1984 Revisited - The 40th anniversary of the Friends of Julian of Norwich

A reflection by Sheila Upjohn

1984 is the year the Friends of Julian of Norwich was founded.   And I remembered that 1984 is also the title of George Orwell’s terrifying book predicting the future of a completely authoritarian state.  So I took down my copy to see if there was anything I could learn from it.

Orwell writes that it was the Ministry of Love that maintained law and order: There were no windows in it at all. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business and then only by a penetrating through a maze of barbed wire entanglements steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by Gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms armed with jointed truncheons.

I was reminded of Julian’s cell with its three windows, one open for her to give counsel and healing to those who sought it, one window through which her bodily needs were met, and the one into the church, through which her gaze beheld God himself.  And I understood that she herself became a window through which we, too, can see God.

Julian and was shown Love is his meaning.    In the book 1984 there was compulsory attendance at a daily Two Minutes Hate: The programme of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day.… Before the Hate had proceeded for 30 seconds, expressions of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room… In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy.  People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices… And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract and directed emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blow lamp... It was even possible at moments to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act.

I was reminded of television pictures of protests and protesters, which now seem to appear almost daily.   No matter what the object of the protest, there are similar angry faces, shouts of rage, and threats of violence to those who disagree with them.

The play about Julian, Mind out of Time, centres on a debate between an archangel and an archfiend about whether Julian has a message for the world today.    At the end, the archfiend plays his last card and reveals his hidden agenda.    

The archfiend  :But she wasn’t clever, she wasn’t an  intellectual.  They’ll despise her.

The archangel: Well at least she was taught to read and write, which shows that somebody cared whether women were literate, even 600 years ago.  And the fact her Latin wasn’t up to much, so that she wrote an English, gives her a far bigger audience now than if she’d written in Latin for scholars only.  It’s funny when you come to think of it.   She was writing about the same time that Chaucer was writing the Canterbury tales, so if they call him the father of English poetry, they might almost call her the mother of English prose.

The archfiend:  Stop it!  stop it! stop it!   Must you to ruin everything we set out to do!   Moloch is onto a new line in discord, spreading the story that men have always stunted women's achievements out of spite, and now you're trying to make out of this Julian woman contradicts that too! It’s inconvenient, I admit, that she wrote so well, inconvenient that some of the things she said bearing hearing again, inconvenient that though she chose to spend all her life in one small room, yet her mind was free.    But they are temporary inconveniences, no more.   We must go on stirring things up.   We must keep them divided.   We must set young against old, black against white, child against parents, rich against poor, women against men, man against God!   We must teach them to hate, to hate, to hate!

In the book, George Orwell wrote of a time when every kind of literature which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance was being altered. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date, so that the whole literature of the past… will exist only in Newspeak versions.  When I read that many children’s books, among them those by Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl, are being altered to make them politically correct, I feel that the time had already arrived.

Fortunately Julian’s book is out of reach, although in the book 1984 There were also whispered stories of a terrible book… which circulated clandestinely here and there and which would certainly have been destroyed if it had been discovered.

Julian’s book circulated clandestinely for centuries.   Let us rejoice that it has now become widely known, and give thanks for the part the Friends of Julian of Norwich has played in helping bring this about.

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