Early in her visions, Julian records that she was sure she’d be overcome by fiends if she shifted her focus from Jesus on the cross in front of us to look up to God the Father in Heaven. She recounts how glad she was that she chose Jesus as her salvation and refused to look away from him. Today she seems to say the same is true of us, in a figural sense; when we lose our attention from Jesus, when our weakness of attention overcomes us, that is where we fall to the fiends, where and when sin is crouching at the door. There’s no strong-arming our way through this, no perfect, fail-safe method to avoid our weakness of attention, it’s just a fact of our mortality. So in this way, our attention and our falling into sin is like mindfulness meditation.
This is inspired by the forty-seventh chapter of Julian of Norwich's long text, Revelations of Divine Love.
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