All shall be well

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.

The hope that steadies a rebuilt life is not a sunny pretending that things are fine. 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.