When we fall through frailty or blindness, then our kind Lord touches us, moves us and calls us, and then he wants us to see our wretchedness and sinfulness and acknowledge it humbly. Writing about repentance, for instance, she says, She is possessed of a great confidence in the goodness of the God who is love. She is also remarkably sanguine and cheering her saying that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” is a fair summation of her attitude. Like the author of The Cloud, she is refreshingly plain-spoken and down to earth. This is a kind of piety which I myself do not share to any great extent, but which I respect as having a long history within Catholic devotion. Julian’s piety focuses on the suffering of Christ, his wounds, his blood, and his sorrows, over which she lingers with great tenderness. The showings themselves range from visions of blood trickling from the wounds of Christ upon the crucifix to intense experience of sorrow and joy to a vision of God in His glory. This volume from Penguin Classics includes both. The Revelations comes in two versions: short text and long. She afterwards recovered from her illness and, after meditating on the visions for some twenty or thirty years, finally wrote about them.

Upon viewing the crucifix, Julian experienced a series of sixteen visions, or “showings”. She was gravely ill, and in preparation for her death a priest entered her room carrying a crucifix aloft. Revelations of Divine Love has its origin in a powerful mystical experience which Julian had on, when she was about 30 years old. In fact, it is worth noting that Julian herself is also anonymous: we call her “Julian” only because her cell was within the wall of the church of St. (The writings of Margery Kempe and of the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing would be others.

She was an English anchoress born in the mid-fourteenth century, and has come to be seen as one of the chief glories of the remarkable flourishing of English mysticism that distinguishes that time. Eliot - it is high time that I finally got around to sitting down with Julian herself.

Given that this blog has, since its inception, held its motto (“All manner of thing shall be well”) from Julian of Norwich - by way of T.S.

Revelations of divine love