In times of fear, I return to Julian of Norwich

“It is God’s will that we see him and search for him; it is his will that we wait for him and trust him.” In times of stress and fear—and goodness, it is hard to hear the world’s mood music as anything other than stress and fear right now—I return to these words from Julian of Norwich. They are taken from the second revelation or “shewing” of the 14th-century mystic’s extraordinary Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving manuscript written by a woman in English. Ill and hovering near death, Julian saw a vision of the suffering Christ. It revealed something that offered a revolutionary spiritual pivot for people who felt like they were under divine judgment: that God is always and ever the abundance of love. Miraculously, Julian survived her illness and later became an anchorite.

Her words still resonate precisely because they are challenging words for desperate times. Though Julian’s background was privileged, the revelations she received were not the product of comfortable piety. Her life was shaped through an intense experience of personal loss, as well as of ill health, in a world marked like our own by war, turmoil, and plague. The Black Death, the English Peasants’ Revolt, and the emergence of the first Bible in English all unsettled what many presumed to be the natural order.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the visions Julian received were of Christ in his great suffering and passion. Indeed, the words I quote above were written in response to her vision of Jesus’ face covered in spittle and blood, dust and bruises, with insults thrown his way. Julian tells us that it was a physical vision but clouded and dim. This troubled her, as she wanted to see her Lord more clearly. However, she was told in her vision that if God wanted to show her more, God would be her light. She was invited to search. She writes: