All shall be well
Julian of Norwich
Against the wall of a church in plague-stricken Norwich, around 1390, a small stone cell has a single window cut through to the sanctuary. Inside lives a woman the town will only ever know as Julian, an anchoress who has had herself walled in to pray. The world beyond her wall is a charnel house; the Black Death has been carrying off neighbors by the cartload, and she herself has already lain at the edge of death, anointed, expecting to die. Out of that long illness came a series of visions, showings of Christ's love so deep and so unhurried that she spent the rest of her life turning them over. And out of them she wrote a thing that should be impossible to write with so much dying outside the glass: that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. She did not mean the plague was not real, or that the grief was small. She meant that beneath the catastrophe ran a deeper current, the unbreakable love of God, and that this love would have the last word over all of it. Her hope was not a denial of the dark. It was reorientation around a love that nothing in all creation, Paul says, can sever.
“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.”
— Paul, to the Romans — Romans 8:28 (WEB)
“Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Reorientation needs a hope strong enough to live in the dark without lying about it. The phase asks for confidence that does not depend on circumstances improving. Here it means anchoring the rebuilt life not in optimism but in the unbreakable love of God in Christ, a love no catastrophe can sever, so that hope holds even with the plague at the window.
The hope that will steady you is not a denial of how bad things are. Like Julian, you can name the darkness honestly and still rest on one thing: nothing in all creation can separate you from God's love in Christ. Julian wrote her confidence from a cell, in a plague, with the smell of death in the street, after nearly dying herself.
If you are carrying real loss or fear right now, hear this carefully: you are not being asked to deny the darkness or to manufacture cheer you do not feel. The plague at your window is real, and naming it honestly is not a failure of faith. Julian's hope rested on exactly one thing, and it is solid enough to bear the full weight of the worst: that nothing, not height nor depth nor anything in all creation, can cut you off from the love of God in Christ. The love itself does not flicker when your circumstances collapse.
From that ground, and only from that ground, you can dare to say with her that all shall be well, not because the dark is absent, but because it is not the deepest thing. A love runs beneath it that the catastrophe cannot reach, and that love, in the end, has the final say.
The Church, in century after century of plague and collapse, has needed Julian of Norwich's kind of hope, not cheerful denial but a confidence rooted in the unseverable love of God. The whole Body across history grieves honestly, naming the deaths at its window and the catastrophes it cannot explain, and still dares to say that all shall be well. That hope has never rested on improving circumstances or a watching world's approval, but on a love no plague, no schism, and no persecution can cut. Wherever the Church anchors there, it can face its own seasons of dying without lying about them and without despair.
The plagues come, and the worst of them strip a life or a church to the studs and carry the rest away. What cannot be shaken is the love of God in Christ, which no height or depth or dying thing can sever. Circumstances are removed; that love is not among the shakeable things, and it has the last word.
- Am I trying to manufacture cheerfulness, when real hope would let me name the darkness honestly and still trust?
- What in all creation am I secretly afraid could separate me from God's love, when Scripture says nothing can?
- Can I dare to say all shall be well from inside this hard place, not because it is fine, but because His love is deeper than it?
Lord, I will not pretend the darkness is not here; You see it plainly. But teach me Julian's deeper sight, that nothing in all creation can cut me from Your love in Christ. Let that love be the ground under my fear, and let me dare to trust that, in You, all shall be well. Amen.