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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 Though I generally share this positive assessment of Julian's development of the "motherhood of God" theme, there is often an undercurrent in my reading that I want to surface and examine. On the face of it, Julian's symbolization of God as mother seems only positive since it highlights themes of life, birth and nurturance, counters the relentlessly male configurations of the divine in Christian tradition and potentially offers a model of gender-inclusive symbolization that is sensitive to both tradition and experience. At the same time, however, Julian's use of the maternal seems susceptible to conventional, sentimentalized interpretations of maternity, interpretations that draw on and reinforce essentialist constructions of maternal practices and roles.8 The [End Page 19] difficulty is, I suggest, not with Julian's theology per se but rather with the multivalent, emotionally loaded and ambiguous character of the maternal symbol itself and the ways in which we as readers inevitably bring our own meanings to the text. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that, until recently, maternity—as practice or symbol—has not been considered a serious object of study and consequently has received little investigation in the social sciences let alone in theology. In Clarrisa Atkinson's words, motherhood has been "too thoroughly identified with the private sphere and with the 'changeless' biological aspects of the human condition" and therefore "not perceived as an institution shaped by culture and subject to history."9 Christianity has of course mirrored and reinforced these essentialist, ahistorical constructions of maternity. In doing so, it has developed a conflicting yet powerful symbolization that succeeds in belittling and idealizing maternity at the same time.10 Given the ambiguity of this symbol, I struggle to find ways of reading the maternal in Julian that are conducive to taking maternity seriously as a source of theological reflection and symbolization, readings that, on the one hand, deflect sentimentalized, essentialist constructions of maternity and, on the other, disclose the symbol's profound potentialities. One significant source for such readings can be found in feminist re-appropriations of the maternal, and in particular, in the articulations of maternity on the part of mothers themselves. In what follows, I propose a number of critical points drawn from these sources and bring them to bear on key passages in Julian's text. These critical points, by no means comprehensive, can be summarized as follows: emphasizing the socially constructed character of maternity as practice...
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