A Soldier’s Devotions

Extract

Whatever criticism may justly be levelled against the church in the later Middle Ages there is no doubt that it succeeded in stirring up, in the minds of many lay people, a deep and vivid sense of the real presence of God in the context of ordinary affairs. Church congregations behaved, according to our standards, with considerable freedom and restlessness, but only the heretical and the excessively careless stayed away, and even those who were fairly uneducated could be connoisseurs of popular preaching. Drama was religious drama with a strong topical flavour—the soldiers who crucified Christ were real ‘ribalds’ such as you might have feared to meet in the course of the Hundred Years’ War, and the Angel Gabriel addresses the Blessed Virgin as ‘turtle’ in much the same way as a modern postman might call her ‘love’. Julian of Norwich, a great mystic whose communion with God passed, as she says, the limit of human expression, was yet concerned by the love which she felt towards her fellow-Christians to try to explain in the simplest terms the truth which came to her in her revelations. She saw, as she says, the whole of creation in the form of ‘a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut’ which, but for the sustaining love of its Creator, would have perished ‘for sheer littleness’.