Raindrops flecked the windows beside my booth at Nighthawks Diner and Bar. I ordered the walleye and an old-fashioned. Petunias, purple and blousy, bloomed in flower boxes on the windowsills. I wrote a few lines in my journal and relished the spice and citrus of the cocktail, the Midwestern savor of my dinner. Minneapolis was new to me.
I wondered how far from where I sat enjoying dinner and a drink George Floyd had been murdered by Derek Chauvin. In Tucson, Arizona, where I live, Chauvin is serving a twenty-two-and-a-half-year sentence in a federal prison.
I glanced at the watch I wear on my left wrist alongside a silver bangle bearing the famous words composed by the fourteenth-century medieval mystic theologian Julian of Norwich: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.I had come to Minnesota to attend a retreat where I intended to write reflections on Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love.
After dinner, I walked back to the rented Kia Soul I’d parked on the street around the corner. Through the driver’s side window, I saw a puzzling sight: a piece of the car’s interior—an armrest?—lay diagonally across the front passenger seat. I opened the car door and took in the situation. Shards of tinted glass glinted like obsidian all over the back seat. The steering column looked disemboweled. The ignition cylinder dangled from multicolored wires.
If I see a Kia then I’m takin your shit. So goes the first line of “Shake yo Nay Nay” by Milwaukee-based rappers Shawn P and Marry Mac. Lucky for me, I’d stashed my shit at the Airbnb before going out for dinner. I carried insurance, and I didn’t own the Kia. The evening ahead, though, was mine to manage.
Picture a middle-aged Presbyterian pastor on her phone, pacing a sidewalk as light rain and dusk descend on the Twin Cities. Picture a customer service representative named Chelsea wearing a headset at a noisy phone bank where rows of agents all do the same thankless job. I ask Chelsea if she’s local. “I am in the Caribbean, ma’am,” she tells me.
Chelsea says it may take four to six hours for a tow truck to arrive. She says, “Stay safe.” She says, “Stay with the vehicle, ma’am, or you may be liable.”
We go back and forth, Chelsea and me. She asks me question after yes-or-no question, her voice uninflected, whereas my vocal cords go taut. I feel them fray at the edges like desiccated rubber bands on the brink of snapping. Xxxx. Chelsea persists with the questioning. She falters at times, and when she does, she starts the question over from the beginning.
A voice I scarcely recognize pleads:“Can you just set aside the script and talk to me like we’re both human? You ask me if I’m safe—I don’t know if I’m safe. I’m stranded on the street, and it’s getting dark. I know that. I’m asking you to send me another rental car. I’m asking you to help me.”
“Ma’am, I am trying to help you. I am not authorized to send another vehicle. I am speaking in a neutral tone because I am trying to keep myself from crying. Does the vehicle have any flat tires, ma’am?”
Chelsea and I are not at liberty to discuss our respective struggles. Our conversation may be monitored or recorded for quality control purposes. All four of the vehicle’s tires appear to be properly inflated.
I return to Nighthawks and explain my predicament to the server who delivered fried fish and whiskey to my table when the evening was young and full of promise. Her eyes brim with mercy. She welcomes me to sit in the same booth as before. She sets a glass of water before me.
Budget Rental Car sends me a ten-dollar Uber voucher via the app. I surmise I’m at least twenty bucks away from the airport where I rented the now-undrivable Kia Soul. Nobody warned me about the Kia Boyz, underage thieves who post videos on YouTube with titles like “I Stole a Kia With a TikTok Hack.” Kia Boyz jam a USB plug into a small knob on the underside of an ignition cylinder, crank it, and up starts the car. They make off with Kias and Hyundais by the thousands in the United States, especially in Midwestern cities. If the cars have not been fitted with antitheft software, which my rental apparently was, Kia Boyz take them for joyrides that occasionally end in somebody’s death. As a rule, Kia Boyz are in it for the fun, not the car parts. They’re not professionals.
My phone rings. A man who calls himself Lynch Wrecker says he’s five minutes away. I abandon the untouched glass of water and return to the violated car. Soon, a tow truck drives up.
“So, they got you, too,” Lynch Wrecker intones. He winches the Kia onto the flatbed. I take a picture of the car, hoisted and lurid in the glow of the truck’s safety lights. Lynch Wrecker is a courteous man and clearly competent. He says it’s no problem to take me to the Airbnb where I suddenly don’t want to sleep. It’s homey and cute, but who are these people I’m renting a room from? What are we doing, all of us on these apps? I want only to grab my bags and take refuge in an airport hotel, someplace nondescript with fire doors and clearly marked exits.
The grimy interior of the tow truck’s cab smells of a freshly smoked cigarette. I quit thirty-seven years ago, but I contemplate bumming a smoke. It occurs to me to be scared, riding beside Lynch Wrecker. The charge on my phone has dwindled into single digits.
I find I’m the opposite of scared.
What comforted me most in the vision, writes Julian of Norwich, was that our God and Lord, who is so holy and awe-inspiring, is also so familiar and courteous. And this was what gave me most happiness and the strongest sense of spiritual safety. Julian writes these words in Revelations of Divine Love, as shetells of her deathbed encounters, mystical yet real, personal yet universal, with the suffering, world-saving Christ, as she meets the crucified Savior whose compassion upholds creation. She finds him to be, as her Middle English language puts it, homely.
Bleeding on his cross, copiously bleeding, Jesus is somehow courteous. He’s familiar, homely, at home in his passion and death, loving and lovely as he dies. Julian sees and hears Jesus. He shows and tells her God is limitless love. She survives near death to write her revelations for the rest of us, for the rest of her life. She tells us—you and Chelsea and me; she tells Marry Mac and Shawn P and the other Kia Boyz; she tells the merciful server at Nighthawks and the Airbnb host who fully refunded my money; she tells Floyd; she tells Chauvin; she tells John Turczak, the inmate who stabbed Chauvin twenty-two times on Black Friday in the law library of the Federal Correction Institution in Tucson—Julian tells everyone, without exception, that God is love, and God will vouchsafe us all home. If home is too long and late a flight away tonight, God, disguised as Lynch Wrecker, will give us a lift and haul away our ruined Soul.
Julian’s fourteenth-century eyes turn to eternity, which she finds is always unfurling now. God knows—we do not know—Julian’s true name. An unlettered creature, she calls herself. Nevertheless, she letters a gospel, a book of revelation. She survives the black plague and transcends her deathbed only to die to the world to live to the Lord. Enclosed in the brick anchor-hold of an urban parish church, Julian writes of the dying, living, life-giving Christ. She calls Jesus Christ our true mother.
Jesus, our true mother, sees us. She sees Floyd pinned to the ground in front of Cup Foods. She sees him dying of the white plague and hears him crying for his mother. She answers. Floyd’s true mother gathers him up and suckles her son at her salvific breast. Thus Jesus Christ who does good for evil is our true mother, Julian writes. We have our being from him where the ground of motherhood begins.
Just before Juneteenth, I visited the memorial shrine at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue outside of Unity Foods, formerly Cup Foods, where Floyd died under Chauvin’s crushing knee. PROTECT OUR PEOPLE, hand-painted on a concrete barricade at the intersection now known officially as George Perry Floyd Square, is a prayer as much as a call for police reform. Teddy bears and vases of artificial flowers—devotional objects left there by grieving protestors—appear faded and worn from four years of exposure to sun, wind, and rain. Graffitists have claimed the surrounding walls and sidewalks: MY CRIES ARE 4 HUMANITY. WHERE THERE’S PEOPLE THERE’S POWER. Living, blooming potted plants, candles, and velvet ropes surrounding a mural of Floyd’s face on the asphalt appear to be regularly, lovingly maintained. A poem on a poster by a writer identified as Miss Mari begins, “For every black man and woman / who called out to their mothers / because heaven was / approaching faster than the / paramedics.” Near the poem, another sign is wired to a streetlight post. Hand-lettered words underscored by painted flowers implore, Listen To The Mothers.
When Julian of Norwich listened to our dear mother Jesus, who familiarly lead[s] us into his blessed breast through his sweet open side, she heard him say, Look how I love you. As Julian sees it, when our gracious Mother has brought human beings ultimately into God’s presence, then we shall really understand what he means in those sweet words where he says, “All shall be well, and you shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well.”
The location of Floyd’s murder may seem a terribly unlikely place to witness the power of Julian’s mother-Christ visions. But the anchoress of Norwich recognized truth when it was revealed to her. Six hundred fifty years on, her vision’s veracity holds and finds urgent prophetic and public expression here. What Jesus promised Julian, I saw for myself among memorial offerings and scrawled pleas for resistance and revolution. In the hands of people gathered on the just side of history, even this site of an infamous racist homicide becomes a gallery of remembrance, a garden of resistance, a testament that by God, even hell must be made well.