“Though Julian learned from the church and saw it as her mother, she also came to want something more, something ‘beyond the common use of prayer.’ In this way, she was not an ordinary child, and as her faith formed, it contained a seed of longing for a closer vision, a deeper understanding, only — she later wrote — if it was within God’s will. During her youth, Julian developed what she called in her writings ‘three desires.’ These desires are strange to modern understanding, but they would not have been extraordinary in her own day when life often centered around devotion to the church and ordinary piety contained hints of the mystical.”

“Her first desire was to have a ‘minde’ of Christ’s passion — a sensual recollection of what it would have been like to be with Christ while he suffered on the cross. The second desire was a ‘bodily sickness’ in which she would draw as close as possible to death’s door without passing through it. The third desire was perhaps the most sophisticated of the three. She desired three ‘wounds,’ an idea that she picked up from hearing the story of St. Cecilia in church. She called the three wounds ‘contrition, compassion, and longing for God'”  (Amy Frykholm, Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography, 8-9).

Frykholm’s endnote explaining “minde” from the second chapter of A Revelation of Love: “Translators have translated minde as recollection or memory, but we also need to include mindfulness and feeling in our understanding of the word’s meaning” (125).