When I was a child, I was taught that God is a tyrannical man in the sky who surveils our every thought, word, and deed, and judges us mercilessly when we succumb to the demonic forces that are everywhere present in the world—even in the music I listened to and the television shows I watched. I was taught that this God loves me, though I saw little evidence of this, unless love is conflated with a predilection for condemnation and abandoning sinners and nonbelievers to unspeakably cruel punishments in a fiery hell. I was also taught that this God will destroy the world soon, and only some will be saved. Of course, as a young adoptee, I felt a deep-down assurance that I could not possibly belong to this inner circle of God’s elect. How could I, when even my own mother didn’t want me?

I don’t know if I ever really believed this terrifying picture of God and the human condition, except in the choiceless way that children absorb what the adults in their lives communicate to them is true. Once I was old enough to critically reflect on these God-images, however, I dismissed them, tossing them into the same dustbin of childhood fancies as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. With some fear and trembling, I even stopped saying my nightly prayers. Still, in the dim recesses of my mind, this tyrant-God and his ever-present threat of abandonment has continued to haunt me, oftentimes merging with the traumatic impacts of relinquishment and adoption.

For instance, with the help of an intuitive spiritual director, I recently uncovered the lingering residue of belief that God has abandoned me to my own hopelessly insufficient resources in a capricious and uncaring universe, where everything and everyone I know and depend upon can be taken from me at any moment. This abandoning God-image still holds sway whenever I allow the ruptures I endured through relinquishment and adoption to define who I am. Of course, I am not talking about what I consciously believe and understand now as an adult. Rather, I am referring to the body memory of what I endured as an infant, and how this body memory—faithfully imprinted upon my nervous system and unconsciously shaping my perceptions and reactions to this day—coalesced in childhood into beliefs about who I am and what the world is. Unfortunately, it was during this same time period, when I was too young to adequately understand what happened to me and why—and most tragically, to understand that I was not to blame—that I also received my earliest religious formation. God-the-abandoner and mother-the-abandoner fused into a single unshakable impression, rooted in traumatic body memory, that I must be so “wrong” somehow that no one could possibly want me or care enough to help me. Not even God.

For years, this unholy tangle of primal loss and toxic religion compelled me to distance myself as far as possible from Christian faith. But it did not extinguish my spiritual hunger. Eventually, as a young adult, I found my way to a Zen Buddhist community, where I was introduced to the practice of meditation and to a radically different approach to religion. For one, I felt greatly relieved when, instead of being told what to believe, I was taught how to sit in a way that fostered alertness and the capacity to sustain a meditative posture for extended periods of time. Instead of learning doctrine, I was taught how to notice my thoughts without following them, and how to pay attention to my breath and body sensations—an entirely new terrain. Instead of passively receiving absolute truth from an external authority, whether through a particular interpretation of scripture or otherwise, I was given resources and guidance within a supportive community to embark upon a journey of personal discovery. I learned to lean into silence and solitude in a way that felt profoundly affirming and liberating. And I learned through experience that, whatever we mean by “God” must somehow refer to that depth dimension within us whose allure I felt in the yearning of my heart for a wholeness and homecoming beyond anything that history, trauma, or circumstance could touch. From this new vantage point, I became interested in the great spiritual writers of Christianity.

One day during this time, while perusing the “Christianity” section in a bookstore in Northampton, Massachusetts, I happened upon a book that grabbed my attention, Showings of Love, by Julian of Norwich[1]. I knew little about her, other than that she was a fourteenth century Englishwoman who wrote about a series of visions of Christ and the Trinity that she received during a near-death experience. Curious, I purchased the book.

On my first reading, I found her difficult to digest. Medieval mystical literature wasn’t exactly a genre I felt at ease with yet. Even so, I experienced a strong, compelling visceral response as I read, as if her words brought something to life deep inside my belly. I read the book again and found myself absorbed in an intuition that her words illuminated a truth that my mind wasn’t yet ready to grasp. I kept reading until I felt assured that something of God was reaching me through her.

In part, my response to Julian of Norwich can be explained on a simple psychophysiological level. Consider how you feel in the presence of someone you trust deeply. This trust isn’t merely an intellectual conclusion that you came to about this person but something you know and feel in your body. You feel safe. You relax. You are in touch with more of you and more of life because of this person. Simply put, you soften, open, and come alive. In contrast, when you are in the presence of someone you do not trust, or if you believe in an angry, retributive, violent God such as I was taught as a child, you inevitably constrict out of fear in order to keep yourself safe. You become less alive and less in touch with yourself and other people. If this is prolonged, you come to identify with the fear, repression, and self-protective isolation that this person or image of God activates in you, and this in turn informs how you see the world. You live, but you are only partially alive.

What Julian of Norwich did for me was make God trustworthy.

With remarkable insight, Julian understood how we tend to project our own fears, bitterness, judgments, and lust for revenge onto God, as she confidently insisted that there is neither wrath nor anger in God, nor can there be. She wrote of Christ as a tender mother who feeds us with her own body, who joyfully takes upon herself our suffering and transforms it into endless bliss, and who is so united to us in mercy and love that we can never be separated. For 20 years she wrestled with what she experienced in her visions in light of scripture and the works of theologians who preceded her, and concluded, as she had heard in her visions, that ultimately, “All will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing shall be well”—this in spite of the fact that she lived through three waves of the bubonic plague, including one that killed more than half the population of her city within a year when she was a child.

I also believe that what I experienced through Julian of Norwich can be described as a recognition event, awakening me to a living hope in the Motherhood that is deeper than biology, deeper even than the cycles of birth and death. What came alive in my body when I read her words were those parts of me that I had to leave behind in order to survive relinquishment and adapt to genetic strangers—parts that only a mother can fully know and cherish, and in whose presence these exiled parts feel safe, loved, and welcome. In this way, Julian of Norwich enabled me to return to a very different kind of Christian faith than what I learned as a child, one that respects my life experience, agency, and critical faculties as an adult, and fosters ever greater aliveness and freedom to live into God’s inexhaustible fecundity.

As I continue to address the traumatic impacts of relinquishment and adoption, and the image of an abandoning God entangled with those impacts, I do so today with the assurance that I have nothing to fear. I have not been abandoned. I trust in God who incarnates in order to draw close and embrace our suffering and alienation in total solidarity—God who seeks to be born anew in you and in me this Christmas.