08/05/2020
Pam Kubica
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Michael Crow
49 mins ·
Today in the Church we remember with great thanksgiving Julian of Norwich. Don't be confused by her name - she was a woman who took that as her "Religious" name. She lived for much of the 14th and into the 15th Century and the whole of her life was spent in Norwich. For almost the whole of her adult life she lived as an Anchoress or hermit in a small cell attached to St Julian's Church in Norwich at a time when that city was one of the largest and most important trading towns in the country. Many came to visit her for spiritual guidance and advice. She is the first woman whose writings, in English, have survived, of which the most famous is "Revelations of Divine Love" telling of visions she experienced when she was seriously ill and very close to death and her reflections on them during the rest of her long life. This was at a time when "The Plague" also known as "The Black Death" was sweeping through the country and indeed the world decimating the human race and, it has been said, almost wiping out the human race, a pandemic not unlike COVID-19 we're experiencing today. She therefore knew from first hand what it is like for those in intensive care today, but for her there was no IT and no ventilators, no NHS! At what was, like today, a testing and frightening time she famously said, "All will be well, and all manner of things will be well". And why? Holding a hazelnut in the palm of her hand she wondered how something that small existed. She concluded that it is because God loves it. Furthermore she went on to write that everything and every creature that is exists because God loves it, including human beings. And she taught that God will go on loving like that, so "all will be well, and all manner of things will be well". What a message of hope for the future when we remember the situation she was in! What a message of hope for us today! Thanks Julian.
