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I was at a church gathering once where a man my age mentioned in passing that he had seen things in his life he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t say what those things were, but I knew he had been an Army medic in Vietnam and had to overcome a great deal in his life. It happened that I was sitting next to a social worker who had previously been a fire department battalion commander. We compared notes. I had once been a hospital orderly and had also seen things I wished I hadn’t. I told him about having to change the dressings on two survivors of a magnesium flash fire who had their faces burned off. The social worker told me about combing through the debris from fatal fires and finding the charred remains of toys his own children played with at home. I suspect most of the people at this gathering also knew first-hand just how cruel life can be.
So what is one to make of Julian of Norwich’s ecstatic vision of Jesus assuring her that “all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well?" It's easy to dismiss such utterances as being unconnected to the real world. Although not much is known about her life, Julian is believed to have been an anchoress who was literally walled off from the world. Yet she was surely well acquainted with the cruelties of life in her time. She survived one of the great cataclysms of human history, a plague pandemic called the Black Death that claimed the lives of one third to one half the population of Europe in the 14th century. Her vision came when she herself was deathly ill, and a priest was administering last rites. Those of us who lead comfortable middle-class lives in the 21st century would no doubt have a hard time imaging just how tough things were for most people back then.
The priest who administered last rites when Julian of Norwich believed she was on her deathbed set up a crucifix in the room and asked her to fix her gaze upon it. As she did so, she had a series of visions that she wrote down after her recovery. In one of them she asked God why sin had been allowed to enter the world. She got no more explanation for sin than Job did when he demanded an explanation for his suffering. She was told only that sin was necessary, but that all would be well. This and other revelations led Julian to believe that suffering was not God’s punishment for sin, as most people assumed at the time. The God she encountered in the midst of her own extreme suffering was overwhelmingly a God of love and compassion.
The supposed necessity of sin or suffering may seem like precious little foundation for assurances that all will be well, particularly when there is seemingly so much hard evidence to the contrary. But when it comes with the force of revelation, one must pay heed. We are like small children who are told not to be afraid of the dark. The dark is still scary to us, but we are calmed by calm assurances from those we love, who can see what we cannot. It is as much a feeling as anything else. Whatever small glimpses we get into a reality beyond the everyday, we come away with an abiding sense that whatever else may be happening, all is indeed well.
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