What Christian hope looks like during a pandemic
Living into the desired new creation is our work—and God’s promise.
There was a profusion of rainbows in Montreal this spring. During the first weeks of social distancing and stay-at-home orders, an array of multicolored artwork soon covered the apartment windows in my neighborhood. Many were accompanied by the same slogan: “Ça va bien aller,” roughly, “It’s going to be fine.”
Perhaps it is only principals of theological colleges who think this way, but the slogan reminded me of Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century English mystic. Julian knew pandemic: as a child, she lived through the Black Death, which killed about a third of the people in her city. At age 30, sick and near death, she had a series of mystical visions (“shewings”) of Christ. She survived and went on to write Revelations of Divine Love, an account of these visions.
In chapter 27 of Revelations, Julian finds herself perplexed by the nature of sin in the world. She asks, “If sin had not been, we should all have been clean and like to our Lord, as He made us.” She continues: “I wondered why by the great foreseeing wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not letted: for then, methought, all should have been well.”
