Julian of Norwich receives her visions

Julian is thirty years old and dying.

She has been ill for several days, so ill that her parish priest has come to administer last rites. He holds a crucifix before her face so that she may fix her eyes on it as she dies. Her sight is failing. Her body is going cold from the feet upward.

And then, as she looks at the crucifix, the bleeding begins.

For the next several hours, Julian receives sixteen showings — visions of the Passion of Christ, of the Trinity, of the nature of sin and suffering and love. She sees the hazelnut. She hears the most famous words in English mystical literature. She recovers.

For twenty years she sits with what she has received, thinking about it, praying over it, writing it down in two versions — a short text written soon after the experience and a long text written twenty years later, when she has had time to understand what was given to her.

We know almost nothing about her life. We do not know her birth name — Julian is the name of the church she eventually retreats to as an anchoress. We do not know if she was a nun or a laywoman. We know she was educated, she was English, she lived in Norwich, and she received visions on May 8, 1373 AD while she was dying.

And we know what she heard. And we know that what she heard has sustained people for six hundred years.

Julian received her visions while dying, and what she heard in them was not a promise that the dying would stop. The world she returned to was still ravaged by plague. The church was still in its Avignon captivity. The Peasants' Revolt would happen eight years later.

All shall be well is not optimism. It is not denial. It is not the absence of knowledge about how bad things are.

It is a word spoken from inside the love of God about the ultimate trajectory of things — a word that holds together the reality of suffering and the certainty of redemption without pretending either away.

Julian heard it while dying. She spent twenty years working out what it meant. She is still working it out in us.

Where in your life does the word all shall be well feel most impossible to believe? That is probably where you most need to sit with it.