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So Julian of Norwich, I always say that wrong . I think it's more like Norwich anyways, I need to figure that out. But um Julian of Norwich, she was shaking on her death bed and

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she was completely um had the sweats and her skin was burning and a priest came into her room to give her the last rites and Julian kind of prize open her eyes and she sees the cross dangling from

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his hand and in her fevered state her mind swirls and she sees visions and after three days of this near death experience, her health becomes completely restored and she spends the rest of her life writing down the

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visions, trying to understand them. Divisions became one of the first published works by a woman. Now the story surrounding Julian Norton are historically sketchy. They contradict one another, and I cannot verify the factual

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accuracy of any of them. We do know she was a cloistered nun. She lived during the black death, the bubonic plague. And as that plague ripped through her village. It took the lives of

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probably about a quarter of the population And it lasted over four years. I had been asked to write a devotional about Julian of Norwich In her work, it was 2019, which seems like forever ago now

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. I had taken Ellen Babitsky's mysticism class, so I had read portions of her visions before, but I didn't know too much about it. I picked up her book showings knowing only the scant historical facts

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about her life. And I got to tell you there are people who have studied Julian's words for their entire lives, digging deeply into her mind and her theology dissertations have been written many of them. And

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so my imposter syndrome showed up and I had to make a deal with it. I decided that I would just experience Julian's words. I wouldn't try to read all of the dissertations in all of the books

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that she had had been written about her rather than taking historical approach. I wanted to read her as a woman thinker, as a writer. I wanted this connection with her. And so I opened up

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the book and the first thing she does is ask for suffering, she writes. I desired three graces by the gift of God. The first was to have the reckon recollection of christ's passion. The second

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was a bodily sickness And the third was to have of God's Grace three wounds. She wants to be closer to jesus and she decides that if she can suffer, then she can understand how mary and the

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disciples felt. She could have this deeper connection. I have to tell you, I put down the book and I groaned. This has been a huge mistake. I hate the idea of redemptive suffering.

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I don't like pain in general. As soon as I start feeling that headache creep into the back of my head. I take an aspirin. I am not someone who likes to suffer. It was more

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than that. The words immediately brought me back to this time when I was a teenager. As an adolescent. I was beginning to just associate from my family just enough to understand. My father was really

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abusive. I hated to seeing what he was doing to my mother into my siblings. I really didn't have anyone to turn to. So I went to people in my church and I told them our family

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secrets, which is a really hard thing to do as a kid in that situation. I was a conservative southern baptist at the time and the people at my church explained to me that my father was the

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head of the household and that it was my christian duty to suffer and that if I could bear my cross with grace and dignity, then I would have a deeper understanding of what jesus went through in his

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life. It had taken me many classes with dr Cynthia Rigby, some intense therapy in decades of work to shake off that tortured theology. And now here I was. And the first thing out of Julian's

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mouth was that she wanted to suffer to gain a unity with jesus. I put the book down, I paced the floors of my Mantz. This had been a big mistake. I wondered if I could

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get out of the contract. Somehow. It was a few days of struggling when I remembered that just about every theologian I've ever encountered had written or done something horrible. We've all thought about Augustine and Calvin

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long enough and hard enough to realize we've got some issues in our theology. So Ginny homophobia, anti Semitism, That's just the start. But with those theologians, I was usually forced to read them anyways

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, Julian deserve the same respect. Have a friend who always reminds me that a lot of theology is like eating chicken wings. You just got to take the time to find the meat and spit out the

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bones. So I picked up the book again and I applied that same hermeneutic to Julian. But I would any other theologian, I gave her another chance . I breathe deeply and read the vision skimming them

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quickly. He began to appreciate Julian's feminine imagery for God and though we were not exactly friends yet, I inched a little closer to her. Then I began to hear the warnings from the CDC that there

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was a virus spreading quickly. The pandemic hit new york city which was an hour train ride from the church I served by March 15, two people from our church died. They were the 2nd and 3rd

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person in our state to die of covid. One was an usher and I was terrified that he had spread it to our whole congregation. I was pastoring an older church, 95% of the people that had

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come that week were in the high risk category. It was the most excruciating two weeks of my ministry and I waited to see if there was a spread . I prayed and pleaded with God and thank God

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there wasn't I. Hospitals ran over capacity. Healthcare workers were completely overwhelmed. It was so confusing because we didn't have much warning here in new york, but the rest of the country could keep this horror

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contained. All they had to do was mask up , stay distant, wash hands. But it felt like no one was heating the health advice. The numbers increased, loved ones caught the virus. Suddenly

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we were in culture wars over masks. I had family members who would not wear them. And I remember one painful night when I ended up crying and screaming on the phone begging my family to take this

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seriously. The suffering, death holiness, anxiety, it just all increased and we were not seeing any signs of hope. All of us were struggling through it with parishioners who thought any sort of health advice

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was a sham. Other parishioners who were scared and couldn't sleep at night. We're trying to get everything online when we weren't equipped to do it at all . In light of all this, I realized that

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whether I liked it or not, I was a pastor and one of the most important jobs that religion has to do is has to make sense out of suffering. I struggle with that. We all struggle

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with it because let's be honest, we as christians have done it so poorly. Sometimes we gloss over the pain and tell people that the suffering is not so bad. The power of positive thinking has seeped

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into America's theological mainstream and we took that idea that all things work together for the good and we have used it to deny suffering, even racism and poverty . Sometimes that sting. Other times, christians blame

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the victims, they see a person who suffers and they assume that it must be God's judgment on them . Or when we go through something horrible ourselves, we try to find some way to bargain with God

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. And so we began to confess because we fear that our own suffering is an outcome of our own behavior. We might try to comfort people, but the hope of some sort of afterlife. The promise

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of Heaven isn't such a bad thing. But too often this idea has been used historically as an opiate to dole people instead of dealing with systemic injustices that make them suffer or has I illustrated earlier, some

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christians will glorify suffering by equating it to jesus suffering . And in the process, they begin to glorify the violence and the cruelty of humanity. As a pastor, I dealt with suffering by trying to avoid

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the topic altogether, even though it comes up all the time. Usually it's when people confess that they don't really believe in God and when I asked why they say it's because they see too much suffering in

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the world and they just don't understand why God would allow that. I often look at these people and shake my head and agree there is far too much needless suffering. Most of it has no purpose.

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People do horrible things to one another and I have never been one to see the redemptive necessity of it , but this year has taught us that the problem of pain is impossible to to avoid forever and has

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it began to consume more of my pastoral imagination. I had just have some way to make sense of it. It felt like when the problem of pain was becoming larger in my life and I had these

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nihilistic attitudes toward pain. The nihilism just kept increasing until it was seeping and taking up more and more of my life in general, everything felt horrible and meaningless and I couldn't find God in any of it

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. He needed some sort of metaphor for it's something that didn't glorify the actions of violent men, something that was life giving. And that is when Julian and I finally got cozy, Julian suffered, she

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watched people dying. She almost died. And she spent her life with this incredible curiosity toward what she suffered. She wrote down her experience. Then, after she thought about it for a couple of decades

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, she wrote it down again. She wanted to learn as much as she could from the pain she dissects it. She is grateful for the compassion and the longing that flowed from her suffering. And at

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one. equates the suffering of jesus on the cross with the suffering of childbirth. She states Jesus is our true mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come suddenly reading that

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it made sense. The suffering of childbirth could be my metaphor for this pain that we've had to endure . I was in labor for 24 hours. I only bring that up to my daughter every once in

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a while, usually when I want her to share her French fries and she refuses. And then I tell her that I was in labor for 24 hours , that I was the woman who gave her life

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and she could give me a french fry. It works sometimes. I know those waves of contraction that moved down a woman's body in order for a child to be born. I know that pain that's suffering

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, but it is not a pain that is born out of the cruelty of men. It is a pain that comes from stretching. It is a pain of creativity. It is the pain of new birth

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. It is the pain that some women have gone through from generation to generation. And it is a pain that we would gladly suffer again. It points to the incredible creativity that can flow from trauma and

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I want to stop for a moment because I know that this is not a good metaphor for many people . There are a variety of reasons some women cannot go through childbirth because of infertility or because they're trans

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or because they just could not because of their life situations. Others do not want to go through childbirth . And I do not ever want to diminish the choice of a woman or uplift childbirth into some sort

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of ideal for womanhood or for humanity. And please forgive me if this subject matter is triggering in some way because there is a multitude of pain around even bringing this up. And yet it somehow works for

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me. It may not be the best way to make sense out of your suffering, but as students and as pastors, the questions of suffering will keep persisting from plague to pandemic may, we have the

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courage to struggle and engage with these questions. For me, it was discovering Julian of Norwich at that right time realizing that her struggle in her pain grew , grew out of this knowledge, this compassion for

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the other and this deep understanding of God's creative for we have that sense as we continue to hope into