Imagine yourself a six-year old child in 1349 when the infamous Black Death strikes. In less than a year about one half of the 30,000 citizens in your town have perished at the hand of the bubonic plague.
It passes but breaks out again–six more times during your lifetime. With each outbreak, images of your childhood trauma return–carts of dead bodies rumbling over cobblestone streets, arms and legs hanging limply out from under the rough linen coverings. Some of those carts carry playmates and family members. You hear again the incessant, haunting funeral bells. You smell the stench of sickness and death in the narrow streets and close living quarters. Fear seizes you by the throat.
Imagine massive chaos, social unrest and violence that the plague leaves in its wake. Besides all this, you go through two major famines and live your entire life in the Hundred Years War between England and France. As Thomas Hobbes described it, life was “nasty, brutish and short.”
Such was the life of Julian of Norwich. And yet, amazingly, she never mentions any of these tragedies in her famous book. Something remarkable happened.
When Julian was 30 she fell into a sickness so severe she couldn’t feel or move her arms and legs. Everyone believed she was dying and her priest was called to her death bed to administer last rites. Shortly after he came, however, she had a vision and everything changed. Her body was healed; the content of her vision consumed her for the rest of her life.
She saw Jesus hanging on the cross–the crown of thorns pushed hard into his scalp and the blood trickling down his face in streamlets. She saw his skin torn by the whippings, his body writhing in agony.
Yet what seized her was not the horror. Rather, the love that shone from Jesus’ face despite his anguish captivated her. She was overcome by his love for her and she saw God’s solidarity with all the pain and suffering of the world.
During her vision Jesus spoke words so simple, so ordinary, so repetitive but so powerful that 650 years later they are still often quoted.
”All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
And so for Julian all the terrors of plague, death, war, social unrest, famine and personal sickness receded. What took their place is seen in the title of her book, Revelations of Divine Love.
That love, however, is veiled behind the grim spectacle of a bloody body, humiliated and nailed to a cross. Put bluntly, this sight disgusts our human sensibilities. Crucifixion was so offensive, it was not to be spoken of directly in polite Roman society. And yet we can only see the full extent of God’s love by considering this spectacle–the crucified Christ suffering for us.
Hence, we must ask God to open “the eyes of our hearts” so we can see through the horror. We must pray to see something more than our natural eyes can see, something from beyond this world, something incredibly beautiful.
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