Friday Reflections: Crisis Times, but All Shall Be Well
- By Bilal Hafeez
You may think the world is in turmoil today, but the 1300s and 1400s were far worse.
Half of England’s population was wiped out by the plague (Black Death), there was a popular uprising over inequality and corruption (the Peasants’ Revolt), and the prevailing ideology of the day, Christianity, was fracturing – with two popes slugging it out in continental Europe (Western Schism).
Against this backdrop, Julian of Norwich, a devout woman, was trying to make sense of why there was so much suffering and pain in the world. After all, if God was all-loving, then surely devout England should be heaven on Earth.
But rather than getting tied up in logical knots like many theologians of her day, Julian sought answers through spiritual experience.
This meant becoming a recluse – an anchoress.
She isolated herself in a church cell, followed the biblical prescription of covering her hair (1 Corinthians 11:6), spent her days in prayer, and fasted for much of the year. She prayed to suffer as her role model Jesus did during the Passion.
And one day, on the verge of what she believed was her death, she had a series of visions – sixteen in all – which she then spent twenty years trying to understand.
Her writings on these revelations are thought to be the oldest surviving English text written by a woman.
So what insights did she glean?
Well, for one, she realised her conception of space and time was too narrow. In one vision, she saw that ‘all that is made’ was like ‘a little thing the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand.’
On the matter of suffering, she concluded ‘no soul can be at rest’ unless we focus on the infinite and eternal – otherwise, the finite world does ‘nothing to satisfy us.’
And in her thirteenth vision, she received her key insight:
‘It is true that wrongdoing is cause of all this suffering, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’
Reimagining the scale of space and time, shifting our focus to the profound, and holding on to the optimism that good things can emerge from bad – this, perhaps, is how we can live in times of crisis. It certainly worked for Julian of Norwich.
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