Norton Friary

Carmelite - White Friars

I’ve spent the day with Julian of Norwich, and very wonderful it has been too.

It’s rained most of the day so apart from walking into the village to get some salmon for supper, I’ve sat under the tarp with the pervasive smell of wet, ripe harvest fields, watching the red kite hunting and listening to the geese, and reading.
It has been so interesting to read of Julian’s ‘death in life’, being bricked into her anchorite cell. She thought she was giving up everything but it wasn’t actually until her faithful maid servant (who provided the food and cleared out the shit), her benefactor, and then her spiritual mainstay, all left her for various reasons, that she finally felt a true sense of a death in life and the desolation of nothingness, losing her sense of herself, a loss of continuity and structure, loss of faith in the sustenance of routine and ritual, and connection to everything, including her faith.
The parallel with bereavement is so marked.

By early evening it was clearing so I had supper and went for a cycle to the Friary watching hares dart and scatter across the fields and geese flying low to their night roosts.
And now the night sky looks like this (extra)