I come around again and again to many texts - poems, plays, prose extracts, religious tracts and writings and so forth. Each time the revisiting creates a new layer of understanding in some way, even if I have forgotten what once I thought. I have read 'A Pilgrim's Progress' a dozen times, each time seeing something new, perhaps at the expense of forgetting something old.

So it is with Julian of Norwich, an anchoress and theologian from the Middle Ages, whose work, 'Revelations of Divine Love', is a classic. I have a small book of daily readings extracted from the text, curated by folks at the Julian Shrine in Norwich. 'Revelations', as the name suggests, is based upon Julian's 'visions' that she had at age 30, and later reflected upon and wrote down, or dictated to another.

In one of the final chapters of 'Revelations' she wrote ( here modernized),

'In our making we had beginning, but the love in which he made us was in him from without beginning, in which love we have our beginning.'

I have always struggled to understand what she meant because there seems at first glance to be a paradox contained within the thought. But unravelling it is not so hard if we consider God's eternal nature. Our individual existence in the real world begins with creation. God's love, the very essence of his being, existed before creation. It is therefore the source of our being in it.

That is still a little mind blowing, I know. It is hard to deal with eternal time and in this case, it might help to think about the 'eternal present.'