Br. Lain Wilson

Julian of Norwich

The fourteenth century was a lousy century. Famine, plague, war. Absolutely lousy.

You wouldn’t know it reading Julian of Norwich, whom we remember today.

Julian would’ve been about six years old when the Black Death swept through England. She likely didn’t have any, or many, memories of this devastating event, and would’ve likely heard stories as she grew up. But we don’t know what she thought of it, or of any of the other horrors of her time. Her “Showings,” which testify to a series of visions she received in 1373, at around the age of thirty, are fundamentally optimistic.

 “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” Jesus assures Julian, and so she assures us, several times throughout, when so much of what was going on around her would’ve argued against that.

Optimistic, maybe, but not naive. Julian does not expect only good things to happen, but rather that the goodness of God enfolds the bad in love and mercy, that the light of God’s loving care is what allows us to see our sins and faults and failings: allows us to see them and, in seeing them, know that they are forgiven.

For Julian, this is an expression of what she calls God’s courtesy: “Our Lord in his mercy reveals our sin and our feebleness to us by the sweet gracious light of his own self, for our sin is so foul and so horrible that he in his courtesy will not reveal it to us except by the light of his mercy.”[1]

God’s courtesy shows that we fail, but that we aren’t our failings; that we sin and do horrible things, but that we are not those things. God’s courtesy assures us that we are loved, loved for all of who we are, which is known fully and completely only by God.

We who cannot know the full truth of ourselves, let alone that of others, can nevertheless partake of God’s own courtesy. We can do that by showing kindness and grace, especially toward those whom we do not know, whose stories we cannot know. This isn’t about being nice (or just about being nice), or turning a blind eye toward fault, but rather acknowledging that God is at work in their lives in ways unknown to us, that the experience of frailty and failure may be the place where God is reach out to enfold them in love, and that the simple act of kindness from us may be what they need to accept that love in that place of great vulnerability. In our act of kindness, we recognize God’s courtesy at work in them.

“All shall be well,” indeed.

Amen.

[1] Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. E. Colledge and J. Walsh (Paulist Press, 1978), 332 (ch. 78).