It is not hard to believe that God is love, or that Christianity is about love. But it is hard to believe only that—and to know nothing else.
Mother Julian by Stephen Reid
The uniqueness of Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich lies in this very singleness of vision—in the author’s pure determination to announce to her readers a God who is nothing but love:
Some of us believe that God is almighty and may do everything, and that He is all-wise and can do everything.
But that He is all love, and will do everything—there we draw back.
And as I see it, this ignorance is the greatest of all hindrances to God’s lovers.
The outcome of this strongest of all radicalisms—this extremism of love—is that the reader is gradually led into a realm of extraordinary cosmic optimism, by a series of steps at once daring, breathtaking, and quite simply incontestable. In reading Julian, before we know it we catch ourselves looking up from the page, surveying God’s creation with new eyes, and asking one of her own favorite questions: “How can anything be wrong?” We learn to listen to a God who says, “Look, I am God. I am in all. I do everything. I never cease upholding my work, and I never will. I am guiding everything toward the end I ordained for it from the first, by the same might, wisdom, and love with which I made it.”
And so we come to trust in Julian’s most famous pronouncement, the enormously simple promise that “everything is going to be all right.” Not content to state this just once, she sets it in a triadic formula that veritably sings with conviction: “All will be well. All will be well. All manner of thing will be well.” It is like a good solid three-point sermon, in which each point is exactly the same. It is as if the thought is such a staggering one that it cannot possibly be understood on a first hearing. But neither can it be expressed in any other way: “You will see for yourself that every sort of thing will be all right.” This is the essence of Julian’s vision, this mysterious energy of pure optimism which lies at the very heart of the universe. For only here do we have a place to stand from which to move the otherwise imponderable mass of the world’s sin and suffering.
Perhaps the most winsome aspect of Julian’s writing is her pure simplicity, as seen in her most famous revelation, that of the hazelnut: “He showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it thoughtfully and wondered, ‘What is this?’ And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made.’” This beautiful image, as homespun as a needlework cushion, prepares the reader for the remarkable claim that “we have got to realize the littleness of creation, and to see it for the nothing that it is, before we can love and possess the God Who is uncreated.”
So confident is Julian in the goodness of God, despite all the world’s sin and suffering, that she foresees a “great deed” by which God “will make everything to turn out well”—a momentous final deed “ordained by the Lord God from before time, and treasured and hid within His blessed heart,” “known only to Himself,” and which “the blessed Trinity will do at the last Day.” Julian sees this fundamentally as a deed of creation, on the same scale as the original creation of the universe: “For just as the blessed Trinity made everything out of nothing, in the same way shall He make all that is wrong to turn out for the best.”
In light of God’s other great act of creation—the re-creation in Christ—Julian sees it as entirely characteristic of God to burst through the whole fabric of things in so completely astonishing a fashion, to “make all things new.” She concludes,
In this fulfillment we shall see the true reason why God has done all the things He has, and the reason, too, for all those things He has permitted.
The bliss and fulfillment will be so vast in its immensity that the whole of creation, wondering and astonished, will have for God
a dread so great, reverent, and beyond anything known before, that the very pillars of heaven will tremble and quake.
Amen!
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