A Lenten book club
February 22 – April 2026 (Lent through Eastertide)
For Lent 2026 the club put two Christian witnesses in conversation: Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century anchoress whose visions during a near-fatal illness became Revelations of Divine Love, and Thomas Merton, the 20th-century Trappist monk whose New Seeds of Contemplation explores how God frees us from the false self we construct to secure ourselves. Ellis framed Lent not as self-improvement but as "the gradual relinquishing of the illusion that we can sustain ourselves apart from God." Any edition worked: a free older translation of Julian was shared, and both books are widely available in modern editions. As always, it was a no-commitment club — come whether or not you have read the material.
Weeks with no meeting:
The series opened with the idea that most of us spend our lives trying to build a self strong enough to hold us together — curating identities and managing impressions — and that sooner or later it fails. The Christian tradition sees that failure not as the end of the spiritual life but its beginning.
Julian of Norwich received a series of visions during a near-fatal illness. Her visions do not offer escape from suffering; they reveal that divine love is more fundamental than fear, sin, or death. Thomas Merton argues that much human suffering comes from the false self, and that the spiritual life begins not when we perfect that identity but when we are freed from it and awaken to the life we already have in Christ.
These books are not instruction manuals for mystical experiences; they are testimonies to what happens when God reshapes the human heart through grace. No prior experience with mystical theology was needed — and no certainty either.
Because the club had reconvened on short notice, Ellis assumed few had read ahead and gave an introduction to Christian mysticism.
Someone whom the community agrees, based on their witness, has been gifted a special closeness with God often called "union with God." It often comes in altered states — Julian through terrible illness, Merton through pure contemplation, others through fasting or exertion. Mystics aren’t "better" than anyone else; union with God is one gift among the many God gives.
Becoming mystics is not our goal. The purpose is to learn more about God and deepen our relationship with Him by reading brothers and sisters in Christ who received that gift. Two guardrails: all mystical experience is subservient to scripture, and it is tested by the beloved community.
Spiritual things are objectively real and independent of our minds, not just names for human tendencies. Our true selves are contained in God; the material world is beloved but is not our home, and the two worlds interact — most profoundly in God becoming human in Jesus. Great theologians such as Augustine, Calvin, and Barth hold to spiritual realism, reaching it through scripture rather than personal experience.
They work opposite ends of the paradigm: Julian is about "up there," the love of God that engulfs us; Merton is about what’s going on "down here." Both matter in Lent, and they meet at Easter. Ellis noted that, unlike the New Testament study, this is a topic where everyone gets to learn from one another.
Missing: The reading was announced for "next Sunday" in the first wrap-up email, but there is no pregame material and no wrap-up for this meeting. The emails don't confirm it took place, though the series continued the following week.
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Missing: Date inferred: a short note confirmed the meeting was on, and the summary arrived late in an email Ellis wrote the following week but forgot to send. The reading assignment for this week was never stated (presumably the chapters between the Week 2 and Week 4 assignments). No pregame material.
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The group started out on the relationship between prayer and contemplation. Ellis suggested that contemplation is a subset of prayer in which God leads a person into their inmost self and, at the same time, into the depths of God. Not everyone agreed — and that was totally fine.
From Julian: Christ showed her the depth of His love, saying that if it were necessary (which it is not), He would suffer and die on the cross for us again — and do it with great joy. That led to the paradox not of joy in suffering but joy despite suffering, echoing Paul in 2 Corinthians: "sorrowful, yet always rejoicing."
From Merton: a conversation about solitude in community, which is the complete opposite of being alone in a crowd. It’s one example of Merton pointing to the usual way we live and suggesting that, although it looks right, it’s all wrong — a path whose destination is desolation. He gently urges us to stay on the true way, though he never says how, because that is God’s job.
Ellis also observed that the conversation ranged all over the texts: these writers interweave their themes and intersect with one another so much that "an organized conversation would completely betray the purpose."
The theme for the week was "Purification, Renunciation, and Trust." Ellis expected the group to range across the texts again, since Julian and Merton weave their themes together in surprising ways.
Ellis wrote that he was already deep into the week’s reading and that Merton’s treatment of faith had really made him think. As always, everyone was welcome whether or not they had read the material.
Julian famously writes that "sin is behovely" — necessary or useful. In Ellis’s "elevator theology": we begin our existence in God on the first floor; born into a world of sin, we ride down to the basement; and when we die we don’t just return to the first floor — we go all the way to the roof. Without sin and the experience of God’s amazing love, we could never reach that understanding of how awesome God is. Julian’s answer to the old philosophical question of whether experience adds to knowledge is yes: the only way to fully know God’s goodness is through sin, mercy, and grace.
In many ways the center of gravity of the book. The servant and master love each other; eager to do the master’s task, the servant falls into a pit. Does the master rescue him? No — the master rejoices because he knows his plan to rescue the servant. For Julian, Christ is not the rescuing God but the God who dwells with us in the pit. Having lived through the plague, she refuses to sugar-coat the Gospel.
In a follow-up, Ellis flagged the passages where Julian and Merton "walk in lockstep." Merton’s false self is the ego and its personas — an illusion kept alive only by our compulsive maintenance; he refuses to define the true self except that it is found in God through contemplation. Julian (from Chapter 45) speaks of our Nature-Substance, hidden in and protected by God, which cannot sin and needs no redemption, and our Sense-Soul, who we are in the world. The Sense-Soul is not false and not "the flesh"; it is part of God’s plan, but its problem is ignorance, which separates it from God. Crucially, God loves the Sense-Soul as much as the Nature-Substance, and will redeem it.
Missing: No wrap-up: Ellis wrote afterward that he had lost his notes from this meeting and only remembered that it was great.
The theme for the week was "Death of the False Self and Emergence of the True Self" — picking up directly from the previous week’s passages where Julian and Merton line up most closely.
Notice where the two writers agree and where Julian nuances the dynamic differently from Merton.
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Missing: Ellis's Easter-eve email implies a meeting on Easter night ("If I don't see you tomorrow night, Happy Easter!"), but he had lost the reading plan, so the assignment is unknown, and there is no wrap-up confirming the meeting or what was discussed.
On Holy Saturday, Ellis sent a reflection on where Julian’s visions "may not have gone far enough."
If we believe that Jesus paid the price for our sins, then whatever we imagine the fate of those unreconciled with God to be, that is what Jesus must have endured — and that, Ellis argued, is what happened on Holy Saturday. Even if we don’t read the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16) literally — and Ellis thinks a literal reading misses the point of parables — most of us imagine something very bad.
He questioned two common ideas: that the cross was the worst physical pain imaginable, and the "Harrowing of Hell" picture (drawn from 1 Peter’s preaching to "the spirits in prison") of Jesus preaching to the dead and breaking down the gates of Hades. Preaching and breaking gates sound more like a reward than a punishment.
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Missing: Not confirmed. Ellis wrote that both books should be finished "by a week from Easter Sunday," and the skipped March 15 week had pushed the series one week past Easter, so a closing session on this date was planned. No email confirms that it took place, and there is no reading or summary. The next email (May 2) said there would be no book club for a while.
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