Julian of Norwich
Julian lived in fourteenth-century England, in a world marked by plagues, famine, and upheaval. Three waves of the Black Death had already swept through the land by the time she reached her thirties. Life was uncertain, and fear pressed on every side. Yet from that world of suffering came one of the clearest voices of divine tenderness we have ever heard.
Julian became an anchoress—choosing to live enclosed in a small cell attached to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich. From that hidden space she gave her life to prayer and silence, listening for God. There, during a near-death illness, she received sixteen visions of Christ that she called “showings.” She survived the illness and spent decades meditating on what she had seen, shaping them into what became the first book in English written by a woman.
A God Who Longs to Be Known
Julian’s visions are filled with the sense that God is not distant, but utterly near—longing to be known and to give rest to weary souls. She once confessed that our unrest comes from seeking comfort in things too small to hold us:
“This is the reason why our hearts and souls are not at perfect ease. We seek refuge in small things, but cannot find comfort there. We do not recognize our God who is all-powerful, all-wise, and all-good. He is our only true rest. And he wishes to be known. He wants us to rest in him. He is all that is, and he knows that anything less is not enough for us. This is why no soul can find peace until it empties itself of all forms. Only when the soul has willingly become nothing, out for love of him who is everything, can it find true rest.”
Those words resonate like balm for our age of distraction. We chase after comforts and achievements, yet Julian insists that peace comes only when we release our clutching and fall back into the embrace of the One who already holds us.
Seeing and Being Seen
For Julian, God’s presence was not occasional or far-off. It was constant, protective, and deeply intimate. She wrote:
“Not only is God everywhere, but he keeps us safe and protected from harm wherever we are. When we see God, we have more strength and comfort than we can possibly describe with the language of this world. We believe that we hardly see God at all, but what he desires is for us to believe that we see him continuously. It is through this belief that we receive his grace. He wishes to be seen and to be sought. He wants us to yearn for him and to trust in him.”
There is such gentleness in this vision: not a God who demands, but one who longs to be sought, who wants us to notice His gaze upon us so that we may live strengthened and consoled.
The Nothingness of Sin
Perhaps Julian’s most daring insight was her vision of sin. At a time when guilt dominated the religious imagination, she saw with utter clarity that sin is not substance at all:
“This revelation of love compelled me to conclude that all that is done is well done, for our sweet Lord is the Doer. At this time, I was not shown the work of creatures, but only the work of the Creator. What I saw was that he is the midpoint of all, and he does everything and is incapable of sin. This led me to believe that sin is no thing. Nowhere in all that was revealed to me did I see a trace of sin. And so I stopped looking for it and moved on, placing myself in God's hand, allowing him to show me what he wanted me to see.”
For Julian, sin was not an eternal stain but an illusion, a missing of the mark. Its only reality is the pain it causes, and even that pain can be used to awaken us to love. She was clear: God is incapable of wrath. Wrath belongs only to human fear and separation. When we fall, the truly humble thing is not to wallow in guilt, but to rise quickly and run back into the arms of Love.
The Ground of Love
Julian’s revelations return again and again to the truth that love is our origin, our protection, our very ground of being.
“Peace and love are always living and working within us, but we are not always in peace and love. Our Beloved wants us to realize that his love is the ground of our whole life. He is our everlasting protector, mightily defending us against all our adversaries, who can be so fierce, so cruel. When we miss the mark, we open ourselves to their attack, and that's when we need his protection all the more.”
For someone like me, raised in a Catholicism heavy with guilt, Julian’s words are water in the desert. I grew up fearing that something terrible would happen if I failed to measure up. Julian whispers the opposite: that even in my failing, I am already held.
When she says, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” she is not pointing to some distant heaven after death. She is naming the truth of the kingdom within us, the deeper self beyond fear, where we already and always belong.
A Gospel of Gentleness
Julian lived through plague, through loss, through the precariousness of medieval life. Her visions were not escapist fantasies. They were revelations rooted in suffering, yet radiant with joy. She teaches us that sin is no-thing, that Love is all, and that we are forever enfolded in that Love.
Her words remain a quiet revolution, reminding us that beneath our fear, our guilt, and our striving lies the steady truth: all shall be well.
Quotations in this section are adapted from: Mirabai Starr, Showings of Julian of Norwich: A New Translation.