Dead Christians Society

Here's another student question, and my answering ruminations, from our class's discussion of Margery Kempe:

Q: The weeping, etc. seems similar to some charismatic movements in terms of being characterized with outward emotional manifestations of the Spirit? Are movements similar to these found at other times in church history?

A: When I first encountered the stories of the life of St. Francis, for example in the near-contemporary accounts in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, I was struck by how similar that spirituality was to modern charismatic spirituality: visions, prostrations, prophecies, miraculous signs like levitations and healings, a vivid sense of the presence of God by his Spirit—all are present in Francis's 12^th-century spirituality. There are other examples too. This is from a newsletter I wrote while at Christian History:

I sense behind this question, for some of you at least, some degree of fear: If we start messing with this Catholic stuff, will we end up taking in some theological poison? Can we really learn from people from whom we as evangelical Protestants have historically differed so much? I'm not going to try to answer those questions here—--we really can't try to do that, or we'll get too far afield.

I do want to point you to the best brief contemporary survey I have seen on Catholic-evangelical dialogue as it now stands. This is a recent Books & Culture cover article which is a concise condensation of a recent book.

On page 113 Margery witnesses a women who has an image of Jesus. This woman lets some of the other towns women dress it up and revere the image. Was this kind of thing common? I thought that the Western church didn't uphold use of icons, is this something different?

Medieval piety was intensely visual. I don't know about "revering images," but Francis's innovation of the crèche, the elaborate tapestries often unfurled and used as backdrops by traveling preachers, and of course the story-based stained glass and statuary in the churches themselves all communicated spiritual things in visual ways. On the other hand, at the festival of Corpus Christi, we move from image as instruction or visual aid to the veneration of the Body and Blood of Jesus himself, by way of the theology of transubstantiation:

[clipped from the very helpful glossary of Margery Kempe's Book]: Corpus Christi became a universal Christian feast in 1317. Celebrating the sacramental body and blood of Jesus Christ, the feast day typically involves eucharistic processions.  This was a highly popular late medieval feast; its focus was the Passion and redemptive act of Christ and it brought all of a town together for communal activities. Margery Kempe speaks of a "solemn procession with many candles and great solemnity (that) went through the town" (MK Ch. 45).  [Essentially carrying the consecrated bread and wine around the town in a special receptacle, which was a focus of worship.] Often dramatic performances were associated with it, such as the "interlude" paid for by the city of Lynn in 1384 for the embellishment of the feast. 

A more general observation is that the strongly visual and tactile devotion of Margery's day is strongly related to the emotional nature of that devotion. Among the different aspects of our human nature, our emotions seem especially closely tied with our physical bodies. We use the same word, "feeling" or "being touched," for the physical senses and for emotional experiences.

My question is: Where has the sense of "touch," of "physicality" gone in today's culture? Does it, can it ever, communicate anything true or spiritual? We have plenty of vision in our TV- and movie-soaked culture. But how often do we experience anything significant through touch? The most intense, ecstatic touch-experiences, those of sex, have been devalued and dehumanized through obsessive attention and being made the commodities of the impersonal marketplace. I think our sex- and violence-saturated culture has contributed to making us leery of committing anything so serious and foundational as our religious lives to this realm of the tactile and the emotional. It's not that we're Gnostic, denying the reality or goodness of the physical. It's that we're super-saturated by vulgar, meaningless exploitations of the sense of touch, the sense of vision (especially, for males, associated with sexuality), and the emotions.

So it becomes very difficult for us to relate to such practices as pilgrimage, for example. When I described, in a class at Gordon-Conwell during the mid-90s, the huge influxes of eager believers, every day, by the busload, to the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 that launched Pentecostalism, and the long streams of eager "pilgrims" that made their way to the Toronto Airport Vineyard church in the [80s? 90s?] and the Brownsville/Pensecola revivals of the [90s?], one student asked, with obvious disbelief in his voice, the following question: "Why do Pentecostals and charismatics feel that it's so important to actually go to the place where a revival is supposedly happening, to 'bring back' that revival to their home churches?"

The answer, it seems to me, resonates strongly with the medieval practice of pilgrimage: people go where God is reputed to be moving in a special way because they recognize the essentially personal, visual, tactile, and emotional nature of this historic faith of Christianity. God continues to incarnate himself in Christ—in the body of Christ—which is his people, his "living stones," wherever he chooses to build them together. We may not venerate Saints today or seek out their relics, but we do crave the kind of physically and emotionally mediated contact with Christ that comes to us in special gatherings of his people—his body—where he seems to be doing special things uniquely "for our time and place." However un-Protestant, or at least un-Reformed-Protestant, that may seem, I believe it reflects a deep truth about the incarnational nature of our faith.

Until this century, little was known about the English mystic Margery Kempe (1373 – 1433) except that she had an association with the sublime cloistered mystic Julian of Norwich. This all changed in 1934 with the discovery of The Book of Margery Kempe in a library where it had lain hidden for four hundred years. Finding Margery Kempe’s own story was important not just because it shed light on her life, but also because it turned out to be the first known autobiography in the English language.

If anyone had expected to find Margery to be anything like her cloistered counterpart, Julian of Norwich, they were in for a surprise. Far from being a typical holy woman, she was married and the mother of fourteen children. Moreover, she had been a woman of substance, even running a large brewery for a time. After turning to God, she traveled thousands of miles on pilgrimage to all parts of the known world.

This woman, who we know only through her autobiographical book, was no spectacular mystic, in the mold of many other, better-known medieval women. Her “homely devotion,” as she called it, rarely reached the mystical peaks of Julian. And her teachings have generally not been considered nearly as deep or sublime as those of Julian and other mystics.

Why did I pick her to talk about today? Because she is a down-to-earth, struggling “regular person” who has some obvious flaws, but who nonetheless has amazing experiences with God. She writes with a rare honesty and an endearing “everyday-ness” about even the most exalted experiences. And she reminds us of the humanity of Jesus and the wonderful ways he is ready to meet us in our daily lives. Throughout her Book, she refers to herself as “this creature.” She writes honestly. We can read her without the pressure of feeling we don’t “measure up” to yet another “saintly mystic” with their strenuous teachings about the devotional life. She does have wonderful experiences in prayer, receives prophetic words, and gives council to important people, but always with an acute sense of her own flaws and need for god’s grace. How refreshing!

***

Now I’d like to look at a few aspects of Margery’s life and her Book that it seems to me might have important things to say to us today, more than 500 years after her death.

Margery knows God is real, and she expects God to work in her life and the lives of others

When she is at her extremity—first in her post-partum depression and spiritual crisis—she turns to God and finds that he saves her. Throughout her life, she turns to him in every circumstance—often when her Christian brothers and sisters have abandoned her or, worse, turned on her—and she finds that he answers her and carries her through.

‘Distancing” of late-medieval piety

And in that lively sense of God’s caring presence, Margery is a wonderful lens through which to see medieval piety—in particular, the intense desire for religious experience of later medieval life. “In the 1200s, the church, more than ever before, began successfully reaching people through preaching, art and drama, books and pamphlets, and annual confession and Communion, among other things. In response, there was a widespread hunger for religious experience—a hunger, ironically, that the church, which created it, could not satisfy. People found parish life humdrum and spiritually undemanding. In unprecedented numbers, devout lay people began seeking a more intense religious life while staying married and working in their secular vocations.”

In parish life, the Eucharist—always the focus of public worship—was becoming ever more “distanced” in a number of ways. The bishop or priest who formerly had faced the people across the altar-table now turned his back on them. The altar-table receded further and further from view until it finally became lodged against the east wall of the church. All the congregation could glimpse through the rood-screen that separated the altar area from the main area of the sanctuary was the moment when the priest raised the consecrated host above his head. Seeing this moment came to be the high point of the mass, and people were known to shout “Heave it higher, sir priest!” if they could not see and adore their savior in the communion elements.

Late-medieval rise in lay piety

In the midst of this late medieval “distancing” trend, devout laypeople tended more and more to make faith and its practice the highest priority in their lives. They did this through an increasingly self-conscious, explicit faith, and through activities like frequent prayer, ascetic routines, frequent attendance at Mass, dedication to acts of Christian charity, and scrupulous self-examination of their consciences.

Especially, laypeople tried to identify emotionally with Christ’s passion, in order to deepen their devotion to and love for Christ, thus becoming a better follower of him. The theologian Abelard helped push this development of “affective” or emotional piety forward with his theory that Christ’s death had been an act primarily intended to make people sorrowful and turn their hearts to Christ. And Bernard of Clairvaux also contributed, with his theology of love and his use of the Song of Songs to represent our relationship to Christ.

 “The late-medieval ‘age of faith,’ as it’s been called, was ignited by a rediscovery of the Gospels (on which we’ll say more in a few minutes); an identification with Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and saints; and especially a desire to see, touch, and emotionally experience the truths of the Christian faith.”

***

More particularly, Margery can’t get over how incredible the Incarnation is, how human Jesus was, and how much he suffered for us

Evangelicals need to hear Margery on this: evangelical Protestantism tends to hurry over the Incarnation—seeing it as a necessary step to get Jesus to the cross, where he can die as a substitutionary atonement for our sins. In general, we miss out on the rich historical theological resources on Creation and Incarnation, and we focus instead on Sin and Salvation. Margery certainly dwells on the Passion—that can be a “bridge” over which we walk to meet her. But it is the fact that God has really become human and really has been tempted and has suffered in all the ways we have that captivates her.

***

She models a life of prayer not in some cloister but in the struggles of everyday life

One of Margery Kempe’s chief contributions was as a teacher of “homely” asceticism—not highfalutin’, unreachable mysticism. “Asceticism” here does not mean 40-day fasts and self-flagellation. It simply means, as opposed to mysticism, “trying to connect with God in the midst of our everyday struggles.” Mysticism, on the other hand, means something like, “scaling, in cloistered solitude a long ‘ascending ladder’ of specific techniques to union with Christ.”

More specifically, the three classical mystical steps are purgation, illumination, and union. These are assumed to come in that order: first you purge yourself of bad stuff through a kind of “spiritual athleticism”—hair shirts, fasting, and all that; then God begins to show you and teach you things. And finally, only after the first two steps, you begin to enter a closer union with God in Christ.

Well, this sequence is quite correctly worrisome to modern evangelical Protestants. Believing as we do in salvation by grace, we assume we have real union with God from our conversion onward; we don’t have to “earn” it through a long effortful climb.

But Margery didn’t experience the Christian life in that sequential sort of way. It was a blissful encounter with Christ that saved her, after all, from her period of insanity after the birth of her first child. And then, after that, her Christian life was a series of cycles, with purgation, illumination, and union all jumbled together, sometimes layered, sometimes in this order and sometimes in that. Hers was no single, straight climb up a mystical ladder. I personally am much more comfortable with that process—it looks a lot like my life, in fact! Very messy!

Prayer

Margery certainly did, however, model a life of prayer. Her spirituality is centered on prayer. She prayed a lot—and we see her praying many different kinds of prayer, with many kinds of results. Sometimes prayer brings her to a point of resolution about something. Sometimes it results in her hearing a definite command from God. Sometimes she gets a prophetic sense of something that will happen in the future.

***

A favorite expression that Margery uses for some—but not all—of her times of intimate prayer was “dalliance.” In the English of her day, this word meant warm, affectionate conversation between two people—often two lovers. It is a homely, down-to-earth term, indicating the rich freedom, the perfect understanding, which expresses the joy of true friendship with Christ, and in Christ. She also uses the term “dalliance” sometimes when she is describing joyous times of fellowship with other Christians. And this brings us to another point where Margery can teach us:

Margery was not a self-absorbed, inward-turned mystic; she was oriented towards Christian community in many ways

Margery was not a self-absorbed, inward-turned mystic; she was oriented towards Christian community in many ways.

Take for example her most subjective practice, perhaps—the “crying episodes” linked to her meditations on the passion. These were themselves not as subjective as they look. Thornton says they usually went through 3 phases. The first phase is objective, focused on the person of Christ and on his Passion. The second is intimate and devotional: she pours out her feelings of love to Christ and senses his love in return. But almost invariably she would go on to a third phase, in which her feelings of devotion would overflow into compassion for other people, often including specific intercession for them.

***

Though in some senses mystical, Margery’s was an active piety, not just contemplative

Just as Margery was saved from navel-gazing, hyper-subjective mysticism by her communal orientation, she was moved out of the prayer closet and into the world by a desire to be a doer of God’s word. In other words, she not only meditated on Christ and enjoyed intimate prayer times with him, she sought to imitate him in the midst of life.

Her time was the early heyday of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. The friars of these orders “tried to imitate literally the life of Jesus and his apostles,” especially being moved by “Luke 9:3-6, the passage where Jesus sends out the Twelve to proclaim the kingdom of God, taking ‘nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.’” And as the “Gospel revival” spread through society, some lay people, including Margery, believed they too were called to observe the hard sayings of Christ and imitate his walk as best they could. . . .

Margery generally lived out an intense concern for others, serving people by practical works and intercession. She never held back from unpleasant duties, however lowly. But this was not out of strict obedience to some medieval code of behavior or religious legalism. In fact, she did not even serve others for Christ’s sake or after his example. Rather, she saw herself as serving Christ directly in them. She served the lepers because they were in Christ, partaking of his Passion; she served an insane woman because that too was a subtle participation in the Passion.

***

She is brutally honest

Here’s another thing I love about Margery: In spite of her sometimes exalted experiences in prayer, she is brutally honest about her flaws and failures. In writing about these, she seems immune to embarrassment, and is perhaps without the kind of self-consciousness which would have led her to re-write her experiences in a way that blurred over the awkward corners and sharp edges of her own personality.

As I’ve mentioned, one example of this honesty is that when prayer brings her to a prophetic sense on some matter, she often has to battle with honest, healthy doubt. She is afraid of misinterpreting what she thinks she has heard from God, because of her own sin or the deception of the devil. “As a prophet,” one of her modern admirers says, “she is extraordinarily free from arrogance.”

In fact, even though she is sometimes brash and self-centered, she is also winningly self-critical. At one point she records about herself (as always, in the third person): “She was enormously envious of her neighbors if they were dressed as well as she was. Her whole desire was to be respected by people. She would not learn her lesson from a single chastening experience, nor be content with the worldly goods that God had sent her—as her husband was—but always craved more and more. And then, out of pure covetousness, and in order to maintain her pride, she took up brewing. . . .”