My Beseeching
a little essay from the Covid days
The feast day of Blessed Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century woman I think of as a spiritual mother and my patron saint, was last week. I, being in the weeds of my day to day life, did not catch a moment to share anything on the Internet about it or do something fun to commemorate. But, better late than never! In the spirit of honoring her, I thought I’d share an essay I started to imagine in December 2020.
This essay, double spaced, is four pages long. It took me at least four months to write it. Sometimes writing is just like that. (If it’s like that for you, don’t lose heart.) I look back at the process of working on it, and the season of my prayer life that inspired it, as creative and spiritual turning points. There is the time before this essay, and the time after it for me.
God gave this essay to me, as a gift, when I really, really needed it. I had to struggle through shepherding it onto the page, sure, but even that was a gift from Him to me. I’m so grateful for that. (Lest I take all the credit, I would like to note that several friends provided invaluable feedback while I was wrestling through drafts.)
“My Beseeching” was originally published in Ekstasis magazine.
My Beseeching
Julian of Norwich lived most of her adult life as an anchorite, a monastic who vowed to solitude and constancy of place. After making this vow, she inhabited a small stone room appended to her local parish church. Some scholars think she took up the life of an anchorite after losing her entire family to the Black Death, which ravaged the town of Norwich several times in the course of her life. She chose to live as an anchorite so she might pray without ceasing and receive the Eucharist every day.
She was a woman hungry for God.
* * *
I visit the Huntington Gardens on a gray day in late December. Not long after I arrive, a steady rain begins to fall. I meander through the glistening grounds companioned only by my umbrella, by the rain, by a hush that undergirds everything.
Without warning, I am compelled to pause.
Before the library’s empty steps, a bonsai rises in a generous curve. Its twisting inner heart is lined with a vein of dark red wood.
A few moments into my encounter with this tree, an elderly man walks up to refill a box of informational flyers. He sports a dampened canvas bucket hat and a khaki zip up jacket. A worn satchel is slung over his left shoulder. He leans toward me, against its weight. The skin of his hands and around his eyes is lined with age. It resembles soft paper.
With warm, steady cheerfulness, he asks if I have everything I need, whether I have any questions. I ask for his name. “I’m Ted,” he replies.
“Are you the curator?” I ask, gesturing at the bonsai. He nods. We get to talking about the tree which, he tells me, is a California juniper. “See that red line?” He points at the crimson vein that caught my attention. “That’s called a lifeline. When the rest of the tree dies it sheds the dead plant material and keeps that lifeline alive.” He tells me how this permits junipers to survive extreme conditions – like drought or fire – through centuries.
While Ted speaks, I look at the tree. Something about the red vein threaded through its heart holds me, roots me to the spot – Ted’s hand hovers two inches over this lifeline. He wants to make sure I see it. He tells me about its persistence. He tells me this particular tree is over 1,000 years old.
* * *
At the beginning of her Revelations, Julian asks God to give her the wound of longing for him. “[I] desyred,” she writes, “. . . thre gyftes by the grace of God. The first was mynd of the passion. The secund was bodilie sicknes. The thurde was to have of Godes gyfte thre woundys.”
Julian details her request for three wounds as follows: “I conceived a mightie desyre to receive thre woundes in my life, that is to say, the wound of verie contricion, the wound of kynd compassion, and the wound of willfull longing to God. Right as I asked the other twayne with a condicion, so asked I this third mightly with out anie condicion. These twayne desires before sayd passid from my mynd and the third dwellid contynually.”
In pleading with God to grant her the wounds of contrition and compassion, Julian prays conditionally. She knows these are unusual requests, and asks that God only give them to her if he, too, deems them good.
But her prayer that she be wounded with longing for God is prayed “mightly” and without any condition. She has a powerful desire to be given the gift of this wound – a gift she considers entirely in keeping with God’s goodness. And this gift is indeed given as requested. Where Julian’s desires for contrition and compassion “passid from [her] mynd,” the desire to be wounded with longing “dwellid contynually” in her.
* * *
After Ted and I part ways, I stare at juniper lifelines and cannot escape the thought of Julian’s longing. There are five California juniper bonsai scattered through the Huntington’s vast grounds. Each tree is sculpted into its own unique shape. One cascades over the side of its pot like a waterfall; one reaches upward with a sensuality that echoes the marble statue of a goddess positioned behind it. One, the one that stopped me by the library, curves in a nearly perfect spiral, the full and twisting halves of its trunk passionately, inseparably entwined.
Juniper trees live and die in response to their surroundings. Always, their crimson lifelines can be traced from root to crown, shaped according to the desires of each tree as it reaches for the object of its longing – be that refuge, water, sunlight, or soil.
In the wild, junipers have been known to wrap themselves around large boulders as they follow light, to sprawl over the earth in search of water, to bend according to the pull of the wind. Their lifelines indicate the histories of their needs. Their lifelines are the core and source of their life.
When she writes about prayer, Julian of Norwich tends to use the word “besekyng” or “besechyng,” both translated to “beseeching,” interchangeably with “prayer.” I like that Julian refers to prayer as “beseeching.” There’s a familiarity with need in that word I do not hear in “prayer.”
All the same, I am not accustomed to praying, or thinking about prayer, the way Julian of Norwich prays. My prayer is restless, pained, impatient with my longing. When I pray, I am not willing to be wounded in any way, and I do not pray out of a desire for nearness to God.
Instead, I pray hoping that my prayers will somehow solve or do away with the longings that wound me.
Today, as rain falls, drumming across my umbrella and scattering diamonds over the roses and turning the Southern California air cool and pearly; as it dampens my feet, my hands, my cheeks; the wound of my longing is stirred up, intensified. It throbs in my inner heart and will not leave.
I suppose if Julian’s prayers are properly postured, and if the juniper lifelines have anything true to teach me, in prayer I ought not to seek the end of my longing but rather its continued life. For to be wounded with longing for God is to be given the gift of an internal movement of soul that is always alive, always moving toward Him.
Perhaps, then, it is desire itself that sustains my prayer. When rightly ordered and patiently endured, longing is redeemed into a lifeline for my beseeching. It opens me to the necessity of prayer and keeps me in prayer without ceasing. As long as I am wounded by desire, my will remains in movement toward God.
Julian of Norwich, in her own desire and grief-wounded life, through many years of solitude and hard-fought prayer, practiced well the skill of this redemption. I struggle to do the same.
The juniper trees are still keeping watch over the Huntington’s rain-washed grounds when, a few hours later, I leave. The sorrow that inspired such longing when I arrived is still living in me, unresolved and wounding.
I cannot forget the juniper trees. The remembrance of their lifelines accompanies me all the way home.