In the final stanzas of his poem, “Little Gidding,” T. S. Elliot writes that “all shall be well, and / All manner of things shall be well,” a quote from Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343-ca. 1413). On the surface, her words sound naive and simplistic, yet she lived during a time of incredible turmoil. She endured three waves of the deadly bubonic plague that decimated half her town, a peasant revolt, and her own life-threatening illness. She became deathly ill at age thirty and received sixteen distinct visions from Christ upon her recovery. Such visions are outside my frame of reference, so I press on.
Julian lived as an anchorite for twenty years. OK, I had to look this word up. An anchorite is someone who withdraws from society to live a prayer-saturated, ascetic life. She never left her room attached to a church for twenty years! Three windows provided her with her only contact with others: a window open to the sanctuary to participate in worship, a window accessible to servant quarters to arrange for food and necessities, and a window open to the outside world, to offer townspeople spiritual counsel. Why would anyone want to live this way?
She wrote Revelations of Divine Love as a prayer exercise. She didn’t intend it for publication, but it was found in her room upon her death and printed posthumously, the first book in English by a female writer. She addressed two common struggles in her writing: impatience and despair. When we become impatient for prayers to be answered, she observed God intends for us to wait for a better time. When we are tempted with despair, she observed, feelings aren’t the final determinant of God’s love for us.
One thing to take away from Julian is a resolute assurance of God’s infinite love. Don’t underestimate God’s love. Scripture testifies that God, in the end, will make things right again. All things will be put right by Christ. We join with Paul in declaring that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.38-39). We close with Julian’s prayer of patience and trust: