All Shall Be Well

Lessons from Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich was a Christian mystic who lived from around 1342 to around 1416 (we do not know exact dates). In May 1373, when she was thirty-and-a-half years old, she received a series of visions as she was suffering from a serious illness. These sixteen “shewings,” which focus on her experience of witnessing the suffering of Christ and talking to him about his pain, restored her to health. She wrote them down, and for twenty years thought about what they meant. Years later, she spent more time contemplating them, and wrote an expanded version. These texts, now published as The Showings or A Revelation of Divine Love, became the first book by a woman in the English language. Julian’s writings contain profound spiritual lessons for readers despairing in the midst of so many global crises. Here I will focus on three: (1) her trust that “all will be well;” (2) her modeling of attention to the realities of suffering; and (3) how she reframes God’s love as so central to theology.

1. Trust that all will be well in the midst of social upheaval

“But Jesus, who in this vision had informed me of all that I needed, answered with these words saying: ‘Sin is necessary, but all shall be well. All shall be well; and all manner of thing shall be well.’” (Julian of Norwich, Showings, chapter 27, long text).

Julian’s affirmation that “all will be well” carries profound hope, and even more so when we understand more about the social context in which she was writing. Elizabeth Ruth Obbard explains that Julian was born during a time of great suffering for the English people.

“Edward III was on the throne, and the Hundred Years War with France was in progress, taking its toll of men and money. The peasants were finding it increasingly difficult to make a living, and their frustration culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when the leaders, having been promised a fair hearing, were ruthlessly put down by Henry Despenser, Bishop of Norwich. When Julian was 7, and again when she was 19 and 27, Norwich was visited by the dreaded Black Death, or bubonic plague. People died in droves, the first swellings of the disease in groin or armpit spreading quickly through the body, leading to death the same day. So many died that heaps of bodies would be collected by carts going around the city at night, the carters calling for people to bring out their dead to be buried in great common pits. It is calculated that over a third of the population of England died in outbreaks of bubonic plague.” (Through Julian’s Windows, 16-17).

War, corruption, political turmoil, poverty, disease, fear, and suffering—such was the context in which Julian wrote. Scan today’s headlines and we see more of the same: war, corruption, political turmoil, and disease lead to fear and profound suffering for so many around the globe.

In the face of such social change, Julian did not experience a call to political leadership and did not form a social movement to address the economic, social, and political crises of her day. Some may see this as a weakness, a failure to respond to the suffering around her. But the vocation she experienced was instead a call to solitary life as an anchoress. She lived in a modest cell attached to the south wall of St. Julian’s Church, and provided prayers and spiritual counsel to the local faithful and to pilgrims who journeyed to visit her. Julian’s room had three doors/windows: an interior view into the altar of St. Julian’s Church, through which she could join in liturgical prayer; an exterior window (some say chamber big enough to sit with visitors), through which she could talk with visitors and receive their gifts; and a third used by two female employees of the parish who brought her food and water and other necessities. The custom of the time was that in exchange for her prayers, lay patrons made donations to the church so that her daily needs would be met. As an anchoress and author, Julian modeled a life of contemplation in the midst of social upheaval.

2. Julian invites us to really see the suffering around us.

Her contemplation of Jesus’s passion and her retelling in gruesome details how Christ suffered is not meant in any way to glorify suffering but instead to face the reality of it. In chapter 17 she describes how she witnessed Jesus’s suffering, saying “the wounds opened wider and the body sagged for all its weight during the long time it was hanging there… the flesh clinging to the thorns as it dried and the thorns clinging to the drying flesh…” Then she recounts her reaction, saying “to see all these many pains of Christ filled me full of pain.” Contemplating the wounds of Christ led her to contemplate the anguish of his mother and friends who watched him suffer. In chapter 18, she writes of Mary’s pain, since “the more sorrow it is to the lover to see the body they love in pain.”

To ‘suffer with’ people in our own day requires a willingness to see the wounds of our world and to let ourselves grieve. It is important for modern readers to develop a capacity for paying attention to the horrors of war, profound greed, the evil of political corruption, realities of genocide, suffering of Ebola victims and their caregivers, fear of those fleeing fires, and all profound experiences of pain, loss, and evil require our attention. In her own work as a spiritual companion, Julian entered into the reality of her community’s suffering, hearing stories of family violence, illness, infertility, premature death, and more. As Julian takes these to prayer, she writes:

“There are evil deeds done that we know of, when such great harm is taken that it seems to us that it were impossible that they should ever come to a good end. And we look upon this with sorrow and mourning, so that we are unable to rest in the blessed contemplation of God as we ought.” (chapter 32)

Julian’s honest look at the reality of suffering does lead to “sorrow and mourning” but does not end with despair. Rather, she notes that the human capacity for understanding is too limited. Instead, in faith, Julian chooses to profess “the high, marvelous wisdom, the might and goodness of the blessed Trinity… For just as the blessed Trinity made all things from nothing, even so the same blessed Trinity shall make well all that is not well.” (chapter 32). Here Julian holds together both honest commitment to truth-telling about evil and trust that evil does not have the last word; instead, love does.

3. God’s love is the key to Julian’s theology

When seeking to summarize the main take-away of her visions, she writes:

“Love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Wherefore did he show it to you? For love.” (chapter 86).

Theologian Grace Jantzen suggests that an enduring lesson from Julian is that violence is not natural, normal, or part of God’s divine plan. Jantzen notes that too often in modern life, violence is taken for granted. Julian’s nonviolent theology offers another way forward, another “imaginary” in Jantzen’s language:

“It is urgent that there should be those who step back and ponder the mind-set and heart-hurt that is acted out in such violence, greed and destructiveness, the cultural symbolic of the West that if it continues to be acted out will certainly destroy the planet through pollution if not through warfare. Only as the deathly habitus is steadily recognized can there be any hope of finding ways of changing the imaginary which underlies it, subverting the preoccupations with death by healing the bitterness of heart and its violent expressions in social policy… Only if there are those who devote themselves to thinking otherwise, to finding other thoughts and values and ways of living them out can there be hope that they may find their way to a symbolic of natality and to the means by which it might be enacted… Part of what it means to be an anchoress in postmodernity must surely be voluntarily to enter a space—indeed to become a space—where thinking otherwise can happen; where creative responses to the deathly structures of modernity can be discerned.” (Jantzen, xx).

Note here the resonance between Julian’s nonviolence and Pope Leo’s call for a “disarming peace.” Julian’s revelations reassure the reader on their path towards trust in God in the midst of the chaotic suffering of the world. Julian looks forward to the day when “we are all in peace and love, that is to say wholly contented with God and with all his works and with all his judgments, and loving and content with ourselves and with our fellow Christians and with everything which God loves, as is pleasing to love. And God’s goodness does this in us.” (chapter 49).

Julian was a 14^th century contemplative, but her social world faced profound suffering, as ours does today. If one seeks to be a modern contemplative, Julian is a steady guide. The modern contemplative must be able to see the reality and enormity of suffering in our world, and at the same time to trust in God’s goodness. The modern contemplative turns towards, rather than away from, the needs of the world. The modern contemplative takes time to question cultural scripts that demand conformity to cruelty. The modern contemplative welcomes the opportunity to be a spiritual companion, and develops a capacity to listen with love. If people of faith are to reshape the climate of war, cruelty, indifference to human suffering that is so pervasive in US life in 2026, we need to cultivate spaces of nonviolence, of healing, of righting wrongs and social repair. Julian’s writings inspire towards those ends.

Mother Julian’s Cell, on the site of the original anchorhold, St. Julian’s Church, Norwich, England. Photo credit: Emily Reimer-Barry.

For Further Reading:

· Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, trans. John Skinner. Gracewing, 2004.

· Elizabeth Ruth Obbard, Through Julian’s Windows. Canterbury, 2008.

· Rosemary Radford Ruether, Visionary Women: Three Medieval Mystics. Fortress, 2023.

· Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, new edition. SPCK Classics, 2011.

· Leo XIV, World Day of Peace Message: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/peace/documents/20251208-messaggio-pace.html

· Website of the Julian Shrine:

https://www.julianshrine.org/