Excerpt

Spiritus:A Journal of Christian Spirituality
Patricia Donohue-White

I understand three ways of beholding motherhood in God. The first is the ground of our nature's making; the second is the taking of our nature, and there begins the motherhood of grace; the third is motherhood at work. And in that is a forth-spreading by the same grace in length and in breadth, in height and in depth without end; and all is one love.1

The 14th century English mystic Julian of Norwich is justly renowned for her articulation of a theological maternity.2 Though the use of maternal images to express divine activity and the designation of Jesus as mother are not unique to Julian,her sophisticated and sustained development of these themes is unparalleled in Christian tradition3 and, until recent developments in feminist theology, Julian has stood alone in that tradition as a theologian bold enough to symbolize God systematically in both male and female terms.4 As many of her readers have observed, Julian does not simply "project conventional notions of human motherhood on to God."5 Rather, she sees motherhood as archetypically divine, and consequently views human motherhood as imaging or making visible "a function and a relationship that is first and foremost in God."6 By employing a range of images for the divine, including maternity and paternity, Julian's theologycan be read as one that transcends gender stereotypes yet simultaneously affirms the work that mothers do as paradigmatic images of God's work in the world.7