The Greening (3 page)

Julian of Norwich… I remembered her name from long ago. Sister Mary Theresa had read to me from her book, comforting, reassuring words of love, during a long period of illness when I was eight years old. Sister had sat by my bedside, soothing me with her cool hand on my forehead, her gentle, loving presence and words of kindness.

Sister Mary Theresa had told me that God loved me, no matter what I said or did, and that he could never be angry with me because he was all love. I remembered the words “all shall be well…” In that little time in my life, I dared to believe that all could be well – perhaps because I so desperately wanted it to be – to believe that my life could change one day and I could be happy.

I opened the leaflet and found inside a map of the route to St Julian’s Church, which was some ten minutes’ walk away. My curiosity was aroused. A woman writer, like me, but one who was a solitary and lived six hundred years ago. What kind of life would she have lived? There was an hour to spare before my train back to London. I decided to visit St Julian’s.

The map led me to the outskirts of town, down dingy streets with lock-up garages to a small, dark alleyway, where a sign directed me to St Julian’s Church. I stepped into a suddenly cool, close place. I walked across the nave towards the altar. To my right I saw a little door with a notice that read “Julian’s cell”. Close up, I read “Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic, lived here. The cell was destroyed in the Reformation, but was rebuilt when the church was repaired after being bombed during the Second World War.”

There was something in the air. Something indefinable touched me in some forgotten, neglected part of my being. There was something about the simplicity and quiet of the place that spoke to me, as if the silence contained a message.

I was caught by the presence of the place. I sensed an invitation to be rested and healed.

In the margin was reproduced a note that Anna presumably had added after the original entry. It read:

But there was more. I believe I knew, deep inside, that in acknowledging the truth of the moment I stepped onto the path that was my destiny. I believe I knew that the path I chose would take me on a hazardous journey into the lost land of shadows.

It reminded me of my own feeling of sanctuary when I entered the unfamiliar world of the antiquarian bookshop. The main narrative continued:

Someone had made this place, created its sacred centre. Her atmosphere remained. I wondered about her. If I turned my head quickly, I thought, I’d catch sight of the edge of her skirt; if I closed my eyes, I’d feel her touch at my shoulder, hear gentle laughter. She was unseen but substantial.

I entered the cell. To the right of the small space was a window, looking onto a patch of grass and flowers enclosed by the church wall. To the front was a plain table covered by a white cloth, upon which stood two candlesticks. High up on the wall, above the table, was a large wooden crucifix. Some little stools were stacked near the door. I took one and sat on it and closed my eyes.

Breathing slowly and observing the intake and outflow of my breath, I meditated for several minutes. A sense of elation welled up within me. I felt ecstatic, flooded with joy. The feeling was intoxicating and made my head spin. I wept, and through my tears poured out my hurt, anger and bitter disappointment with my life.

I felt a strong, feminine presence, the warmth of a woman whose love enfolded all those who entered the place, whose arms were opened wide to soothe a frightened child, whose tender caress touched me with understanding, whose gentle entreaty breached my resistant heart, whose compassion pitied my sadness, whose joy diminished the darkness touching my soul. I suddenly yearned to know the woman whose passion was imprinted on the place, whose mothering, limitless spirit sought out my sorrow and hurt and brokenness, desiring to hold me and make me whole.

I recalled the words from Anna’s book that had so moved me, the words that had offered the hope of being held safe in an embrace that would never let me go. And here was Anna, describing my own feelings in a way that made me feel a kinship with her.

I looked up at the figure of Jesus and observed that the head was thrown back, the eyes wide open. I was brought up to believe that Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins and in doing so had redeemed us and bought us a place in heaven. But here was an aspect of his dying that I had not seen before. The head was thrown back awkwardly and the eyes were revealed. It was not only his nakedness, his powerlessness in the hands of the people who ruled the society in which he lived, not only these familiar aspects of his death that I observed. This was different. The eyes were wide open, the soul laid bare, his feelings exposed.

Suddenly I was taken back in my memory to the age of fifteen. I had been holidaying with a German family, on an exchange visit. One day they had taken me, without warning or preparation, to the Memorial Museum on the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. We went into a hall of photographs, joining a queue of people that moved slowly, like a procession of penitents, across and around the room.

Suddenly, as my hosts moved aside to allow me to see, I was confronted by a sight that filled me with utter horror. Before me was a pyramid of rotting, skeletal flesh – blackened eye sockets where bright eyes had once smiled, emaciated limbs flung indecently across a stranger’s body, so many, many people thrown away, like rubbish, with neither kind word nor prayer. I caught my breath, feeling dizzy and sick. How was it possible? How could this terrible thing have happened in this world where I was growing up? I did not know what to feel or what to do.

To the right of the photograph I saw a glass-framed notice. It was a report written by a journalist who had accompanied the liberators of the camp. He had observed, he said, that each of the bodies in the many similar piles he saw that day had a small cut at the top of the hip. A survivor had explained to him that, when the body becomes emaciated, this is the last place where any flesh remains. The starving prisoners had been gnawing at the dead in order to stay alive.

I felt I was falling, falling backwards into a dark pit. I felt terror and I felt shame. I thought:
We did this.

In that instant I knew what humanity was capable of and that I must be capable of the same. What would I have done? Might I have been a prison guard who committed such horrors? Or a guard who did not join in but looked the other way? Or one of the starving prisoners gnawing at the dead? Which of those parts might I have played?

I felt grief – for the dead and for those who had to live with what they had done. I felt shame. It is a terrible thing to kill someone. How much worse to kill his soul, to take away the part that is sacred? And how do you live among the people you love when you have compromised your soul? That day something deep within me changed for ever. My certainties dissolved. My childhood ended.

As I stood in Julian’s cell, looking up into the eyes of the broken figure on the cross, I thought:
We did this, too.
I have looked at the cross many, many times, but now I seemed to see it for the first time. In the eyes of the broken figure everything was revealed – the anguish, the doubts, the fear – all the natural feelings of a man suffering terribly and close to death.

In those last moments, when Jesus bore his trial alone, he became the victim of our inhumanity. Like the numberless victims of our inhumanity throughout the ages, he was stripped of his dignity. And in his utter vulnerability, I realized, he compelled me to become a participant when I would have preferred to remain an observer, striking an image upon my heart that cannot fade.

I entered his private space, the space each of us strives to protect, hiding behind a mask throughout our lives, covering the shame we cannot bear to see in a place that no one else enters. What if the mask were wrenched away suddenly, exposing everything, exposing me as I really am? Could I bear it? Could anyone bear it if he has shame, and which of us does not?

I remembered hearing a song written by a survivor of the camps – “My sister Hana had green eyes, she looked after me, my sister Hana had green eyes, she was murdered in Treblinka.” My heart moved; I felt it move as a constellation moves in space, I felt it lift and move, as a heavy weight is moved; a movement almost mechanical, of great power, lifting my heart up and forward into a different space and engendering a deep, sweet, mighty swell of compassion, brought from unimagined depths with a force I could not comprehend and moving me to tears of such heart-full sweetness that they soothed away all hurt and horror, even the horror of the atrocity that had inspired them.

As I looked at the wide-open eyes, I realized that the beliefs of my childhood must now give way to a better understanding. It was a necessary death, but the manner of his dying was necessary, too. He embraced the worst that we could do, for us, because we needed to be shown how much we were loved and nothing less would convince us. And at the sacred centre of the crucifixion a mystery unfolded, like the opening petals of a rose, revealing the vulnerability that is at the heart of love.

I rose and walked to the window. In my mind’s eye, I saw the exposed and gusty shore of eastern England edging the encroaching waters that claimed the outstretched land time after time. At the bleak horizon, those brooding, restless, rushing seas had no defence against the tearing force of wind and weather, flung from a dispassionate, measureless sky. I imagined all of this, unchanged yet ever changing, perceived from the narrow confines of a tiny cell, through one small window, snug and quiet in the dark, by Julian.

I wondered: What did she see and understand in her vision of the crucifixion, what secret knowledge did she gain? How did she distil her alchemical promise of unconditional love from the crucible of faith and prayer, when her Church preached fear and punishment? What made her risk a charge of heresy and death at the stake to defy its teachings with her revelation
of a God who is never angry? What impelled and sustained her? I wanted to know the beguiling woman who had walked a straight and steady path through such difficult and dangerous territory. And did her story have the makings of a play?

I left the cell and retraced my steps across the nave. Near the entrance to the church was a little table, upon which some pamphlets and books had been left. Among them were several copies of a little book with a pale yellow cover. Its title was
Enfolded in Love
and it contained extracts from
A Revelation of Love,
Julian’s book. Below the title was a simple line drawing of a homely figure in a rough garment, who was leaning forward to gather up a kneeling child in an embrace. The child’s head was bent forward, exposing the nape of his neck, which was bare and vulnerable.

I took up the book eagerly, glad of the chance to be reacquainted with the words that had brought me such comfort as a child. I opened it at random and read “He did not say, ‘You shall not be tempest-tossed, you shall not be work-weary, you shall not be discomforted.’ But he said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’” Tears came to my eyes as I remembered how dear Sister Mary Theresa had touched me somewhere deep inside when she had read those words to me. And I was not overcome. It was true.

I put the specified £5 into the collection box and took my copy of
Enfolded in Love.
As I made my way back towards the railway station through the dingy, now darkened streets, the image of the crucifix and the memories of my childhood travelled with me. How strange that the past should have surfaced suddenly, in such a profound and unimagined way. What could be the reason?

What could be the reason? I echoed Anna’s thoughts. For I, too, was being reminded of the past, of the person I used to be. Reading her words, entering the private world of her intimate thoughts and feelings, had brought me into a different space. I felt very calm.
But I was also intrigued. I wanted to know the rest of her story. And she was challenging me. What would I have done, had I been a guard at Belsen? How do you live among the people you love when you have compromised your soul? I hoped I would never have to find out.

At the office the following morning Milo was on top form, buzzing around with an air of self-importance that suggested a big news story was brewing. Alex approached, carrying a bundle of papers.

“Hi, Jo.” He looked despondent. “Have you heard?”

“What? I just got in.”

“Something big broke overnight. A mole in the Foreign Office says the government has lied about arms deals.”

“Great! Who’s got the story?”

“Chris,” said Alex. “Imran and I are helping him.”

“Terrific! Well done.”

“Yes, it’s a brilliant chance – but there’s something more, something funny going on. The mole has a secret illegitimate child, apparently, and that side of the story’s wanted. Only the boy doesn’t know this chap’s his father and I’ve been sent to doorstep the mother.”