Woman's Hour - Julian of Norwich and the power of inspirational words in tough times

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Words to live by and finding hope in the face of terrible suffering, the life of the anchoress or hermit Julian of Norwich, the power of walking and nature to heal and art that replaces adverts with words of love – all part of this special Bank Holiday Woman’s Hour.650 years ago a woman we only know as Julian of Norwich produced a book written while she was voluntarily walled up in a hermit’s cell which challenged the ideas of the time about sin and suffering. It presented a radical vision of love and hope that “All Shall Be Well and All Shall Be Well and All Manner of Thing Shall be Well”. We hear about her life, how it has helped one woman through cancer treatment and inspired the lives of others, and we hear from listeners about the words that they turn to for motivation and encouragement. Nuala McGovern speaks to Claire Gilbert author of a new novel I Julian; Dr. Hetta Howes senior lecturer in medieval and early modern literature at City, University of London; Sally-Anne Lomas Trustee of The Friends of Julian and creative director of The Cloth of Kindness project and to Faye Smith founder of Hope Walking. And, the British Kenyan artist Grace Ndiritu explains why she emblazoned the words 'Wherever you are I hope you have found peace' on 30 billboards around Birmingham.Producer Caroline Donne

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2. And of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, this is Nuala McGovern and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Today I'm asking, do you have words to live by? Maybe words of love or kindness that have helped you through a tough time? A mantra that keeps you going? Words that I like are from Maya Angelou. It says, I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. So that's my one. But maybe Brené Brown

speaks to you. Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up. Well, you know, when we talk about slogans, there's one that pops into my mind. Maybe you've popped onto your bedroom wall. Live, laugh, love. It actually comes from a 1904 poem called Success by Bessie Anderson Stanley. And it was hugely popular at certain times, but now considered a little bit naff by some. But a lot of us do have words of inspiration spelled out on fridge doors or on posters or T-shirts, maybe a tattoo. I do wonder, is it more of a female thing to do, to have these words to turn to in times of stress, perhaps? I want you to stop and think about this phrase. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. How familiar is it to you? On today's

Woman's Hour, we'll be hearing about a woman who 650 years ago wrote a book that challenged the prevailing ideas of the time about suffering and sin. She dared to present a vision of love and hope in the face of terrible suffering. We're going to hear from women she has inspired with her words and her life. In May 1373, this woman, who we only know as Julian, and at approximately 30 years of age was suffering from what she believed to be a terminal illness. But she experienced a series of 16 visions or showings. And following her recovery, Julian spent the rest of her life pondering the meaning of these

visions and also recording her insights in poetic writing and actually daring to present an alternative to the contemporary understandings of God. So not a God filled with anger, handing out punishment, but instead a God motivated by love and even more daringly as a mother. And that could have caused her to be condemned as a heretic, but she persisted. So All Shall Be Well and All Shall Be Well and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well were her response to a world that was ravaged at that time by plague and religious persecution. And her writing became known as the Revelations of Divine Love. It was the first book to be written in English by a woman. And she became an anchoress. That is a woman who was walled, yes, bricked into a cell to live a life of prayer and contemplation. And hers was attached to a

small church off St. Julian in Norwich, from which she was given the name Julian. Well, with me are Clare Gilbert, author of a new novel, I, Julian, which imagines the life of Julian of Norwich, and also Heta Howes, senior lecturer in medieval and early modern literature at City University of London, and one of the BBC's New Generation thinkers. You're both so welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Clare, let me start with you. When did you become first aware of Julian of Norwich? She was the one bright star in a dry-as-dust theology degree at Oxford University many, many years ago now. And she's stayed with me ever since. I think she appealed to me then because she didn't try to organise God, which a lot of the theologians I was studying did.

She then became the subject of my doctoral thesis on environmental consciousness. And then I got cancer. And she became my spiritual companion through two and a half years of really tough treatment. And it was coming out of that that I conceived the notion that I might tell her story in the first person as a homage to her. I loved reading about her and the way that you portrayed her. But how do you go about writing, you know, this 3D personality or 4D even perhaps of a life that we know so little about? Yes, I did have to use my imagination. I used the sparse historical facts that we have. And then I also just really entered very, very deeply into Julian myself.

And there's a lot of me, inevitably this will be the case, there's a lot of me in the story. Like what? Well, being left alone, being given time and space to contemplate and not being troubled by many, many things, not wanting to be completely bound by the life of a that's caught up with the world. Her physicality, I have heard she has dreadful constipation, which is something I experienced in my cancer, because the anti sickness drugs gave me

dreadful constipation. So that's a description from my own life. She has this one of the visions is an experience of being in a lot of stress and then suddenly feeling completely brilliant again and then a lot of stress and brilliant again 20 times. And the description of the stress that she's in is an exact description of one of my hot flushes. Loads and loads of things, ways in which she touches my life and I've spoken about her.

Yes, because I felt at times the depiction was very modern for example her friend speaking about the pain of miscarriage or getting a fit of the giggles in church and at other times instead so removed from our way of living today living in a bricked up cell by choice I should say. Was that difficult to get the balance right? I really wanted her to make sense to us today. And I honestly believe that some of these experiences are universal for women, like the loss that you experience with miscarriage, or hot flushes or constipation. I mean, they had bodies then we have bodies now, I think I think they read across the centuries. But also, I really hope I help people understand why she might have made that choice

to be bricked up for the rest of her life in a cell next to a church. You do also imagine in the book about Julian experiencing the death of her husband, then the death of her own daughter from the plague. But why did you decide to include that? Because we don't know that that happened. We don't know. The text implies that, well, certainly that she could write in English, which means she was a householder of some sort. Her words about motherhood, maybe she knew what that felt like from the inside. So yes, it's an imagination. But the other thing about that event is that this was a second or third wave of the pestilence, as they called it in the 14th century, which specifically took away children and young men.

So this was the devastating thing at that point. And for Julian then to try and make sense of the guilt she feels that changes completely when she has the revelations and begins to understand God in a completely different way, that this would have been for all the women who lost their, all the people who lost their children. And as someone put it, lost their hope. If your children die, you lose your hope for the future. So she needed, in the story as it were, she needed to really know what that felt like on the inside. Let me turn to Heta. You know, Clare mentioned being a householder at that time. Tell us a little bit about the Norwich that Julian would have lived in. It was a very thriving place, hard hit by the plague,

which Claire's already mentioned. It was a place where, I mean, bearing in mind, you know, medieval women didn't have nearly so many options as we do now. There were some more kind of available to them. We know women were slightly more educated than sometimes we've imagined, for example, in the past. Lots of trade, lots of visitors visitors lots of pilgrimages so people coming in and out of the city really regularly it would have been quite bustling quite lively which is one of the things that's interesting

about Julian being an anchoress there because on the one hand she's very separate as you said bricked up isolated solitary but on the other hand she has kind of one of her windows looks out onto the outside world. People come and talk to her, kind of can interact with her. She'd have a sort of bit of fabric to keep her modesty. But she would have been in a really unique position of both being apart from that world, but also, you know, having a duty to it. It was expected that she would talk to people. She would give them advice.

She would offer counsel and comfort and things like that. Because of her experiences and that she was really a life of service. Yeah, and this is, you know, being an anchoress was really, you know, it was top tier. You know, if you wanted to be a religious person, you needed money to do it. So a homeowner, she will have likely have been from a good family. Maybe she did at some point kind of act as sort of head of a household.

Women would have had a lot of administrative duties in the household and would have run a lot of stuff and kind of managed big households like that. But yeah, it was, you know, the idea was that you gave over everything to the church. And in return, you reflected and devoted your life to God. But you also had a duty to the people who would come to you. And about Julian, we've heard Claire's interpretation. I've been fascinated by Julian for years. Similarly, university, I did a medieval literature MA and English literature degree. And I always loved medieval literature, which I think is quite unusual. I teach literature now. And a lot of my students like, oh, why are we doing medieval?

Why do you love it? Because it's the best. And Julian? I think it's something to do with how distant and bizarre, but also close to home it feels. So much of the stuff that these women write about, the fact they're writing at all is kind of always quite special because it was so much harder for women to get words out there in the same way. But, you know, a lot of the stuff in Julian's text, you know, I'm not a religious person myself, it feels very remote, a lot of kind of weird bodily imagery and stuff like that. But then, you know, also the sense of what it feels like to be in a space alone,

what it feels like to be a woman, what it feels like to kind of navigate a world where there aren't as many avenues open to you and how different medieval women negotiated that, I found endlessly fascinating. So we mentioned her important work was Revelations of Divine Love, written in English. You're going to read an extract for us in Middle English first and then translate it.

Then with a glad cheerer, our Lord loked into his cedar and beheld and joyant. And with a swater looking, he led forth the understanding of his creature, be the psalm wound in his cedar within her. So in this extract, it's a vision that Julian is having. And in the vision, she sees God before her as if he's really there. And he kind of pulls open the wound in his side from the crucifixion. And he leads Julian forth into what she calls an understanding. So this idea that she's kind of through this very bodily interaction, she's learning to understand that there's room for all of mankind in the wound in

the side, but more kind of metaphorically in Christianity. So there's room enough here and it's a fair, delectable place. It's large enough for everyone. It's a sort of sense of belonging, inclusion, but very hinged on the bodily, on this kind of wound. And I think people are often quite surprised by how graphic some of these visions are. The sort of blood, the wounds, the kind of, but also very beautiful. But that is interesting, the blood, the wounds that some might find revolting, perhaps, as you talk about them today. How do you explain it to your students? So I like to explain it through the idea of women's bodies as well.

So at the time, the sort of general way of thinking about God was quite intellectual, but there became a new craze, what we call effective devotion, which had much more emphasis on the body. And it was really directed at women and illiterate men as well. But there's a kind of equation between women's bodies and men's bodies that we increasingly find. So women's bodies were thought to be more porous, more open, more fluid, and so was Christ. So there's a kind of a way in there that women might otherwise be denied. Yeah and I suppose women are more used to dealing with blood for example than men are and that's definitely something

I suppose that would connect the two. You're staying with us both Heather and Clare, thanks very much but we want to bring in Grace Indiritu next. She is the first artist to show her work in a series of commissions from the street advertising specialist Build Hollywood. So this project replaces traditional billboard advertisements in five cities all across the UK and instead has

works of contemporary art and it swaps slogans for messages of love or care or vulnerability, bravery. And it's all inspired by the book All About Love by Bell Hooks. And Grace's take on this was inspired by a love letter written to her mother who died when Grace was in her teens and also by one of her favourite artists, Mike Kelly. There is a personal, a tender quote from the letter appearing on the billboard. It says, wherever you are, I hope you have found peace. And the background instead juxtaposes consumerism with nature. So like fashion imagery, glossy magazines that we're usually used to seeing on billboards are now covered really in a way by hand-painted drawings of leaves and these words as well.

Grace, you're very welcome to Woman's Hour. For people who aren't familiar with bell hooks and don't know about All About Love, how would you describe it? Bell hooks is a very famous African-American writer and a theorist. She mostly wrote books dealing with issues to do with race, class and gender. And so she's been well known in the art world and in critical race theory circles for many years. And now she's going much more into the mainstream. Her best known book is all about love and it talks about different types of love.

Love can mean different things to different types of people. Bell Hooks is very advanced or progressive in her ways of thinking about love. And you have chosen those words, wherever you are, I hope you have found peace. So those words come from the letter that I wrote. The letter I was writing was commissioned by Tate for an upcoming publication on Mike Kelly, who's one of my favourite artists. He was an American artist. He grew up in Detroit, which is kind of similar to a city like Birmingham, where my mother actually died. My mother, she was a Kenyan feminist activist. She studied at the Truth and Reconciliation Centre when I was a kid. And so these ideas to do with activism and love have come into the project. Really, I was thinking about these two people who have obviously,

my mother's had obviously, her death had a profound meaning to me. But also Mike Kelly as an idol for me as a young artist growing up into, you know, a professional artist. The words, wherever you are, I hope you found peace, is kind of, you could say, mysterious words, but also quite abstract, but also very meaningful. And we put up 30 billboards all over Birmingham. Some of them had imagery that was much more mysterious, like images of clocks, so ideas of time coming into it. But then I also had kind of more fashion imagery. And I used, funnily enough, a model that looked really like my mum from the 1970s and 80s. It was a really eureka moment of thinking, oh my God,

this model looks exactly like my mom. And you feel that then connects with Bell Hooks, All About Love? In the sense of love can be a cathartic thing. There's different stages of love with some people when they die, you know, let's say if you've had a bad relationship with them, it's hard to get to that place of forgiveness. But you can usually wish that the person has found peace. It's not just a happy, sentimental way of thinking about death and about grief, which I think Bell Hooks is very interested in as an activist. Yeah, that's something I'm very interested in, how activism and spirituality work together. And I've used that a lot in my own practice,

because normally they're quite polarised, which Thich Nhat Hanh, the famous Vietnamese monk who died recently, he talked about this idea of meditation in action. So what does that mean, meditation in action? That means like taking these kind of words and these sentimental feelings to do with love and then putting them into action through activism, through protest, through, you know, raising consciousness. And yeah, these are things that are going to affect lots of us as things like climate change and ecology issues come into the foreground. Do you ever worry, Grace, about the sentimentality tipping over into something that's a bit cheesy, for example? So when we actually put them up last week and we were interacting with the public,

some of them were like, that sentence, it's too deep. It's too deep. Too deep. Because if you're walking down the street, the sentence isn't really selling you anything, this billboard. It just literally says, wherever you are, I hope you find peace. And then in the corner it says, with love and art, grace. People are like, OK, this isn't selling me anything.

What do I do with it? And that's what's interesting about public art, especially billboards, because people are used to being sold things. People aren't used to having space to think and slow down. And so, yeah, we had some really interesting conversations with the general public about the project. It's really interesting and great to see as well. I know they've all been in Birmingham,

but the actual exhibitions or the project, should I say, will continue both in Glasgow and also Manchester, Brighton and then Bristol. But Grace Indaritu, thank you so much for speaking to us from Birmingham. Glasgow and also Manchester, Brighton and then Bristol. But Grace Indaritu, thank you so much for speaking to us from Birmingham. Thank you. You're listening to Woman's Hour. And today we're talking about the power of inspirational words to motivate us and express how we really feel.

And Julian of Norwich, whose words, all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, continue to resonate after 650 years, particularly apparently during lockdown. Now, this programme has been recorded ahead of time, so we won't be able to respond to your messages today. But we did ask for you to send us the words that inspire you. Here are some of them from Tina. If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Like me, Tina turned to the words of Maya Angelou. And Rosa also got in touch. She said, you have to try to live your life in such a way that you don't need to be forgiven. Those words she got from Morgan

Freeman in a recent interview. And Anne wrote in, she said her friend had a t-shirt with a tidy house is a sign of a wasted life. It was printed on the t-shirt. Anne's motto, she said, is clean but crumpled. And she hates ironing. Thanks so much for those comments. But I do want to delve a little bit deeper into something that we touched on and that is what it might have been like for Julian to shut herself away for the last 30 years of her life and also why did she do it? Sally-Anne Lomas is a writer, filmmaker and trustees of the Friends of Julian. Welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. So we mentioned the word anchoress and Heta talked a little bit about it.

But explain what Julian was signing up for and why. Well, she would have taken a vow of stability to stay in one place. We don't really know exactly whether she was bricked in or not, because some anchoresses were allowed some kind of freedom to step outside. But there's a very good possibility that she was literally in four walls, in this space of four walls, in which there would have been three windows, one into the church, one out onto the street where she could talk to people, and a third where a maid would deal with the business of life,

food and all the stuff. Waste going back out. Waste going back out, all the nitty gritty. And do we know how big those windows were? I don't think we do, but I wouldn't imagine they were large because there would be no glass in them. So, you know, you'd keep them fairly small. So you could keep the cell warm in the winter, for example.

Do we know how big it was? I think Claire will probably know better than me, but I think it's about 10, 12 feet. Yes, but we know, so there's a reconstruction. If you go to the Church of St. Julian, there's a reconstruction, but we don't know for sure that's exactly the footfall of the original cell. But it's a reasonable size. You can pace backwards and forwards.

You want to be able to if you're there for decades. But before you go in, Claire was describing the funeral service, which I'll go to in a moment. But there were also guides at the time given to anchorites for anchoresses, anchorites for self-care. What do they say in them? What is it that they're kind of instructed to try and help them live out this unusual life? So interestingly, a lot of the information that we have about anchorites and anchoresses come from these guidebooks because there's so little remaining. An anchorite is a man and an anchoress is a woman.

Yes, an anchorite is a woman. So these books give us a really good insight into what daily life would have been like so they have really clear instructions what time you get up how many prayers you do what kind of prayers you could say um ways you might occupy yourself how to make sure you're warding off the temptation of sin because these books usually written by men are very careful to say just because you've you know taken yourself out from the world doesn't mean that you're not going to sin or mess up so here's here's how to make sure you don't and they prescribe who you should talk to so when it's okay to talk to men for example

if you're a female anchoress um but one thing i find really interesting is is one thing they're really worried about is the sin of idleness because of course you are just kind of in a space on your own and and while sometimes reading these, it feels very full. And there's a lot of different parts to the day. It's the same thing over and over again. So potentially quite tedious points. And a lot of their advice is kind of how to try and focus the mind. Almost some of it feels almost meditational.

How to make sure you're kind of interacting with the outside world, but not too much. You're keeping your focus on God. And because they worry that if you start being idle, you might start thinking about the outside world a lot, about what you could be doing instead, that you're kind of split focus. And I also suspect they worried that if that started to happen, you might, you know, try and leave. Because if you get in your own head... Could you leave? No. You made a vow to stay there.

But I think one of the things that's really interesting is it's hard for me to imagine how else in medieval society a woman would get the time and space to write a book. Because she was in a room of her own, you know. So maybe it took that level of commitment to actually create the space in which a book could be written. There's just something else I wanted to observe about the guide for anchoresses. So you worry, you're in a room, you get no exercise. But the exercise of standing, opening your arms wide to pray, raising them up, bringing them together, bowing, bowing lower, kneeling, full prostration up again. It's quite like yoga, daily yoga, you might say. So she would have kept quite pretty active in her cell if she'd done all that was advised.

And do we know, like, how common was it for a woman to take this on? More common for women than men, usually. Really? Actually, particularly in the sort of mid-middle ages. The numbers kind of spiked quite a lot. They went up sort of around the time Julian was an anchoress after the plague. And, yeah, I think one very plausible reason why might be because there were so few avenues open to women to do things that they wanted to do. If you weren't keen on getting married, if you had got married and didn't want to again, if you weren't keen on having children or again, perhaps, you know, as you imagine, Claire, you know, had had a family and lost them.

If you wanted to write or you wanted to be alone, it was very difficult for a woman far more more than a man, to find a way to do that without kind of turning to extreme measures. So with my students, for example, they say, you know, why on earth would anyone choose this? And you say, okay, well, it is really extreme. And it wasn't like, you know, thousands of women were doing this, but hundreds, certainly. And one kind of plausible reason might be, okay, well, I don't want to do any of these other kind of very narrow things that are prescribed to me as a woman. So maybe I'll do this. But you did have to have a bit of money. It's not like anyone could do it. Yes, it's still a privileged position. Thanks, Petra. Did you want to jump in on that, Sally-Anne, like in the sense of why women might like to do it?

Yeah, well, I think that if you had an intellectual interest, you liked ideas and you wanted space to... I mean, women didn't get many opportunities to have a voice. So here was a space where you potentially... Well, Julian had the space to read, to write, to think, to contemplate for 30 years her original visions. And think dangerous thoughts as well. Slightly safer, perhaps, behind a wall. Let me turn to what I alluded to there, Claire. You were describing in your book

the funeral service in a way, I suppose. I'm not sure what the correct term would be. That takes place before Julian is bricked up in her cell. Yes, we don't know exactly what happened, but I imagine, and it's a proper funeral service, that's exactly what it is. And she enters the cell during this service and then the cell is bricked up as she's kneeling there towards the end of the service. So this, which bit I'm going to read is immediately after that. I understand.

Stillness There is a quiet rustling of clothes as the people leave the church, then the thin cry of a baby. The cry leaves the church with the people, and silence returns. I rise from my knees and turn to face my cell, my coffin, my small home. I have never felt so fully alive. I am not expecting this. I was expecting to feel tortured by confinement at this point, as the portal is bricked up, the walls pressing upon

me like the walls of my home in the city, my breath short and shallow and panic only just kept under control. But the panic I felt when I first kneeled has gone. At last, at last I am alone. At last I can ask the world to recede, and it will. All I have to do is to close the curtain, and I will be left in peace. So much space, just for me. And warm. A fire has been lit in the little fireplace. Life in new death. Time and space and strength for the long, slow, interior journey.

Deep into God. God deep into me. I have come home. I found that passage so moving when I read it, although not half as beautifully as you have just read it. But it seems like Julian is steadfast at that point, Sally-Anne. But do you think she had doubts? She wouldn't be human if she didn't have doubts. And in Claire's book, we have other passages where she really questions the decision that she's made. But I love that line, which is, I've never felt so alive. And I don't know, I have a shed in my garden where I write, you know, and it's Virginia Woolf's room of one's own, isn't it? And when I close the door and shut away the world and I'm in my room, my writing room,

it is a wonderful, wonderful feeling. So part of me imagines Julian having that same sense of kind of here I am, this is my space and it's mine to do what I want to here. There is one person, not person, thing that used to sometimes share the space, according to some, which is a cat. Legend says so anyway, I think. What do we know, Sally-Anne? The guide to anchoresses said that they were allowed to have cats. Which is quite a luxury, I thought. Well, there was problems with mice and rats. So it sounds all nice and fluffy.

But then when you think, hmm, yeah, I wouldn't like to be sleeping in one small cell and have a rat problem. Very nice to have a cat nearby. Rowan Williams said that everybody always goes on about Julian's cat, you know, just because there's a picture of her in the cathedral with a cat, that the cat has kind of assumed enormous apocryphal proportions. I resisted giving her a cat in my story and finally gave in. He's called Jib because cats were often called Jib at that time. G-Y-B.

G-Y-B. But he's based on my own cat that years ago I had called William, who was full of character. So William the cat is acknowledged in the book. I love. So you see yourself in Julian or Julian in you and also with your cat. Indeed. Well, I want to turn now to Sophie, who is a listener in Cumbria, and she was inspired by the popular poet Rupi Kaur. Sophie, you're so welcome

to Woman's Hour. I see you have a little baby on your lap, or should I say attached to your chest? Also welcome, little boy, little girl. Little girl. Okay, well, you're both very welcome. Can you read me the words that mean a lot to you? What's the greatest lesson a woman should learn? That since day one, she's already had everything she needs within herself. It's the world that convinced her she did not.

And why do you turn to those words? Well, the reasons keep changing. But I first came to them, actually, in preparing to become a mother, to give birth. I came across them around the time I found out I was pregnant. I had planned and I'd hoped to be pregnant, but I was really surprised that when it actually happened, as well as joy and gratitude, actually, one of the overwhelming feelings I had was actually fear. It was fear, it was dread. And really, you know, quite sadly, it was this feeling that actually it would be something

that I wasn't capable of, that it was something I wouldn't be able to do. And if I did do it, it would be terrible. And well, basically, when you're smiling and with the baby on your lap,

the words that you have read out to us are rupee core. And I'm wondering, when do you turn to them now? You talked about finding them during your pregnancy. Yeah, so I suppose ultimately it's in those moments where whether it's pregnancy and this notion of something happening that's never happened before, or whether it's pregnancy and this this notion of something happening that's never happened before or whether it's now when I'm well into the throes of it I have two beautiful daughters I you know one is

four one is is nine months and it's in those moments where you can feel or I can feel very overwhelmed by what it is that is needed of me as well as what it is that I want as an individual. And sometimes, you know, I can't hear my own voice, be it because there's other little voices overriding my own, or just the fog, you know, I haven't slept for more than two hours at a time in over nine months. And you know, that is quite a fog in the day so I actually have those words on my stairs and I pass them daily sometimes I don't see them and sometimes I do and it's just a way of um of reassuring myself that actually yeah I I do I do have it in me and I am capable and you talk uh the way you talk about them, I'm thinking of them as an anchor

for you. And we're talking about an anchoress actually in Julian of Norwich. You said you were drawn to that idea of all shall be well. What is it about that phrase that speaks to you um I think you know I myself am not a religious person but I am spiritual and I think it comes down to having a core belief that ultimately it will be okay and and actually it also could be it could also be wonderful and this happened to me really the first time at 30 when I when I became pregnant I gave birth they it wasn't terrible it was actually hugely empowering it was positive I had been prepared for whatever was to come but it actually was hugely empowering um and obviously since then we've had a pandemic we've had so many things that we could never ever have prepared ourselves for and terrible loss and

terrible hardship but actually ultimately we will come out the other the other end of it and um and you know for women I think the reason that that piece is so powerful you know Rupi Kaur herself has has done such a lot of work to get to to establish her own self-belief that actually um i feel that as women we have to work harder you know society is is doing a lot to tell us that we're not capable it's doing a lot to tell us that we aren't able um and actually more often not we are and it's so interesting you bring up that point, because as we were looking into inspirational words or quotes or mantras, I do feel that women turn to them perhaps more often than men. I don't see the quotes as much in young boys rooms as perhaps I see in young girls.

And you laugh. What do you think that is behind that? I mean, that's a really interesting question. I think from my experience of being with my partner, who is very different to me in many ways, he doesn't explore his own thoughts and feelings in the way that I do and the women that are around me do. But I would argue that he actually doesn't have the complexity of the challenges that i do as a mother and as a woman living today i am nurse i am administrator i am finance manager i'm a professional person i am an individual you know and actually i think we have a lot more to navigate at times and so finding a way to access an anchor a point that doesn't require

a lot of thought a lot of space because you might not have time for those thoughts or any physical space somewhere that you can just go to um and in a millisecond just get that little boost and that reminder that and then carry on you know you don't have the indulgence keep calm and carry on as they say but you know the way you just described your responsibilities uh what's echoing back to me is the role of a householder that we see in i julian that you know the woman has so many aspects of the life as she holds together other people's lives, right, by being organised and being giving and whatnot. It's been lovely to speak to you, Sophie. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Thank you. Lovely to speak to you.

And all the best with your girls and your family as well. We did get this message from a listener who was interested that we are celebrating the life of Julian of Norwich. Julian has been a female name in my family for approximately 200 years. There has been an association with Julian of Norwich, particularly through my great aunt, Mother Julian, Mother Superior of the Community of the Epiphany, Truro, 1827 to 1911. Alas, the community dwindled, closing after the death of the last nun some years ago. I wear a silver bangle,

made as a gift from me to me, to mark the end of my marriage, inscribed with, and I quote, all shall be well and all manner of things will be well, unquote. That is from Julian. Well, let us turn to one of those most famous sayings, all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. It was quoted by the poet T.S. Eliot. It was admired by Queen Elizabeth II. You might have seen it, the phrase threads its way through the bottom of

a stained glass window in the Chapel Royal at St. James's Palace in London. That was to commemorate the 2002 Golden Jubilee. What do you think, Sally-Anne, that Julian meant by that phrase? It's God's message to Julian.

And I think it means that it's a message of hope, of holy hope. And I think it's like there's a bigger picture. And in this particular moment, we can't see everything. But what we can do is hold on to a hope that somehow in a way that we cannot possibly grasp now, all shall be well. Things will change. There is a holding meaning in this. And for me, it's also the rhythm of the words,

the all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. It's a comfort. It is a comfort. It has a kind of enfolding, wrapping kind of feeling that you can hold on to. So, yeah. It does. It has a rhythm that I suppose, like any meditation, can ease the anxiety or the strain of a certain time. I want to bring in Faye Smith, who is the founder of Hope Walking. Welcome, Faye. Hello.

Now, for our listeners, I want to let them know that you have come through a lot of challenges through an abusive marriage and the traumatic deaths of your husband, father and daughter. And you set up a walking group called Hope Walking. Why did you take that direction? Well, it all started really when my marriage broke down. And in common with many women,

I had alternate weekends without my children. They were two and six at the time and there was no space in my life for walking. I was working four days a week and set up a little business on the side and was also trying to be a good mum. So walking was pushed to the side apart from these alternate weekends and as I started walking other people in my network asked if they could join me they might be going through menopause, empty nest, relationship breakdown, bereavements, losses of various sorts. One had a child with special needs and they just needed a lifeline of that companionship to get together and talk through the issues that we were facing in a really positive, healthful way. And the group grew and grew. We called ourselves the Four Ws, Wonderful Women

Walking at Weekends. And then from that, eventually people got repartnered, they moved on. And then after my engagement broke down, I joined the Ramblers and that allowed me to walk and be guided myself then instead of having to organise it. I understand. But coming back to all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. Sally-Anne was really explaining to us there the radical hope. Is that something that resonates with you? Absolutely, it does. I founded the business a year ago this week, actually, and I do some exclusive walks for women so they feel it's a safe space. And we explore themes of grief and loss because I meet so many women carrying so much loss and bereavement and grief. And that's loss of various sorts. It might be health, it might be a career, it might be relational.

And they haven't been able to find the time or the space or perhaps the techniques to deal with it. Because you have spoken about the negative impact of holding on to that grief and trauma. It lives in the body. You know, as we know, the body keeps the score. I was through my marital breakdown, and some listeners may associate I was grinding my teeth so much that

I actually killed my own teeth and had to have extractions I had. Within a week of my daughter's death, she was 12 at the time, I was in the dentist crying not just with the bereavement, but with agony. I had two abscesses because my teeth hold my pain. And so I meet people constantly. They have terrible backs. They have migraines. They have all sorts of bodily issues. And it's because our bodies are hanging on to the grief and trauma,

not because we want to keep it usually, but because we don't know how best to get rid of it. How does the walking help? Well, there are many people I'm sure who've been on Radio 4 who will tell you that it's the most phenomenal medicine almost and it's fantastic for the mind, the body and the spirit. While we're moving, just on a basic level, who doesn't want to move through?

You don't get over grief, but you can move through it. There can be a new normal. There can be health, healing, hope and happiness on the other side. And I'm now a trained bereavement befriender with Care for the Family who helped me through with telephone bereavement befriending. And our motto is we hold out hope for people who are struggling to find any hope in their lives right now and we tell them that a we understand not their exact situation but what they've been through and that life can get good again and we just need people to hold hope for us well you know there is in i julian and she famously talks about the whole world in a hazelnut that's something you come back to claire but others do too and this image of the natural world like the intimacy the

beauty of something so tiny which can be held in your hand um how important is the natural world, do you think, getting to, I suppose, try and reach those places of hope? I would say it's absolutely critical. In my experience, I was having mentoring. I call my community like AA for grief and loss. I was having mentoring. I had buddies. And after a session, I would take myself for a long walk on the Kent coast. I'd never lived outside Sheffield my

hometown for 50 years and I moved to the Kent coast I was 20 miles from France and I just walk along the coast and the blue green therapy of being in nature and dealing with my inner pain and externalizing finally what I'd been holding on to like many women we hold on to these things we haven't got anywhere to go with them what what could i do i got a surviving son who was four years older than my daughter i was self-employed i had a business to run my home was on the line what do we do do we go to bed for a year no we carry on but therapy and walking in nature has been so beautiful because when you stop to look at a leaf or a flower it's um i speak as a

christian but i would say i have holy envy for the buddhist philosophy of mindfulness and the walking that is embodied in that and i would stop and i now run modern day pilgrimages where i invite people of any and no faith to do the same and we might stop and we might look a tree at rooted and say where in your life are you feeling unrooted where have you been blown over and you're struggling to stand upright again we look at ivy and we might say where do you feel other people are entwining themselves around you and you need to break free of that these kinds of things nature is teaching us a lesson all the time. And I found God in nature in a way when I was deconstructing through some faith issues that I have never experienced before.

It's interesting how you describe how you do those walks, because we got this from a listener. What keeps me optimistic is looking closely at nature, the number of different greens in a field of wheat, the detail of a single flower or leaf. It puts things back into perspective. And fresh air is always good for the head, is not the truth. A couple more of the words that have stayed with our listeners. And here's one from Shirley. Over the years, I have found myself singing in my head. I have confidence from the sound of music when going to interviews, etc. And I found it helped. Maybe you should sing it out loud as well, Shirley. Let me see. Here's

Peter. My friend said to me as my partner was having assessments for dementia, this too will pass. And this mantra has helped me stay positive even when my optimism is fading. Thanks for that, Peter. We'll read some more of the messages that you have sent in to us. I want to turn to another aspect of words, Sally-Anne. You're also creative director of a therapeutic project. It's called Cloth of Kindness. Tell us a little bit more about what it does. OK, so the Cloth of Kindness came about because there was an exhibition about Julian of Norwich called Creativity and Compassion. And I wanted to produce something for this exhibition.

So I love that phrase of Julian's where she says we're enfolded in love, we're enfolded in God's love. So I was thinking, how could you make real this? How could you make physical the idea of being enfolded in love? And I thought about, you know, a boyfriend's jumper, you know, that way you feel the kind of the textile that carries this sort of thing. So I was thinking about clothing and Julian has this fantastic phrase that we're clothed in God's love, like the bones in the flesh, that physical. So how could you make something that physical? So I had seen these amazing embroideries by an artist called Lorena Bulmer, who was in the great Yarmouth workhouse at the end of the 18th century. And she had done these embroidered 12 foot embroidered letters that were full of rage and fury. But visually, they were splendid. You know, it was like sewing as handwriting.

And I sort of thought maybe I could borrow her style and turn it into a rant of kindness. So I asked people to send me in their stories of kindness and compassion, their experiences, and I sewed them all in the style of Lorena on pieces of fabric and then I backed it all with teddy bear fur so it was all soft and then we exhibited it in the exhibition on a sofa so people could literally get under and wrap themselves in this cloth of kindness with all these words of kindness and actually it was even soft the embroidery makes it feel soft so it worked on a lot of different levels and was very physical and And while it was there, the chaplain from the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital came to that exhibition. And she said,

oh, would you bring that up to the hospital, the cloth? And that's when the project started. And we began having patches of material that patients, doctors, visitors, everybody could sew their own. It's very simple, the embroidery skills. It's not about being a beautiful embroiderer. It's just about words of kindness or compassion that mean something to you. We say every patch tells a story. And then we sewed all of those together and made a cloth of kindness for the Norfolk and Norwich, which stays there, which can be used by people.

So we've had bereaved families touching it. And then it's become a project so we now work with cancer centres we work with teenage mental health groups and people in these settings embroider their own patches the cloth stays in the place and it becomes a legacy it's lovely and you can see more of that work online. It's Cloth of Kindness. Thanks, Sally-Anne. I want to turn back to you, Hetta, because we're talking about all these words and all the influence of Julie of Norwich

and I suppose really what came from it as well, her being the first woman to write this book in English. But we talked about, you know, women's voices not being heard. How did she manage to have her words live on into the year 2023? Well, I think she's a very special case because they could very easily have been lost. I mean, so many medieval texts are not around anymore. And her work was not known in her lifetime. And Claire in her book imagines a scenario for that, where she gives it, you know, gives it kind of for safekeeping.

We don't know the real story, although I think that's plausible. But she basically, her words found their way somehow to women's convents, to nunneries. And that's kind of how they were preserved. It was a while before they became very popular. But I would say particularly in sort of the last sort of, you know, 100 years or so, she's become a wildly popular Christian figure, but also even in lockdown, she became known kind of casually as a lockdown saint. Because, you know, she was isolated. As we were all locked in?

Yeah, exactly. So it's, you know, it's, oh, all of a sudden, people who might not have been able to find a connection with Julian before, were like, well, God, I'm stuck in here as well. And I want to find some comfort. And I think more so than any other writer I've come across, religious writer in the Middle Ages, her emphasis is always on love and comfort and hope. You get so many writings from that time that are hellfire and brimstone and don't you dare mess up. And if you do, it's a disaster. And her words are very much about God loves you, and he will pick you up. And, you know, keep going, all shall be well. So I think that, you know, regardless of your religion, spirituality, I think there's such a point of connection there. So I think the sort of accessibility of her has carried her on, but also the sort of role women have played in fostering her. Although her thoughts at that time would

have been considered, of course, so at odds with the church's teaching, even though you'll often hear God is love now. It is women, Celia, I know, that kind of had a role in preserving Julian's words. It is, it is. The existing manuscripts that we have, which are copies made 200 years later, were from a group of nuns, English Benedictine nuns who lived in France. And their order, we don't know how they got that manuscript, but we do know that they treasured it, that they copied it, that they studied it. And to this day, that order of nuns still, the nuns use Julian, the novice nuns do. So they preserved it and kept it safe and kept it secret. And it's thanks to them that we have that text now.

I mean, when it was published in the 1600s for the first time, it got the most terrible reviews, like the demented ravings of a madwoman. And the manuscript, when it was found, was filed in the Sloan Collection of the British Museum under witchcraft and magic. So it is extraordinary that it's taken... You know, talk about a slow burner. It's taken 650 years for Julian's writings to be truly appreciated widely.

If anybody's thinking of approaching Julian, set in such a different world, as I mentioned, to our own, but what would your advice be for them on how to enter it? Well, I suppose I've got to say they should read I, Julian, because I hope it's a good read as well as making it an understandable. But I also really, really hope that the book will get people to read Revelations of Divine Love. And one or two Julian scholars have said to me they're grateful for it for that reason, that it will bring more people to her actual writings because they are absolutely exquisite. And I think you can just open the book and see what your eye falls on. You'll find something beautiful there, beautifully written. Some calling her the mother of English prose. Alongside Chaucer, Chaucer, the father of English poetry. Why isn't she recognised alongside him?

She's a brilliant, brilliant writer, contemporary of Chaucer. Heta, do you have a favourite Julian phrase? Yeah, I do. So one that I think, again, in terms of accessibility, so it's talking about God. So he said, thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be trevised, thou shalt not be deceased. But he said, thou shalt not be overcome. So the idea that, you know, no one ever promised that, you know, everything would be fine and it would all be plain sailing. But one promise is you will not be overcome.

And I think regardless of where you're coming at, Julian, from, this idea of I can handle this, you know, Sophie saying I am capable of this. I think there's a real inspiration in that, you know, I will not be overcome. Sally-Anne, do you have a favourite? Mine's just a very simple little one, which is I will hold you securely. And I just, I hold that when I'm feeling a bit wobbly. I will hold you securely. I'm thinking of your cloth of kindness also, securely holding people.

And Claire? I love an awful lot of Julian, as you can imagine. But the one I like to offer is, as I lost my mother when I was 12, God, all wisdom. God, all wisdom is our kindly mother. And the image there of mother as well, which of course was so radical, thinking about God in that way.

Thank you all so much for coming in. Fascinating, insightful. I think our listeners will leave with a lot more knowledge and probably inspiration and perhaps also aspiring to learn more about Julian. I want to thank my guests,

Heta Howes, her book, Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife, The Extraordinary Lives of Four Medieval Women is out next year. Clare Gilbert, Director of the Westminster Abbey Institute and her book I, Julian, is out now.

Faye Smith, founder of Hope Walking. Sally-Anne Lomas, trustee of Friends of Julian and creative director of the Cloth of Kindness project. We also had Grace Indiritu and our listener Sophie from Cumbria. You can find information

about celebration events for the 650th year of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love on the Woman's Hour website. On tomorrow's Woman's Hour, I'll be talking to the rising star, actor Belle Powley, about her role in a new drama, A Small Light. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time.

What could be more modern than a net zero travel show? A show about going places that never goes anywhere. Welcome then to Your Place or Mine on BBC Radio 4. I'm Sean Keaveney and I love travelling almost as much as I love staying at home and watching music documentaries. I figure Massachusetts, you know, for somebody like you who doesn't particularly enjoy broadening their horizons, it would be sort of a baby step, because Massachusetts is kind of the heart of New England. So, you know, it wouldn't be too shocking for you. Each week, another fantastic and intrepid guest attempts to lull me out of my postcode with persuasion alone. Eat the insects too. I mean, that's what they do a lot in Oaxaca.

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What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.