Today the Church remembers Julian of Norwich. She lived through plague, turmoil, injustice, war, and fear. This is what she learned: “If there is, anywhere on earth, a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”
From the British Library, about Revelations of Divine Love, the first work in English to be authored by a woman: Aside from being the first work in English to be written by a woman, Julian’s work is all the more extraordinary because she claims that she was illiterate, calling herself a ‘simple creature that cowde [knew] no letter’. Despite her claim, the work is a sophisticated piece of theological writing which contains many powerful images, including one famous one in which Julian has an image of the universe as a thing so small that it is like a hazelnut lying in the palm of her hand. The text reads:
He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my understanding it was as round as a ball. I looked at it and thought, ‘what may this be?’ and I was answered generally thus, ‘it is all that is made’. I marvelled at how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly fall into nothing for its littleness and I was answered in my understanding ‘it lasts and ever shall, for God loves it’.