Julian of Norwich: All Shall Be Well

by Emily Warner Eskelsen

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Not everyone in fourteenth century England closeted themselves into the wall of their nearest cathedral and spent the rest of their lives watching Mass through a peephole, but enough people did that it was pretty competitive, and they had a system worked out for these would-be anchorites. 1 It’s kind of what you chose if your other options weren’t working out and you really really liked God. And Julian of Norwich really really liked God.

This turned out to be a good plan for her, and not just because it was harder to get the plague if you were permanently quarantined. During her time as an anchorite in the cathedral in Norwich, Julian wrote the earliest surviving written work by a woman in the English language, and by doing so became one of the most influential Christian mystics of all time. 2 Today, there are schools and sanctuaries and even bridges named after her. For someone who effectively buried herself alive and may have even erased her own name, 3 this is a pretty astonishing outcome. 

We don’t know much about Julian’s life, except that she was born in 1342 and lived until about 1440, a time of war, plagues, and papal schism. 4 She wrote that she had first asked God for three wishes, or “graces,” when she was a child. First, to bear witness to the passion of Christ; second, to endure an illness serious enough to almost kill her; and third, to experience the triple-wound: the wound of true contrition, the wound of natural compassion, and the wound of willful longing for God. 5 She would get all of her wishes.

When Julian was six, the Black Death swept through and killed over half of the population of her hometown, Norwich, in England. Fifteen years later, it came again and killed her husband and child. Soon after that, the Peasant Rebellion brought a rebel takeover of Norwich and public mass burnings at the stake. 6 Julian must have understood woundedness and known that there was something about the divinity of God that she needed to learn. In 1373, at age thirty, Julian was stricken with a terrible illness, and prepared herself for death. For several days and nights, she lay on the brink of death, and then, in the midst of her pains, she received a remarkable series of sixteen visions.

Over the ensuing decades, Julian marveled over these visions, or “shewings,” while fulfilling her duties of praying and giving counsel to the many people who would come to receive succor from her, through a small opening in the stone wall of her cell. 7 Eventually Julian committed these shewings to paper along with her interpretations and understandings of what she had been shown. While she was not known as an author in her lifetime, these writings later were distributed and then published as the book Revelations of Divine Love.

What made this book so remarkable is the clarity and compassion with which it depicts the theology and personality of Christ. Pope Benedict XVI put it this way:

“Julian of Norwich understood the central message for spiritual life: God is love and it is only if one opens oneself to this love, totally and with total trust, and lets it become one's sole guide in life, that all things are transfigured, true peace and true joy found and one is able to radiate it.” 8

In contrast with the dominant contemporary theology of an angry God who requires suffering for sin, Julian’s God was entirely made of love and utterly incapable of anger: “God is everything that is good; the goodness in everything is God.” 9 She reminds the reader to “Remember: there can be no wrath in God.” 10

Julian’s depiction of divinity is, in addition, astonishingly feminine, especially given her historical context. Julian would refer openly in her writings to Christ as our Mother, using “she/her” pronouns freely and with love. 11 Mirabai Starr tells us that Julian “reveals the feminine fact of the Divine in all its radiance and reminds us to seek God there.” 12 The theologian Richard Rohr wrote that he “would go so far as to say that the reason most religions in the last millenia overdid the notion of God as male is precisely to overcompensate for what was almost too obvious: God is, in essence, like a good mother—so compassionate that there was no need to compete with a Father God—as we see in Julian’s always balanced teachings.” Actually, according to Julian, God transcends gender, Christ’s male body symbolically maternal:  “[t]he human mother can tenderly lay the child on her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us directly into her own tender breast through her sweet broken-open side.” 13

In juxtaposition to the utterly nonjudgmental and “friendly” love that characterizes Julian’s God, her visions wallow in the gore and suffering of the crucifixion. She describes wounds from the crown of thorns in horrifying detail, and bleeding “so profuse that it seemed to me that, if this had been happening in the physical world rather than in a vision, the blood would have soaked my bed and overflowed onto the floor, splashing up the sides of the walls.” 14 Julian marries these images to the love of Christ, allowing us to experience, through her visions, the sufferings of Christ, and to thereby understand the depth of Christ’s love for us and the sweetness of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. Perhaps it is the contrast between the suffering discussed so extensively in her writings and the overwhelming love of God she describes so beautifully that resonates with the millions who have read—and loved—her book. That contrast between earthly suffering and heavenly love is so often the force that drives seekers of faith so persistently, and the distance between them measures the depth of God’s love and power to save.

The visions and Julian’s explanations for what she was seeing were varied and extensive, comprising 87 distinct chapters in her book and covering a wide range of theological topics that are studied, written about, and debated throughout the world. At the end of her writings, however, Julian poses one simple question to the Holy One: What is meant by all this? “Would you like to know?” she is answered.

“Know it well: love was his meaning. Who revealed this to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why did he reveal it to you? For love. Stay with this and you will know more of the same. You will never know anything but love, without end.” 15

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Footnotes

1 Christina Stern, “Sealed in, yet Soaring,” Commonweal Magazine, published March 7, 2017,  https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/sealed-yet-soaring.

2 Therese Elaine Novotny, "Julian of Norwich: Voicing the Vernacular" (PhD diss., Marquette University, 2015), e-Publications@Marquette (Paper 524), https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/524/.

3 “Julian” is so called because she lived in St Julian's Church. Her given name is lost to history; Michael Gore, “Sin Will Be No Shame: Julian of Norwich’s Theology of Sin,” 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20060227033052/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3885/is_200010/ai_n8923156.

4  “General Audience of 1st December 2010: Julian of Norwich | BENEDICT XVI,” Libreria Editrice Vaticana, published December 1, 2010, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20101201.html.

5  Mirabai Starr, Julian of Norwich: The Showings: Uncovering the Face of the Feminine in Revelations of Divine Love (Hampton Roads Publishing, 2022).

6 Gore, “Spiritual Life.”

7 Karen Murdarasi, “Julian of Norwich: Everything You Need to Know About the Medieval Mystic,” Premier Christianity, February 1, 2023, https://www.premierchristianity.com/history/julian-of-norwich-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-medieval-mystic/1733.article.

8  “General Audience.”

9 Starr, Julian of Norwich, 21.

10 Starr, Julian of Norwich, 34.

11 Starr, Julian of Norwich, 167

12 Starr, Julian of Norwich, xxi.

13 Starr, Julian of Norwich, 166.

14 Starr, Julian of Norwich, 32.

15 Starr, Julian of Norwich, x-xi.