What are the possibilities of homemaking in a world out of joint? What does it mean for Christians to be on a pilgrimage? To be sojourners in the world? Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss what it means for Christian life to be a journey not from here to there, but from here to … here. This conversation is based on a free download resource available at faith.yale.edu. Click the link in the show notes to download your copy today.
This conversation is based on a free downloadable resource available at faith.yale.edu. Click here to get your copy today.
“We may heed the call of Jesus to follow me and find him leading us right into the home we already have.” (Ryan McAnnally-Linz)
What are the possibilities of homemaking in a world out of joint? What does it mean for Christians to be on a pilgrimage? To be sojourners in the world?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss what it means for Christian life to be a journey not from here to there, but from here to … here. Together they discuss what it means for the world to be the home of God; the task of resisting the “dysoikos” (or the parodic sinful distortion of home); the meaning of Christian life as a pilgrimage; and three faithful ways to approach the work of homemaking that anticipates how the world is becoming the home of God—Ryan introduces examples from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Julian of Norwich, and a modern-day farming family.
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu. Hello, listeners. This week in the Christian liturgical season is sometimes referred to as Bright Week. It's the week following Easter, and we've made it a practice at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture to celebrate Bright Week by celebrating our friends and supporters, everyone whose financial contributions have made our work possible.
We identify an exclusive resource that one of our team has written and we turn it into a downloadable resource, but we don't just post it on our website. We also print it out and send it to our donors as a chat book, a small, but tangible token of our gratitude and appreciation. If you're interested in becoming a donor to the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, you can go to faith.yale.edu/give. And if you're interested in downloading the very resource that we're discussing in today's podcast, you can do that by going to our homepage, faith. yale. edu, subscribing to our list and receiving it as an email. You don't need to have read it in order to enjoy today's conversation, but you might benefit from it.
It's a piece called From Here to Here, Christian Life as Pilgrimage, and it's by Ryan McAnally-Linz. Hope you enjoy the episode today.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Christian life is a pilgrimage in important ways from here to here. What we're doing is. in the spiritual pilgrimage of our lives is coming to know and inhabit and relate and so coming to participate in the ways that God is making it God's home. The fundamental conviction here is that the parodic distortions of sin aside, notwithstanding, the fundamental goodness of creatures remains that can never be Fully sapped, always there.
Moreover, God is always working redemptively in the world. And there are always glimpses of something like that consummation of God's homecoming to be had. And so in a Christian pilgrimage of this sort, we're not turning our eyes, say upward and away to use the kind of classic directions of things, kind of downward and in a certain respect, deeper in to the world around us.
In a kind of changed relation and a project of coming to recognize and celebrate and support its goodness has created the ways that it's being redeemed and the ways that it offers glimpses of consummation.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Hey listeners, it's Evan here and I'm with Ryan today. Hey, how's it going, Evan? It's going great. I'm excited to talk to you about this recent piece that we put out for Bright Week. We're releasing this episode in the week that follows Easter, traditionally known as Bright Week. I think we learned that a few years ago from a friend, Paul Edwards.
Um, thanks Paul. I had never heard of
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Bright Week before that.
Evan Rosa: Me neither. It was just kind of a bright week. Jesus is risen and Christians all over the world are celebrating in the lightness of that reality. I might ask, what does this bright week mean to
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: you? Oh, you're just going to draw us off on a long tangent now.
The liturgical calendar is a really interesting thing to me because I'm totally shaped in the way that Charles Taylor talks about modern time, where it's this kind of undifferentiated thing. There's no higher and lower times. That's all my guts are formed in that modern way. And yet something in me aspires to a sense that somehow, Bright Week is closer to that time that the disciples were with the risen Jesus than other weeks are.
I want to be able to feel that, but I
Evan Rosa: don't. That's interesting. No higher or lower time. And we're not talking about time today, but we are kind of talking about space and
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: place. I mean, Charles Taylor talks about the same thing with regard to space. You go from like an ordered undifferentiated universe with this kind of like blank canvas of space.
And similarly. The idea of holy places kind of starts to lose its grip on us. Although I, I don't know, I think if you look around, you find people keep going back for that. And that actually, that's an interesting little twist into the idea of pilgrimage, right? Because that's what we're going to be talking about today, where we may not have a strong sense.
of holy places, but there are at least echoes in things, places that people will go on long trips just to have been there, right? It's kind of passe now, but for many decades, Graceland was like the classic of this, right? You would go to Memphis. Just to go to Graceland. I think there's an echo there of that sense that this place is unlike other places.
And there's something special about having been here, not at any particular time or anything, not for any particular event, but just for the place.
Evan Rosa: There's something, I don't know, deep in the human spirit, I think, about looking for that. And even if modernity has flattened things out for time and space and kind of made them, uh, a blank canvas, so to speak, the human spirit wants to look for special places and think about special times.
It's just that now it's kind of, seems like it's more up to us. It's just, uh, something that we express onto the world.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Right. And the risk is that you wind up with them feeling kind of hollow, like they can't handle the weight that you're putting on them. Cause you know, you're putting the weight on them rather than finding the weight in them.
Evan Rosa: That's right. Great. So we are going to talk about pilgrimage today and really ask the question in light of that modern reality, Today, how can we characterize the Christian life as pilgrimage? And so you wrote this piece last year, and I wonder if you could just kind of share a little bit about where it came from.
And listeners, if you're interested in the background for this conversation today, we're currently offering a free download on our website. You can go to our homepage and sign up with your email to get a free download of our latest This essay by Ryan is available, and we're going to be talking about that essay.
So it might serve you to sign up for the list, read that and follow along. But for those of you who aren't there, we'll give a little bit of a primer.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Also, if you do that, you get to enjoy Evan's beautiful artwork that he attaches to all of these little books. It's a wonderful thing. And thank you.
Evan Rosa: I enjoy looking at really cool ideas.
Your idea in this case and expressing that in a creative different way. Give us some feedback. Let us know what you all think. Um, pilgrimage. Yeah. We're used to pilgrims with funny hats, but we're used to the idea of a pilgrimage to Mecca. If you're a Muslim, a pilgrimage to the Holy land, Pilgrimage to special places.
I appreciated the nod to both Fenway Park and St. James Park for Newcastle fans in your text, Ryan. Thank you for that. But what is it about? Being a pilgrim. There's this word, Peregrini in Latin, and I want to start there with Augustine. That's where you start the piece. Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: We, we are, we are pilgrims according to, to Augustine.
He's picking up on some biblical language.
Evan Rosa: The quote is in this mortal life, we are exiles. And that word exiles, Peregrini, we are exiles away from the Lord.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's the quote. Yeah. So Augustine has a picture of this life as in important respects, always alienated, always away from our true home, which is in or with the Lord.
And Augustine, I mean, he sets the tone for basically all of Western theology for over a thousand years. And so the fact that he makes a big deal out of this image means that the idea of being pilgrims, not just Every once in a while when we go on pilgrimage, but being pilgrims in the whole of our lives becomes a kind of a steady note in Latin Christian understandings of what it means to be a human being and in particular a Christian.
And I think there's something really important about that image, but I also think that it gets kind of distorted or it goes awry and in various ways. And it was important to me to think through some of those as we think about the condition of kind of making our homes in the world at a time when the question of home is really ambivalent and really pressing for a lot of people because all sorts of social and cultural dislocations that are going on in the world.
Being
Evan Rosa: at home in the world and the idea of God's home coming to us is this theme that you and Miroslav have been working on for some time. It's really important to each of your latest theological work, the home of God. And this seems like an outcropping of that. It seems like it's got an important base there.
So I'm wondering if you can like, kind of help orient the listener to some of your ideas. In the home of God and how it informs this idea of pilgrimage or exile or Sojourner.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. For this. Yep. So Marla and I have sketched this big theological arc that you can see over the course of the Christian Cannon running from Genesis through Exodus, through the Psalms, and then Gospel of John.
And I'm going to go into the final chapters of the book of Revelation, where this, the arc is of God creating the world to be God's home and ours. And the kind of crisis, the problems in the narrative are ways that the world is unfit to be God's home and unfit to be our home. And so the vision of the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth at the end of Revelation serves for us as kind of a capstone of this story the orienting direction.
of God's intention and God's work in the world is homemaking. It says, behold, the home of God is with human beings. And, and that's kind of, that's where we're headed. And, and there are different ways you might take that. You might take that and say, oh, so that means kind of being at home in the world, because this is where God's home is meant to be, is the kind of basic project or stance that we should be taking.
But you could also say, And this is what I think is really important. That image of pilgrim still applies. It's still, even if our basic understanding is not that kind of God is going to take us away from here to some sort of heavenly consummation, that is an utterly different world. So even if we reject that, you around and say, the world as it is, it's not that we're on the way from here to somewhere else.
It's that we and our world are on the way to being something else. Is it kind of
Evan Rosa: becoming?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yes. Yes. The life as pilgrimage and the task of homemaking start to come together. It's you start to say something like, well, And then, the ultimate home, the true homecoming is God's homecoming to the world in the redemptive consummation of all things.
But while we're on the way, the point is not, and Augustin I think goes wrong in this regard, he tends to think that there's, you know. The big risk is getting too attached to the world. And he famously uses this image of a traveler who's on the way home, but who gets kind of caught up in the sights and sounds and all of the, the nice things about the places that the traveler's seeing on the way and decides never to go home and never, never makes it to the end of the journey.
Sort of anti Odysseus. Right. You're right. Right. Yeah. If Odysseus is the one who always remembers. that he's heading home to Ithaca, Augustine is worried that we as Christians might become beguiled by the kind of shiny stuff of the world. Yeah, exactly. Um, we might not have the presence of mind to tie ourselves to the mast.
Right. And, and I want to push against that and say, yeah, Augustine's right. That the kind of the world as it is, the world as we find is not perfectly fitting home. It's out of joint, but The task of pilgrimage is a pilgrimage kind of towards what we and this are meant to be and are on the way to being.
You
Evan Rosa: put it really well. And this is to kind of keep pushing in the direction that your essay goes. which is on this out of jointness, right? And I'm quoting here from you, if home names, a place of safety and of mutual resonance, attachment and belonging, then this, the world cannot quite be it. So it really is still on the way.
It's still becoming the home of God. It groans in that direction. It struggles quite a bit in that direction. Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I kind of more systematic theology way of putting it as To say in a fallen world, to be fully at home is to be embracing sin and its effects. And it's to be kind of casting our law in ourselves with They're distorted forms rather than kind of trying to work with God's reorientation of us or to receive God's reorientation of us towards something better.
Evan Rosa: Okay. So to describe some of that characteristic damage, and this is something you're borrowing from Lauren Winner, amazing theologian and author. Disoikos. Explain what that word means, maybe parse it out, and maybe also add to what work was it doing? Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So my kids make a lot of fun of me for being far too into etymologies, they say.
But here's a kind of, here's an etymology of disoikos, this word that Miroslav and I more or less made up for the home of God. There are some antecedents in Greek, but They're few and far between. So oikos means home. So that's the kind of central image of our work on the home of God. And dis, this D Y S prefix is a prefix that means something like the subversion or negation of.
The goodness of a thing. So it's not, it's not a protive, it doesn't just take it away. That would be sale and an ocos like un home, oh, not un disoco is an un home. It's more home. That's like a quarter note out of tune. Oh, it's still recognizably kind of the thing. Dis costs. It is not the absence of home.
Recognizably home. It's the thing, but it's like a note. That's a quarter step, a quarter tone off the key, which is just about as off as you could be. And
Evan Rosa: the closer it is almost as like the more noticeable sometimes. Cause there's that sharp dissonance. That's true. And like,
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: this is a great metaphor because there are different degrees of offness and different kind of ways that homes can be.
Not quite what they're meant to be. And this is really important because oftentimes it's the very goods of home that get distorted by sin and its effects. So something like security, this is, I think a genuine good of home. Home is a place of safety, but. We can look around at our world and see the kind of grasping after security and the securitization of home participating in Well, it warps the folks who are in a home and creates, actually that creates the home as a space of fear in the process of securitization.
And it has harmful effects on those outside the home. Just think of all the ways that people get profiled as not belonging in a neighborhood, someone calls the cops, and then there's violence from this thing that, that's, it's not that safety is not a good, it's just that sin has a way of Taking goods, turning them off kilter.
And that's what's happening with home and in so many places. And we use this word disloyal cost to mean that. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: Given that reality, the out of jointness and the just off ness of, of our homes here. The earth is our home. Let's come back to pilgrimage like this, a, uh, a journey from here to there. And yet you want to characterize that pilgrimage in an interesting way.
And so set that up for us. What is that?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Christian life is a pilgrimage in important ways from here to here. What we're doing in the spiritual pilgrimage of our lives is coming to know and inhabit and relate, and so coming to participate in the ways that God is making it God's home. The fundamental conviction here is that the parodic distortions of sin aside, Notwithstanding, the fundamental goodness of creatures remains that can never be fully sapped.
It's always there. Moreover, God is always working redemptively in the world. And there are always glimpses of something like that consummation of God's homecoming to be had. And so, in a Christian pilgrimage of this sort, we're not turning our eyes, say, upward and away to use the kind of classic directions of things, but kind of downward and in a certain respect deeper in to the world around us.
In a kind of changed relation and a project of coming to recognize and celebrate and support its goodness has created the ways that it's being redeemed and the ways that it offers glimpses of consummation.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. You talk about going deeper into things as opposed to some like maybe different
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: thing, right?
It's not like looking away. It's learning to look and really see and. Get into the deeper truth of things. It's obscured by all sorts of sinful, broken things. I
Evan Rosa: love the way you put it. Um, deeper into the reality of particular creatures, whether our human neighbors or our other than human fellows, deeper into the pulsing intensity of places, soil and sunlight, water and air, the histories layered like sediment and landscapes in built environments, deeper into the warp and weft of a whole web of interwoven relationships.
I love that poetic. Really nicely said. Thank you. I think we kind of need to name what is a very common conception for the average Christian of not seeing things that way, that it's not going deeper into anything, that there is a kind of not of this world bumper sticker kind of mentality. I'm going somewhere else.
There's even an old hymn, like a 20th century hymn that Johnny Cash covered. I'm a pilgrim and a stranger wandering through a wearisome land. I've got a home in that yonder city, good Lord, and it's not made by hand. And we're going to push against that a little bit. in the vision of, I mean, it's sort of eschatological vision that you are naming in the home of God coming here and it already being created to be what it is becoming.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, that's right. That's the kind of driving impulse here. And I don't know. This is, it's a contestable sort of theological claim, right? There's a long, rather venerable history of that leads to this hymn. Yeah. Hand is covered by the venerable Johnny Cash. Um,
Evan Rosa: St. Johnny.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: But I do think that it is true to So, we have a really important strand of the scriptural witness, and it resonates well with the conviction of God as Creator of all, that there's not some portion of that all that God creates that is just a kind of it's like the Like the booster on a rocket that gets, that gets just jettisoned as the rocket heads out to space, right?
Where in this case, the rocket is the human soul. Um, and yeah, so I think, you know, there's a real interesting ambivalence around the word cosmos in the gospel of John, where This is the thing that is there in that most famous verse of the Gospel of John, God so loved the world. But this world is also the subject of quite a bit of judgment in the Gospel of John.
This world is that which doesn't recognize Jesus. This same word is Jesus. That's the word for what Jesus says, the ruler of this world, he means Satan, is coming. And so there's a way in which Johnny Cash can sing about this world not being our home that I want to really affirm that there's a real danger of Christians becoming way too at home in this world.
But what we mean by this world is this world as it is. This world as it is warped and not yet kind of brought into the fullness that it is meant for. But to take that and then to say that this world in the sense of trees and rivers and other human beings and bodies and then things like this is the problem I think is a kind of, I think that's a theological mistake.
That's the argument that I've been trying to make. So you
Evan Rosa: ask, what does this work look like? And you say, we may heed the call of Jesus to follow me and find him leading us right into the home we already have. So there's this interesting question of what is the task of this life when it is a journey from here to here, when it is.
Seeing the world as coming into its potential, contributing to that in such a way that we might help to make this the home that it could be. Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So the, so the question is something like, well, if the world is, is meant to be God's home and ours together, what kind of lives are consonant with that? And If you look at the gospel narratives, if you say, well, we have an instance of God making God's home in the world as it currently is, what did that look like?
How did Jesus relate to home? You get this wonderful, but maybe a little bit baffling diversity of ways of relating. Sometimes he has a home, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he's inviting people into his home, at least one. really plausible read of the passage in the gospel of Mark where the guy gets lowered down through the roof is this is Jesus's house where this is happening which is which we actually that kind of I always wondered as a kid but what about the dude's roof you know he's just okay Jesus is just okay with this dude having a hole in his roof now well that would say if it was Jesus's roof then it's oh yeah Jesus Cool.
He's a carpenter. He'll fix it later. Yeah, exactly. So you get that. You get Jesus calling people away from their homes. You get Jesus staying kind of out in the open and you get some of my favorite stories because they have that nice little inversion where Jesus goes and calls someone. And then the next scene is them eating together at that person's house.
I think this happens with Levi, the tax collector, and it happens with Zacchaeus as well. And that's not to say that this is, that this is kind of the key image, the paradigm is what Jesus calls you to is the home you already have. It's to say, sometimes that's the case. And in the work of discernment and saying there is this kind of.
Diversity of ways of relating to our ordinary homes that can be fitting and faithful responses to our pilgrimage. One of the options is. You thought you were being called out on an adventure. Actually, what you're being called to is right where you already were in this process of hosting Jesus there, hosting others there, and making it a space where God's home is coming.
Evan Rosa: I think there's this mentality of I go to prepare a place for you, right? Like I want to escape there. It's so the attention, the focus is on Jesus's agency. God's agency to redeem and save and take care of things and rescue. But what's interesting and I think very appealing to me about this is the agency that we share with God to be kind of co laborers in that sense, to use a scriptural word, like it's a, it retains enough responsibility for our own place that we just find ourselves in and, and for better or worse are simply called to try to improve.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. And I want to be careful to say that, that beginning, that accent on God's work is the fundamental thing, as I see it, that There are all sorts of ways that Christian theology and Christian life go wrong when we think, when we start using language like building the kingdom or in, so you can translate that to home, right?
Bringing or building God's home is not something that is, that we can just do. It's not our task. And, but responding faithfully and appropriately to the homemaking God is our task. Not alone, as co laborers, empowered in the spirit, together as communities. But my hope is that you're kind of liberated from the ultimate responsibility so as to be able to give yourself more fully to the proximate ones that are actually course.
Yeah,
Evan Rosa: you use three sort of case studies. And I think it'd be great to just kind of walk through each of those and look at what's fascinating and interesting about these three as ways of, you say, resisting the disoikos, the out of jointness and, and fulfilling whatever limited, but nonetheless, real responsibility there is there for us.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. So if this pilgrimage doesn't look like detachment from earthly concerns. What does it look and it looks like potentially a lot of things. That's the whole point of the diversity of stories in the gospels about home related stuff. And the three I picked out for this were Dorothy Day and Peter Morin and the Catholic worker movement in the depression era, a couple of Canadian farmers, the Rusicas, who our friend Norman Worspa has written very movingly about, and the 14th century theologian, Julian of Norwich, who's kind of my favorite.
That is not of these examples. Um, well, let's take
Evan Rosa: them in turn and spend a few minutes first on the Catholic worker movement. What was the out of jointness for Dorothy Day and Peter Moore? And obviously like in the depression era, like just a huge crisis.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: The Catholic worker movement, right, they're facing massive economic dislocation, tons of physical homelessness in New York City and then other cities where the movement moves to massive unemployment.
And basically a lot of people who were poor, but had kind of socially stable and respectable lives have been thrown into destitution. Everything's in upheaval and they're right in the thick of it in Manhattan. That's the dislocation combined with a sort of Like modern isolation in ways that traditional forms of community that may have weathered economic downturns in different ways have, are not so much there in 20th century Manhattan.
So that
Evan Rosa: depiction, I mean, it's important to kind of realize the weight of that and what that would have been like, and the kind of uncertainty, the kind of, suffering and maybe scrambling that an individual or family or a community might feel when faced with that kind of widespread economic disaster.
That's so frightening, you know, like people still worry about those kinds of things today. Let's think about, you know, what the, what was special about the Catholic workers response to that? What, what was happening there?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. I think what is special about their response is they met real physical. Needs in personal ways.
So basically what happens is. Dorothy Day is a journalist. Peter Morin is a kind of a radical ideologue. And he comes around and basically, I hear you're the person I need to help me get these ideas out. And they start a newspaper called the Catholic Worker. The newspaper is the start of the thing, but people start coming to work on this paper.
And they need places to stay. They're, they're unhoused folk who are involved in this project. And so they figure out housing, they have rooms, people are staying on the floor, they're staying everywhere. They're staying as long as they, they want, becoming part of the community. And then as people need meals.
And not just people who are staying here, but everybody in the city needs meals. So they start serving meals and you go from, there's just kind of a newspaper slash hostel slash soup kitchen. And the boundaries of belonging are just totally fluid. The people can come in and out. They're constantly working through interpersonal conflict because People are not great to each other at any time, and you put a bunch of people together and there's going to be conflict.
And if you read Day's memoirs, The Long Loneliness, you see this, it's just a kind of It's a spontaneous work that recognizes that it's not going to just solve a problem, but that it is going to address particular needs in particular places and create little pockets of home likeness in the mostly anonymous.
And then, you know, starting from 1932 on with the New Deal and to a greater extent, bureaucratized care. which does important things, but also as it runs the risk of missing the kind of humanness and the hominess that's needed in a place like this. So that's, that I think is what's special about the Catholic worker movement, especially at the time that it started.
You bring up
Evan Rosa: loneliness, um, in the piece. And of course it's, you know, uh, the key phrase in Dorothy Day's memoir, but, but that hospitality. element kind of responds to a deeply, the sort of, it's not the primary symptom of the great depression. It's this sort of like indirect,
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: right. It's there. It's a kind of long cultural arc and social development that's happening.
And I think it's still with us today in important respects, but the depression is a shock, right. In the same way that the pandemic has been a shock for us. on this question of loneliness. Yeah. And so that's a place where I think Catholic workers, if you're looking for, what does it look like to, like, to take this pilgrimage deeper into things toward the home of God that's coming?
One thing it can look like is Have people in your house fight against loneliness and atomization by inviting people in and recognize that it's going to be messy. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: And yet another way to respond here, and I'm going to shift us to a different person is to not have anyone ever in your house. Julian of Norwich.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's to be totally enclosed in your own cell for a long time. And, and it responds to it in a totally different way, but it's. Just this amazing story. And I think it would be great to hear some of your affection for Julia Norwich to come out.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So many of us know now young people who are important respects.
Children of the Pandemic. Julian was a child of the Black Death, which killed like a quarter or a third of the population of England. And during her childhood, I think she was, I think she was six ish when it first came. And she The plague hit a couple of more times. One, one, one time it was called the child's plague because anybody who'd been old around like long enough and survived had some immunity built up, but it kind of came through and it was just like, Oh, just devastated the young population because they were the only ones who didn't have immunity.
So Julian has seen some stuff and But then she sees something else, which is Jesus, right? Uh, she is on her deathbed as she thinks, and sick with the plague or no, it's not the plague at some other disease. And she's sick for days. She truly believes that she's in the process of dying. A priest holds up a crucifix.
and tells her to take to set her eyes on it. She had been looking up towards God and he's told to look to the crucifix in front of her eyes. And then she sees it begin to bleed. And then she has this lengthy series of what she calls showings, visions where God is Communicating to her through mental images, through kind of vision in front of her face as far as she can tell, and through words.
And sometime after that, she decides to become an anchorite. To be an anchorite was effectively to have your funeral before you died, And to be buried in a cell, a one room cell attached to a church. And so you're kind of dedicated to the life of prayer for the rest of your life. You're never supposed to leave this cell.
And we don't know exactly how Julian's cell worked. It certainly had a window out to the world. And she received visitors, at least at that window. We don't know if they were able to come inside. Another English mystic named Marjorie Kemp tells about going and visiting Julian when Julian must have been like 70 years old.
So after 30 to 40 years in this cell, and Marjorie's having visions and she goes to Julian and says, are these real? Like, how do I know? What do I tell? And Julian kind of gives her a presentation. Council on what it's, what it means to be a visionary and to hear from God. It is amazing. And that we've kind of jumped ahead.
You might think that Being an anchorite, enclosing yourself in a cell, shutting out, is shutting out the world. And it, it is in some ways, but I think what we see in Julian is a kind of enclosure that's subvert the ways that sin creates enclosures. If one of the things that sin does is create these kind of walled off barricades that are impermeable, then what Julian is doing is in the way that she's an anchorite.
It's not necessarily what every anchorite is doing, but for Julian, she's an anchorite as kind of minister to the world. She's kind of cut off a set of worldly cares by shrinking her world down. She's released herself to a kind of care and ministry for all of her fellow Christians. And this is, I think, is a really interesting way to think about possibilities of homemaking in a world out of joint.
It's not the kind of roll up your sleeves engagement of Dorothy Day and Peter Moran, but it's not disengagement either. It's a kind of testament that one doesn't, that one can shrink this created world to this degree and yet still have God and still, because one has God, have all that God loves, which is everything in one's life and as one's concern.
Evan Rosa: There's a kind of interesting oneness theology or that's happening in Julian. But we all be one in love is this, is this quote of hers that you referenced? There's also a fascinating kind of mutual indwelling that looks is happening between God dwelling in us And we dwell in God. Let's pick up on some of the mysticism of Julian.
Um, I wonder if you would take one more stab at thinking, he described this orientation toward the world that God made to be our home and kind of. Shutting oneself, well, no, and closing oneself, shrinking things down in such a way that you might be able to like, get distance from it. What can any of us learn from that?
I mean, besides very comforting messages. Uh, and I think this is what I, personally found so appealing about Julian when I discovered her. Um, um, is there a recommendation there for the average person about how to interact with the sort of disjointedness of the world and how to interact with it in a way that we might get some perspective and it might impact us?
You thought of that?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's a great question. I spend a lot of time thinking about Julian these days. I'm wrestling with this on a regular basis. At some level, she has the kind of theology of a better life then and there that I want to push against, right? She really, she thinks of heaven as up, it seems, and she thinks of that as where we're going to be after we die.
So some of her recommendations, I would find. Not quite right, but in the way she is able to have a kind of world denying theology of a sort while loving the world.
Evan Rosa: Do you think it's almost like just acknowledging The particular calling of the anchoress and the monastic, that person who encloses themselves steps away from something in order to have that, whether it be critical or compassionate distance to be able to, whether it's prayer for, or a kind of wise understanding.
And because clearly the message of the divine showings. comes to our benefit, you know, in an important way, which is not to say that we should all imitate her. It's, or that there's a kind of core recommendation, something practical. It's more of a mindset. It's more of an insight. Yeah. I think the
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: heretic life is always a particular vocation.
That's a kind of clear thing. Julianne doesn't think of herself as writing for fellow anchorites. And that's an interesting thing about her. She thinks about herself as writing for just ordinary Christians, anyone who loves God. So I think the way I might. The way I've thought about Julian and this kind of homemaking work for myself, being very far from an anchorite, is that she gives us a sense of the ways that a really appropriate and faithful answer to kind of massive dislocations, a sense of global out of jointness might be Something that looks and could go wrong as hunkering down, but is a kind of an intentional narrowing of, of certain forms of our kind of daily activity concerns in life.
That opens us up with a kind of. A spiritual vista on the whole. And that, that I think can be true in a kind of ordinary American domestic life, if done right. There might be ways of, of kind of shrinking one's area of practical interaction in that opens up towards a kind of actually really important mode of relating to the world as a whole.
It doesn't mean kind of closing yourself off to everything that's outside so much as saying the simplicity of the anchor cell is liberating. And there may be ways that for those of us who aren't going to go into an anchor cell, we still need to hear the word that a greater simplicity in our lives might be liberating towards actually a wider scope of concern.
Evan Rosa: So you have a third example of, in this case, I think something that's a little bit closer to home, a pun intended, that feels like within contemporary life, is a way that this family, the Russicas in Canada were able to re envision their understanding of the land and place that they occupied and kind of look at it from a different perspective that allows them in their own way to resist the out of joyness of the
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: home.
Yeah. So the out of joyness here is ecological and all the ways that particularly in 20th century industrial agriculture. has ways of disrupting and And as worse forms, just kind of mining the natural world for carbohydrates, protein and fat in ways that leave just kind of unrecognizable from how it was before humans started growing in this way.
And the story of the Ruzikas really basically is farming families inherited some farmland in Canada, wanted to modernize it. went the industrial route, wound up, burnt out themselves and their land was burnt out, and they were in debt and they needed the change. And the change was this adoption of a more integral form of agriculture, where they were treating the land not as a resource, but as a partner, as a kind of community of creatures.
All of which are participating in processes of growth and things like that. And, and so they, and especially the way that Norman Wurzba narrates their story struck me as a real instance of one way that humans today, given the kind of the broken home character of so much of our relation to the non human earth, can go about.
Healing that, can take steps towards reconciliation, can, can find a way of becoming more at home. with a world that greatly exceeds humans and our plans and desires.
Evan Rosa: This is your, I think you're quoting Norman here in describing an approach that they call holistic farm management. They came to see that quote, they did not simply live on the land.
But from it and through it as members of one vast community of life. And they also talk about the flourishing of people, fellow creatures, and land all together. And it's kind of this, I like the way that this points out the need to kind of. See that this is not necessarily like, um, a solution that comes from a sort of like from outside, um, sort of just acts and obliterates and kind of overwhelms and overcome something.
It's actually like emerging from within and tries to accommodate the struggle, uh, for that and acknowledge the complexity of. Belonging together in this, yes, out of joint, but the only world we have. Right,
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: right. And there's a, yeah, there's a way that it, it see, you can't reduce it to a formula. It's because it's because there are just really complicated sets of partnerships involved.
And I think that describes a good home very well. You can't reduce it to a formula and it involves complex. Forms of partnership and anytime we start to kind of break our dwelling down into a neat formula or a kind of Problem that could be solved with the right kind of like technological ingenuity. I think we're starting to go awry and we're starting to lose some of that pilgrimage deeper into things because when things become like variables in your formula then they're textured and complicated reality starts to get washed
Evan Rosa: out.
Yeah. Ryan, this piece is really interesting. I think it's landing on something that each of us have deeply knit into us, which is like trying to understand our place and where we are and understand ourselves as on a journey, a way of life. Trying to become something. We have, each of us have this vision for what we hope to become and what we hope the world becomes.
And I love the way that you're identifying the structure to help people think about that. Thank you for this piece.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Thanks for letting me talk about it, Evan.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a For more information, visit us online at faith. yale. edu, where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources like the very one that we were discussing today that people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to the podcast, welcome, please subscribe, listen on your favorite podcast app.
So you don't miss an episode and to our loyal supporters and faithful listeners, if you haven't signed up for the email list, now's a good time to do it. You go to our website at faith. yale. edu and you get this new resource download. But if you've already done that, you could also share this episode, tell a friend, or you can give us an honest rating and review in Apple podcasts to let us know what you love or give us some feedback about what you'd like to see improve.
Thanks for listening today, friends. We'll be back with more soon.