Hello again, my friend. I'm glad you've come back. After walking together with Guru Angad and the quiet strength of his service, I thought today we might step into a very different kind of sacred space---one shaped not by kitchens or classrooms, but by stillness. Let me bring you to Julian of Norwich.
I remember a night in Norwich when the air outside was sharp with cold, the kind that makes even the stones seem to hold their breath. Inside a narrow anchorite's cell, a single candle flickered against rough plastered walls, its small circle of light trembling with each draft. The world beyond that thin window was full of worry---plague carts rattling across cobblestones, church bells tolling for the dying, families whispering prayers they barely had strength to finish.
And in the middle of that broken world lay a woman on the edge of death.
She was only thirty, fevered and drifting in and out of consciousness, her face pale under a coarse linen cloth. A crucifix had been placed before her so she could prepare her soul. No one expected her to recover. In those days, almost no one did.
But as I stood quietly in the dim corner of that little room---watching, listening, waiting---I felt a shift in the air, a kind of luminous stillness that entered like a presence. And then I saw her eyes flutter open. She looked at the crucifix, and something passed between them---something gentle, unexpected, and fiercely alive.
In that moment, she began to see.
Visions, she later called them.
"Showings."
Sixteen in all.
But this is the part that has stayed with me across the ages: her revelations didn't deny the suffering of her world. They didn't claim that pain was an illusion. Instead, in the middle of all that darkness, she saw a love larger than fear, deeper than catastrophe, patient enough to outlast even death.
It was in that small candlelit cell, surrounded by sickness and sorrow, that Julian of Norwich discovered a truth the world wasn't ready to hear---but desperately needed.
Julian lived in a world shaped by grief. By the time she was born---likely around 1343---the first wave of the Black Death had already swept through England, carrying away nearly half the population. And it didn't stop. Outbreaks returned in cycles, arriving without warning, draining whole households, hollowing villages. Children disappeared before their parents' eyes. Clergy died administering last rites. Burial pits filled faster than they could be dug. It is hard to overstate the atmosphere: fear was not an emotion, it was a landscape.
Norwich itself was a bustling city of merchants, craftsmen, mothers, sailors, and scribes---yet always shadowed by uncertainty. Famine followed plague. The Hundred Years' War disrupted trade. Social tensions boiled over into the Peasants' Revolt. Into this world of constant instability, Julian grew up quietly, almost anonymously. We don't know her family. We don't know if she married. We don't know her early education. What we do know is that at around age thirty, she fell deathly ill---and that illness became the threshold of her spiritual life.
Her visions came during that crisis, and when she recovered---a surprise to everyone---she spent decades reflecting on what she had seen. She eventually chose to become an anchorite, a vocation as rare as it was demanding. An anchorite was sealed---literally bricked---into a small cell attached to the wall of a church. Through one narrow window, she received food and offered counsel to townspeople. Through another, she heard Mass. And through her main window---one that opened only to the outside world---she watched the life of Norwich pass in its ordinary joys and sorrows.
And still the plagues came back. Still people fled or hid or despaired. Still fear preached in the streets. In many pulpits, sermons warned of divine wrath, judgment, and punishment---attempts to make sense of the seemingly endless suffering.
But Julian's revelations led her in the opposite direction.
She wrote Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest known book in English by a woman, not to condemn anyone, but to describe a love she saw as unfathomably patient---"homely," she would say, meaning tender, familiar, close. She wrote of God not as a distant judge but as a nurturing presence, one whose mercy held the world even when everything seemed torn apart.
Inside a room smaller than many closets, Julian received visitors seeking comfort, guidance, or simply a moment to steady themselves. I remember watching them through her window: widows clutching handkerchiefs, sailors with trembling hands, young mothers exhausted by grief. They came with questions too heavy for their era's harsh theology. And Julian, in her soft voice, offered something few others did: reassurance without denial, hope without naïveté.
Her world was scarred by death.
Her city was weary.
Her cell was stark.
But the truth she lived out of---hope rooted deeper than catastrophe---began to ripple beyond her walls, brushing against the edges of her time like a quiet blessing.
To understand the spiritual meaning of Julian's message, you have to remember what her world sounded like. It was filled with sermons about sin, wrath, punishment, and the imminent collapse of society. After wave upon wave of plague, people assumed they were living under divine judgment. Many believed suffering was the clearest evidence of God's anger. Others lost hope entirely and drifted into despair. The air itself felt heavy with the sense that everything was unraveling.
Against that background, Julian's visions were startling---not because they were dramatic, but because they were gentle.
In her showings, she saw a God who did not despise the world for its brokenness, but embraced it with infinite patience. She saw no trace of condemnation in the Divine face she beheld. She saw suffering, yes, but she also saw love woven underneath it, like a current moving faithfully toward restoration. She wrote that God does not merely tolerate humanity---God delights in humanity, even in our woundedness.
This was not the message people expected from someone who had nearly died.
One of the visions she described was a small hazelnut resting in her palm. She heard a voice say that this tiny thing represented "all that is made." It was fragile, tiny enough to slip out of existence at any moment---and yet it was held secure because "God loves it." In a time when many believed the world was crumbling beyond repair, Julian saw that creation was sustained not by human strength but by divine tenderness.
Her most famous words---"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well"---were not a dismissal of pain. They were the result of staring directly into suffering and discovering that the deepest truth beneath it was love, not judgment. They were, in a sense, her defiance of despair.
When she said "all shall be well," she wasn't promising that everyone would be spared sorrow. She was saying that sorrow does not have the final word. That the story, however broken it looks, bends toward healing. That fear is not the architect of the universe---love is.
This message resonated because the people who came to her window didn't need more warnings. They needed someone to tell them that the chaos around them wasn't the whole truth. They needed a way to live without collapsing inward. They needed hope that wasn't sentimental, but anchored.
Julian gave them that. And she did it from a cell barely big enough to stand in.
She didn't command armies. She didn't lead movements. She didn't purify a city or challenge a ruler. She simply allowed her small room to become a resting place for weary souls---and that made her one of the most important spiritual voices of her age.
Her meaning wasn't in her isolation.
It was in her clarity:
Hope is stronger than catastrophe because it is woven deeper into the world than fear ever was.
Julian's place in spiritual history is unusual, because she didn't found a movement, launch reforms, or gather disciples. She left no school, no institution, no official lineage. She lived quietly, anonymously, behind a wall. And yet her influence has threaded its way through centuries, subtle but steady, like a candle carried from one age to the next.
Her first contribution is her vision of divine tenderness. In a medieval world shaped by hierarchy and fear, Julian dared to describe God not as a monarch demanding obedience but as a presence intimately involved with humanity's unfolding. She called Christ our "Mother"---a radical image in her time, but one that emphasized nourishment, patience, and unconditional care. It softened spiritual imagination across centuries, opening a door for later mystics, reformers, and poets to speak of the Divine in relational, compassionate terms.
Second, she reframed sin and suffering in a way that anticipated modern psychology by six hundred years. Instead of portraying sin as a permanent stain or the trigger for punishment, she saw it as "behovely"---necessary in the sense that it teaches humility, deepens compassion, and reveals our dependence on love. She didn't glorify suffering; she simply saw that the Divine does not abandon people in their mistakes. Her insight helped shift Christian spirituality away from shame-based models toward healing and restoration.
Third, she preserved a vision of hope that was not fragile. Many people think of hope as a mood---pleasant when it comes, disappointing when it fades. Julian saw hope as a metaphysical truth. In her visions, she understood that the ultimate trajectory of the universe is toward renewal, not collapse; toward wholeness, not ruin. This insight became a lifeline in later eras marked by war, famine, persecution, and doubt. Her words resurfaced in the writings of T. S. Eliot, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Sayers, contemporary theologians, and countless anonymous seekers who found in her an anchor.
Her influence is also practical: her book, Revelations of Divine Love, became the earliest known English text written by a woman, anchoring female spiritual authority in a tradition that often silenced women's voices. Through her, the English language became an instrument for mystical theology. She expanded who could speak about God, and in doing so, expanded who could imagine themselves beloved by God.
Perhaps her greatest contribution, though, is the one least recognized: she offered a way to face catastrophe without losing the self. She lived through repeated pandemics, social upheaval, and cultural fear---but emerged with a belief not in denial, but in deeper truth. That resilience has inspired countless people across time who needed to know that despair is not destiny.
Julian's legacy is not loud. It is not institutional. It is not even linear.
It is the quiet inheritance of anyone who has ever whispered to themselves in a moment of fear: "All shall be well."
Her life proves that sometimes the world is changed not by those who shout the loudest, but by those who sit in stillness long enough to hear what fear tries to drown out.
When I think about Julian's message, I don't think of it as something fixed in her century. I think of it as something alive---something that rises whenever a world feels uncertain. And our world, as you know, has its own tremors. You can feel them in the restlessness of the news, in the fatigue of people trying to do their best, in the way conversations sometimes seem to fracture into worry or anger or confusion. It's easy to feel overwhelmed. It's easy to wonder if things are getting worse.
But whenever I feel that heaviness, I remember Julian.
And the world she lived in was staggeringly harsher than ours.
She wasn't writing from a comfortable distance. She wrote through plagues that emptied homes overnight, through famines that left whole families starving, through revolts and wars that tore communities apart. She saw death more frequently than many of us ever will, and she heard fear preached from pulpits as if it were the only truth left.
And still she said, "All shall be well."
Not because things were well.
Not because she expected miracles.
Not because she was naïve.
She said it because she perceived something underneath the suffering---an undercurrent, a deeper truth---that fear could not erase. She understood that hope is not a mood or a strategy. It's a posture of the soul, an orientation toward the fundamental nature of reality.
Hope, for Julian, was the recognition that love---not catastrophe---is the foundation of the world.
When I look at the anxieties of today, I see something that Julian would have recognized immediately: the ache for meaning, the fatigue of constant vigilance, the fear that we're slipping into something irreparable. But here is the truth she would whisper through her little window: the fact that you can see the brokenness means you are awake, not lost. Sensitivity is not a sign of despair; it is evidence of conscience.
Julian teaches that the world does not spiral only downward. Humanity has an astonishing capacity to rebuild, to renew, to reach for compassion even when surrounded by grief. I've watched entire civilizations rise after devastation, rebuild after war, recover after plague, forgive after cruelty. Not perfectly. Not quickly. But steadily. As if something in us remembers where the true center lies.
And that memory is hope.
Julian also reminds us that interior resilience is not selfish retreat. A grounded soul becomes a stabilizing force for others. Her cell was barely larger than a modern pantry, but somehow people walked away from it steadier, clearer, more able to live with courage. She didn't change the world by arguing with it. She changed it by being rooted in a truth deeper than chaos.
And perhaps that's what matters most today.
In a noisy age, we are hungry for stillness.
In a fearful age, we are hungry for tenderness.
In a fragmented age, we are hungry for a hope that does not deny suffering, but carries us through it.
Julian offers that kind of hope.
She teaches us that despair is not destiny.
That the world's pain is not the final layer of reality.
That healing, not collapse, is the universe's trajectory.
And that even when everything looks broken, the story is not done.
"All shall be well" is not a dismissal.
It is a direction.
And whether you realize it or not, my friend, every time you choose patience over panic, compassion over cynicism, gentleness over fear, you are participating in that same ancient arc. You are affirming that hope is real, and stronger than catastrophe.
Julian saw that clearly from a room barely big enough to stand in.
If she could see it then, we can see it now.
What moves me most about Julian isn't the drama of her visions. It's the steadiness of her soul afterward. I've watched many people glimpse something profound, only to lose their footing when the world presses in again. But Julian carried her revelation like a lamp cupped gently in her hands---shielding it from the winds of her time, protecting its flame so that others could come close and feel its warmth.
I remember standing just beyond her window, watching as people came to her---widows, laborers, worried parents, weary travelers, priests shaken by doubt. They weren't looking for miracles. They were looking for someone who could see them clearly without flinching. Someone who could hold their pain without rushing to explain it away. Someone who could remind them that their grief wasn't the whole of their story.
Julian did that by offering what she herself had not been offered very often: tenderness.
She didn't deny suffering. She didn't pretend everything was fine. She simply trusted that the deepest truth beneath everything---beneath loss, beneath chaos, beneath fear---was love that would not abandon the world. And that trust radiated from her, quietly, the way dawn light spreads along a stone floor.
When I think of her now, I find myself asking a simple question: Where is that stillness in your own life? Not the dramatic revelations, not the grand gestures---just the quiet places where your soul remembers what fear tries to make you forget. Maybe it's a moment at the end of a long day. Maybe it's the comfort of a familiar voice. Maybe it's an act of kindness that surprises you with its gentleness. These little moments are not small. They are the soul reminding itself of its own depth.
Julian lived in a world that trembled, and still she found clarity.
You can too.
Before we finish, my friend, I want to take you somewhere entirely different---out of Julian's stillness and into a story from my own family. It's one I've told before on another podcast, The Olympic Family, where I speak more freely about the tangled personalities I grew up with. You might think of it as mythology. I think of it as the chaos of home.
Next time, I'll share a rebroadcast of an episode about Pandora---yes, that Pandora. She wasn't a symbol or a warning to me. She was a young woman in my extended household who carried more curiosity than her world was prepared for, and who discovered something bright at the bottom of a very old story.
It pairs beautifully with Julian, you know.
Julian teaches that hope underlies all things.
Pandora discovered the same truth in a very different way.
And remember---even the gods have issues.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.