Everlasting Love - Julian Of Norwich - The One Year Women in Christian History Devotional

1342–1416

What would people think about you if they had only your writings to go on—your memos, grocery lists, and Facebook posts? Would they be able to piece together your life? Would they know what you were all about?

That’s the case with Julian of Norwich. We know next to nothing about her, except from her own writing. Certain clues suggest that she was a woman of noble birth (including the fact that she knew how to write and had time to do so), born in the mid-1300s, and she came from the English town of Norwich. But her unremarkable life changed at the age of thirty-one, when she was deathly ill and had a series of sixteen visions. She immediately wrote them down and spent the rest of her life composing commentaries upon them. The resulting book, Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, stands as a classic of English spirituality.

What was Julian all about? In a word, love. In two words, God’s love. “God is more nearer to us than our own soul,” she wrote. Even our own sin cannot pry us away from the Lord’s heart. “In falling and in rising we are ever preciously kept in one love. . . . I saw full surely that ere God made us He loved us; which love was never slacked, nor ever shall be. And in this love He hath done all His works; and in this love He hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlasting.”

This was an important message in the late Middle Ages. You might say that Christianity had “left its first love.” The church was largely about power and rules. This idea of God as a loving parent rather than a scowling judge was much needed.

It still is much needed. And that brings us back to the original question: How would people define you? If someone added up your sayings and doings, would they look at your life and say, “This person was all about God’s love”?

I have loved you, my people, with an everlasting love. With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself.

Jeremiah 31:3