politicians who incarnate the very meaning of fatalistic
selfhatred by watching hundreds of thousands die with a shrug of the shoulder
(“It is what it is”). Julian absolutely lays waste to a punitive Father God who
operates on anger, punishment, and what she calls “vengeance.” She found none
of that in Divinity—only in humans (who project it onto Divinity)!”
We live in a world that needs to learn a lot. Let’s hope the
pandemic lessons take us to a better place.
