On Being Annoying

Lessons from the life of Margery Kempe, God's Most Annoying Soldier.

Nov 20, 2023

Margery Kempe - World History Encyclopedia

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I’ve been reading about Margery Kempe, a medieval Christian Mystic widely credited with writing the first autobiography in the English language. Although her book has apparently been very useful for researchers looking to understand what life was like for your average, everyday gal in the middle ages, Midge Kempe was anything but average. For one thing, she was pretty well off financially. For another, she was unusually devout, and went on a huge number of religious pilgrimages.

But my interest today is less in what she herself accomplished and more on the many, many records we have of people who met Kempe in life and how they felt about her. Because, apparently, people who met Kempe found her to be unique in at least one particular regard: Margery Kempe was insanely annoying.

A little bit of research into Kempe’s life and it’s not hard to see why she grated people’s nerves. She was a homebrewer (strike one), loudly and proudly sexually abstinent despite bearing fourteen children (strike two) and, like I said, wrote an autobiography (strike three). That would all be irritating on its own, but we haven’t hit on Kempe’s defining trait. Following a severe illness in which she had visions of Jesus, Mary, God and a whole host of other religious figures, Margery decided to express her piety by weeping and wailing in public all day, every day.

This is not an exaggeration. Margery, apparently, never shut up. To be around her was to be around a woman who constantly blubbered about how much she loved God and how sorry she was for her sins. She did this during her many pilgrimages, to the point where one group tried to bully her into silence by stealing her things and another seemed to have just left her behind altogether, having grown absolutely sick of her. She went to spend a few days with no less a spiritual luminary than Julian of Norwich, who basically told Margery that her heart was in the right place but she needed to take it down a few notches, asking her to only indulge in her piety according to "the profit to her fellow Christians."

Julian of Norwich wasn’t the only one to ask Margery to back off. She was asked to tone it down by Jesus Christ of Nazareth, according to Marge’s own account. Kempe wrote that she saw Jesus in a vision, who assured her that he had already forgiven her sins and that maybe she could dial it down to “pray[ing] the rosary only until six o'clock; to be still and speak to him in thought” instead of out loud. (It’s giving this old SNL sketch).

Poor Margery. Hard to imagine a worse legacy than “man, that lady was annoying.” It touches a nerve. We’ve all misread a few social cues — realized much too late that we’d been in a situation where we were being too loud or too familiar or too something that probably led others to find us annoying. Some people, thusly burned, get a little better at navigating such waters. But probably none of us are as good at it as we think we are.

This happens a lot with a certain kind of Christian who’ve had enough run-ins to be very anxious about beating the “annoying” accusations. We assure others that we’re not “that kind of Christian” or whisper condescendingly about someone else who is “very Christian,” setting ourselves up as the ideal barometer for just how “Christian” a person should be. Sometimes this is a good thing, such as when you’re establishing that you’re not the kind of Christian who, say, thinks all trans people are mentally ill.

But sometimes we just want to establish to others and ourselves that we’re not the kind of Christian who is very cringe about it — Bible verse tattoos, paintings of Jesus playing soccer with kids, that sort of thing. We are basically doing what we can to communicate that we are Christian But Not In An Annoying Way.

I have a sneaking suspicion that underneath our desire to be Christian But Not In An Annoying Way is a little bit of shame — a sense that maybe those Very Christian Christians are doing something right. That seems to be at least part of the deal for Margery, who in addition to being annoying, was also very brave. She was tried as a heretic for the crime of preaching and quoting Scripture, which women were forbidden from doing. She beat the rap by successfully arguing that there was a difference between preaching and just talking publicly about all God had done for her. They let her off with a warning. Some things never change.

This happened several times — Margery getting detained as a heretic and then barely escaping. At least once, her escape was literal: Authorities in Canterbury were determined to burn her at the stake as a heretic, but she was rescued by two men who were so handsome she seemed to think they must have been angels. Maybe they were! You don’t know. You weren’t there. If God’s eye is on the sparrow, then surely it is also on His Most Annoying Soldiers.

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In her essay Envy and Exemplarity in The Book of Margery Kempe, Jessica Rosenfeld argues that much of the enmity that Margery’s neighbors felt towards her was actually jealousy. They felt diminished by her level of spiritual devotion. Maybe they were even envious of it. And this manifested as annoyance. Again, some things never change.

This doesn’t mean any of us should start spending all day wailing in the streets about our love for God. But I do think there is a lesson here about examining our annoyances, and second guessing the true nature of them. We are all more annoying than we think. The least we can do is be gracious to each other about it.

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