Making All Things Well: Finding Spiritual Strength with Julian of Norwich

By Isobel de Gruchy

40 reflections exploring how the writings of Julian of Norwich can provide comfort and support for even the most extreme need. They open up her central themes - suffering, overcoming evil, the faithfulness of God - and relate them to the challenges we encounter today. Ideal for personal reading during Lent, for a retreat, or for group reflection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848255142

Book preview

Meditation 1

Wishes and Sickness

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When shall I come and behold the face of God?

Psalm 42.1−2

We each come to our Christian faith in different ways. For some of us there is a definite moment to remember, for others there never was a time when we were not Christian. For a young woman living in or around Norwich, in East Anglia, in the fourteenth century, both of these applied. She tells us of a remarkable and very memorable series of what she called ‘showings’ (or revelations) that she had. But for some time before that she had been a devout believer. For she also tells us that she had long ‘desired three graces by the gift of God’ (Chapter 2). We all have some things we desire or wish for in our Christian lives. If you had to name three wishes, what would they be? Julian’s three were these:

My wish was for God to give me three graces: the first was to experience, as though I were present, Christ’s Passion; the second was a bodily sickness; and the third was three wounds. I already felt deeply about Christ’s Passion but I longed for more. I wanted, by God’s grace, to feel as though I were actually there with Mary Magdalene and Jesus’ other friends – to see with my own eyes what he suffered for me. I wanted to suffer with him as others who loved him had done.

Chapter 2

The second grace she asked for strikes us today as very strange. She desired a ‘bodily sickness’, something just short of actual death. Being aware that even then this was unusual, she added that the first two graces should fall within God’s will for her.

On the eighth day of May in 1373, God granted Julian’s second ‘wish’ and along with it the first. She tells us she was thirty and a half years old when she fell seriously ill. When it seemed as though death was near, her curate was sent for; he gave her the Last Rites and held a crucifix in front of her. As she felt death closing in she remembered her wish for the second wound − that Christ’s pains would be her pains − to lead her nearer to God. She then saw Christ on the cross as he hung in agony:

Suddenly I saw the red blood streaming down, freely and copiously, from under the crown of thorns, a living stream, just as it had done when the crown was first pushed onto his blessed head. It came to me, truly and powerfully, that he, who is both God and a man, and who suffered for me, was now showing this to me without any intermediary.

Chapter 4

In this way the first of her ‘showings’ (visions or revelations) began. We will examine these and their meanings in the meditations that follow.

What of the third grace she desired? Again it was unusual then as it is now. It was for three wounds, and these she knew were according to God’s will.

Julian did not ask for three wishes –

the kind of wishes we might ask for –

she prayed instead for three wounds,

not shying away from the pain that these would