When the great English mystic Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) was 30 years old, she contracted a grave illness and came so near to death that she received the last rites. At the end of her illness she had several visions, or “showings”, that she understood to have come from God. She spent the next 20 years reflecting on these visions and writing down what she had learned from them. Perhaps, the most famous of those showings is this one:

“And he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut, that seemed to lie in the palm of my hand. It was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And the answer came, ‘It is everything that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen into nothing, so little was it. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts, and will for ever, because God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it…” (1st Revelation)

Seeing the fragile thing in the palm of her hand, Julian wondered how it could last. She had reason to wonder if the world she knew might fall into nothing. As a child she lived through the Black Death, the plague that decimated Europe from 1348 – 1351. Nearly half of her city of Norwich died in a three-year span, and she herself nearly died from serious illness.

Sometimes our own lives seem so tenuous they might dissolve into nothing. It might be serious illness. It might be job or economic problems. It might be family or relationship difficulties. It might be doubts about faith or uncertainty about love or our competency or our worthiness. Whatever the cause, life can seem uncertain and our hold on it unsure. Our hold on ourselves and on God can seem tenuous and uncertain. Julian of Norwich found her comfort, not in grasping and clinging to the ephemeral littleness of created reality, but in uniting herself to the abiding love and joy of the uncreated God.

Fr Matthew, with acknowledgments to Rev Matt Gunter