Today, May 8, the Church remembers a most remarkable woman. We know her as Mother Julian \u201d\u201d or the Lady Julian \u201d\u201d of Norwich. Born in 1342 she lived in Norwich, where she died in the 1420s. From about 1375 she lived as an \u201canchorite\u201d\u009d, withdrawn from the world and living a solitary life of prayer in a cell attached to St Julian\u2019s Church, which today is a shrine and place of pilgrimage. …<\/p>\n
In her vision of the crucified Christ crowned with thorns and bleeding, she discovered the God whose very being is love: \u201cSuddenly the Trinity filled my heart with the utmost joy.\u201d\u009d In one of her most celebrated images she tells us that God showed her \u201ca little thing, the size of a hazelnut, which seemed to lie in the palm of my hand\u201d\u009d. She asks what it is, and is given the reply: \u201cIt is all that is made\u201d\u009d and she knows that that making comes from the overflowing love of God. All is held in being by the Divine Love, and that Divine Love is seen in the sacrifice and self-emptying of the crucified Christ, and it is that same longing love \u201d\u201d compassion, a suffering with which Julian longs to share. She learns that Christ is the ground of her beseeching, the foundation of her praying. Intercession becomes adoration. Like her nameless contemporary who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing she smites on the dark cloud with the dart of her longing love, and finds an answering love. It is the joy of that love which brings her to her great affirmation of hope, \u201cthat all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,\u201d\u009d because indeed she learnt \u201cthat love is our Lord\u2019s meaning. And I saw full surely in this, and in all, that before God made us, He loved us. Which love was never slaked, nor ever shall be.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n