Contemplative Story: Julian of Norwich

By Shannon Hennebry

Julian of Norwich (1314-1413)
Benedictine Nun
Biography with excerpt from Revelations of Divine Love

The contemplative life arose out of the desire to return the church to its first-love: God. Contemplatives feel the need to be different and that the church should not be secularized. God’s love for humanity and our subsequent love for others is a major contemplative theme. There have been contemplatives from the time of Christ to our present age.

One such contemplative is Julian of Norwich. Little is known about her early life. Scholars don’t even know if “Julian” was her given name or simply the name she adopted for the church where she was an abbess. She was born around 1342, during the time of the Black Death. She survived the potential horrors she was born into, but became deathly ill when she was thirty. A priest came to give Last Rites and she was miraculously healed. In the hours after her healing she received sixteen visions regarding God’s love for humanity as shown through the Passion of Christ.

Julian went on to write two accounts of her visions, which became known as The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (believed to be the first book in English written by a woman). The first, shorter account, she wrote after becoming an abbess at St. Julian’s Church in Norwich. She wrote a fuller account after twenty years of silent prayer and mediation on her visions. Through these visions Julian sees divine love as creating, sustaining and redeeming all thing and that by this divine love “all manner of things shall be well”.

Julian’s small room, or cell, in Norwich reflected the three-fold life of an abbess. One window looked out to the altar, a second window allowed her to speak with others who had given their lives to serve God and a third looked out to the public road. Julian was known as a counselor who combined spiritual insight with common sense.

For Julian, her prayers and meditations on her visions filled her life. She came to believe that faith was believing even when God opts to hide such dynamic visions. She went into complete seclusion in her early 60s and died around 1413. She is not officially beatified by the Catholic Church, but is considered “blessed” due to popular devotion.

For we are so preciously loved by God that we cannot even comprehend it. No created being can ever know how much and how sweetly and tenderly God loves them. It is only with the help of his grace that we are able to persevere n spiritual contemplation with endless wonder at his high, surpassing, immeasurable love which our Lord in is goodness has for us.