“all shall be well
and all shall be well
and all manner of things shall be well”
I keep returning to Julian of Norwich’s beautiful saying.
When I remember it, I turn it over, and rub away at it like a prayer bead.
But I realised today that despite its deep attraction for me, I have never looked at it in context.
Julian of Norwich was a cloistered anchoress in the 1300’s who left a set of texts that have been called the Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love which are the details of and commentaries upon her visions.
When contemplating Julian’s phrase I was drawn to the idea of disease and medicine. For all things, including suffering to be well, suffering too must be considered medicine. And it recalled for me Yumen’s koan: “Medicine and disease cure each other. The entire earth is medicine. What is the self?”
Holding her revelation inside Christian theology, Julian poses wellness as a different sort of paradox. Michael Gore writes that,
“At the heart of the revelations received by Julian are her insights into the nature of sin. Even sin, Julian sees, serves a purpose in the plan of the Lord. She discerns only part of the fullness of the purpose of sin; the other portion will remain closed until the end of the age….
Nothing is more reprehensible than sin. As Julian sees it, sin:
is so vile and so much to be hated that it can be compared with no pain which is not itself sin. And no more cruel hell than sin was revealed to me, for a loving soul hates no pain but sin; for everything is good except sin, and nothing is evil except sin.
Brant Pelphrey points out that Julian viewed sin as a lack, or failure, of a person’s basic humanity. Sin is unnatural and harms both ourselves and other human beings. Sin acts as a kind of madness that cripples human nature, leading to anxiety and despair, which Julian identifies as the most significant illnesses brought into the world by sin. So the Lord showed her nothing good in sin. Sin causes all the pain and suffering that the human family endures and is the ground of all the sufferings of Christ. Julian, deeply moved by what she saw concerning the nature of sin, ponders, “I often wondered why, through the great prescient wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not prevented.” This is, certainly, the greatest mystery of the human condition. If God is who God is claimed to be, why then was sin allowed? Why did God not foresee the falling away, and if the Fall was foreseen, why then did God allow it to happen? Jesus responds, telling Julian, “Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.” At the core of Julian’s vision lies this paradox: sin is foul and evil, and yet necessary; and the pain and suffering brought about by sin will all be made right….
Sin is necessary, but for those who love God, sin has no final shame: “And God showed that sin will be no shame, but honour to man….” For each sin, according to Julian, there exists a corresponding pain. But suffering endured because of sin results, finally, in a corresponding joy and reward given by God to those who suffer. Sin ultimately loses its power to wound or destroy those who suffer its pain because of the reward given for enduring the suffering. Jantzen explains this in the following manner:
Julian is clear that the rewards will be so great that we will actually be glad we suffered. Just as Jesus rejoiced in his suffering, because it resulted in that which he greatly desired…. All the joys of heaven cannot justify previous pain and suffering unless those joys are in some way a direct result of the suffering, not just compensating rewards, but as intrinsically impossible without the pain.”
(Michael Gore : Sin will be no shame)
While Julian’s Christian theology is a little alien to me, Julian’s sense of sin as a lack, or failure, of a person’s basic humanity, as unnatural and harmful to self and others, “as a kind of madness.. leading to anxiety and despair”, which is “the most significant illness” in the world; and yet, a necessary suffering, I find somewhat compelling.
If sin can be seen, in an intertextual religious sense, (and this is how I see it) as separation from our recognition of, and being, our true Self; if this horror at our ignorance and the harm it causes, of our Self estrangement, of “life as suffering” is the state we “wake” to (as humans first of all exist, then encounter themselves, to paraphrase Sartre) ; then this sin is inevitable.
And yet, to quote the Buddha, there is a path out …
“all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”