Julian of Norwich

Born: c. 1343 CE

Died: c. 1416 CE

Feast day: May 13

Julian of Norwich may seem like an unusual choice to highlight in a magazine about social justice. A mystic who lived 600 years ago, she spent much of her life closed up in a few rooms. But for centuries this woman has been a beacon of freedom and consolation to anyone who has come across her writings, mainly because she was willing to ask the tough questions. Her visions of the Son of God did not blind her to the darkness of the world around her.

Julian, born in 1342, spent her later years as an anchoress in Norwich, England. Anchoresses never left their small enclosures, although they did see visitors through one window that opened out upon the world. Julian, for example, earned a fine reputation as a spiritual advisor to the many she counseled through her window. No one knows whether Julian was a laywoman or a nun, and in fact no one even knows her true name.

When suffering from a serious illness at the age of 30, Julian had a series of visions revolving around the Passion of Christ, the Incarnation, and the Trinity. She viewed these “showings,” as she called them, and the life-threatening illness from which she soon recovered, as an answer to her prayers that she might better know the Passion of Jesus and come close to death in order to live a better life.

After pondering her experience for almost 20 years, she wrote a small book, Revelations of Divine Love, about the visions and insights she had received about them in her years of prayer. While it is impossible to do justice to the depth of Julian’s writings here, one need only consider a few of her subjects to understand why she is still wildly popular today.

Throughout her work she refers to God—specifically Jesus—as our Mother. For Julian this image did not replace the fatherhood of God, but rather complemented it. “And so I saw that God rejoices that he is our Father, and God rejoices that he is our Mother,” she writes.

Julian saw motherhood as “the closest, most loving, most faithful approach to human beings,” writes Charles Cummings in Peaceweavers. She recognized in Jesus all of the life-giving acts of a mother: bearing us into life, nourishing us, healing our wounds, comforting us in times of trouble.

In her visions, Jesus had assured Julian that “all will be well.” But this woman who grew up with the Black Death ravaging Europe, who saw sin and destruction all around her, knew that all was not well. Julian pressed God on the matter of sin. She asked, with some fear, “Ah, good Lord, how could all things be well, because of the great harm which has come through sin to your creatures? . . . I saw that nothing hindered me but sin. And so . . . I often wondered why, through the . . . wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not prevented. For then it seemed to me that all would have been well.”

She also wondered how church teaching on hell could be squared with her own powerful experiences of God’s love and mercy. Julian got some answers to her questions, though perhaps not those she was expecting. Christ assured her that just as his Passion had erased the effects of the first sin, he would heal the effects of other sins as well: “If I have cured the greater, can I not cure the less?” Some of the answers were left in mystery: “What is impossible to you is not impossible to me,” God told her. “I shall preserve my word in everything, and I shall make everything well.”

Regardless of the answers, Julian’s questions are those you can still find on 21st-century lips.

—Catherine O’Connell-Cahill