CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT – The woman who told us: 'Without love we cannot live'
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
I am familiar with the famous quotation from Julian of Norwich “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” It’s from her Revelations of Divine Love, probably the first book ever written by a woman in English.
But I didn’t know much about her until reading Claire Gilbert’s new novel I, Julian which, based on the scant evidence available, imaginatively recreates her life. Julian lived through the outbreak of bubonic plague which devastated England in 1349, killing around 50 per cent of the population, and its return in 1361 when 20 per cent died. In the novel she loses her beloved husband and infant daughter.
She experiences the social upheavals which followed the plague, and the challenges to “Holy Church” by early Protestants. During a serious illness in 1373 she has the series of visions she later reflects on and writes about.
Despite these devastations and sorrows, and ecclesiastical talk about the plague as the judgement of an angry God, Julian remained convinced of the love of God she had seen in her visions – love for her, and for all humanity.
She became an “anchoress”, confined to a small cell attached to a Norwich church, devoting herself to prayer and meditation, offering counsel to those who came to her window facing the street – and secretly writing the Revelations.
“In this love he has done all his works,” she wrote of God’s love. “In this love we have our beginning.” She tells us that “our life is all grounded and rooted in love, and without love we cannot live.”
This is Julian’s fundamental message from her century of crises to ours. We are loved by the God who holds the whole cosmos tenderly in the divine palm. Humanity is God’s “heavenly treasure on earth.” We are loved! We may not always feel God’s love, but God is never absent. It’s simply, says Julian, that we have forgotten how to look at our loving Lord who is very close to us “and in whom is all comfort.”
Julian’s “All shall be well…” springs from her understanding that in the end, through the death of Christ all sin and brokenness and alienation will be healed, God’s creation united in love, humanity brought home to God.
The Christians who most encourage me are not those who come with many words and much theology, but those who rest gently in the divine love for them, and welcome me quietly and affirmingly as another of Mother God’s beloveds. Those who came in distress to Julian’s window received the answers they sought deep within them, not through any words of hers, but whispered by the love of God which reached them through her.
