Julian of Norwich: 'All Shall Be Well' and the Revelations of Divine Love

In May of 1373, a thirty-year-old woman in Norwich, England, fell gravely ill. Her family gathered around her deathbed. A priest held a crucifix before her face. And then, over the course of roughly sixteen hours, she received what she would spend the rest of her life trying to describe.

We don't know her birth name. We call her Julian — after the church she later lived beside, St. Julian's in Norwich — and she became, quietly, one of the most important spiritual voices in the history of the English-speaking church. Not through fame. Not through power. Through presence.

After her visions — what she called her "showings" — Julian eventually enclosed herself in a small anchorite cell attached to St. Julian's Church. She lived there for decades. And through a small window in her cell wall, she listened to anyone who came. Pilgrims. Priests. Ordinary people carrying things too heavy for Sunday mornings. She prayed with them, reflected their struggles back to them, and pointed them toward a God she was absolutely convinced was love all the way down. What she was doing, before the language existed for it, was spiritual direction.

The Showings: What Julian Actually Saw

Julian of Norwich received 16 distinct visions over a single day and night beginning May 8, 1373 — while she believed she was dying. Each vision, which she called a "showing" or "revelation," centered on Christ's Passion and the nature of divine love, and she recorded them in two texts: a Short Text written shortly after her recovery, and a Long Text composed over roughly 20 years of sustained meditation and prayer.

The difference between those two texts is worth pausing on. The Short Text is raw — the immediate record of someone stunned by what they'd experienced. The Long Text is something else entirely: the fruit of decades of prayer, sitting with the visions, asking God what they meant, and slowly receiving understanding. Thomas Merton, writing in Spiritual Direction and Meditation, describes this kind of contemplative deepening as the heart of genuine formation — not the initial experience, but the patient, prayerful return to it.

So what did she see? The visions clustered around several unforgettable images.

In one of the most cited passages in all of Christian mysticism, Julian saw something small in her hand — the size of a hazelnut. When she asked what it was, she understood: "It is all that is made." The whole of creation, no larger than a hazelnut, held in being by God's love. She then saw three properties of this tiny thing: God made it, God loves it, God keeps it. Without that keeping, it would dissolve into nothing. It wasn't nihilism — it was wonder. Creation is small and fragile and entirely held.

The visions also moved through Christ's suffering in granular, almost unbearable detail — not for the purpose of dwelling in pain, but to show Julian something about love's nature. What she saw in the Passion wasn't defeat. It was the full measure of what love is willing to do.

Other showings addressed sin, the nature of the soul, divine judgment, and the relationship between the human and divine wills. By the sixteenth showing, Julian had been given what she believed was a complete — if mysteriously layered — picture of God's love and its implications for human life.

If you've ever felt like your prayer life is reaching for something just out of range — a deeper sense of God's presence, a way to hold suffering without being crushed by it — Julian's showings are worth sitting with. And if you want a framework for that kind of sitting, our contemplative prayer guide offers practices rooted in exactly this tradition.

'All Shall Be Well': What Julian's Radical Optimism Actually Means

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" is the most quoted line from Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love — and it's almost always misunderstood. Julian didn't receive this phrase as a promise that pain goes away. She received it in the middle of a meditation on sin and suffering, while wrestling with how a loving God can allow the damage that human beings clearly experience.

She pressed the question hard. She didn't get a tidy answer. What she got was a conviction — what she might call a "teaching" — that God's love is larger than human understanding of evil, and that the final word belongs to love. This isn't escapism. It's a theological position, carefully arrived at through suffering. Google Trends data shows that searches for "Julian of Norwich" increased approximately 10-fold between 2019 and 2023, with the sharpest spikes during the COVID-19 pandemic — suggesting that it's precisely in seasons of collapse that people find their way to her.

Here's what makes Julian's optimism genuinely radical: she held it alongside a frank acknowledgment of sin. She didn't minimize it. She didn't pretend human life is fine. She looked directly at the worst of it and still concluded — based on what she believed she'd been shown — that love wins. That's not wishful thinking. That's hard-won trust.

Ruth Haley Barton, in her work on spiritual transformation, describes this kind of grounded hope as one of the marks of genuine spiritual maturity — not the absence of doubt, but the ability to hold doubt within a larger trust. Julian got there six hundred years before the language of spiritual formation existed.

What does that mean for you, sitting in whatever you're carrying right now? It means Julian isn't offering you a platitude. She's offering you a theology — tested in her own body during illness, refined over forty years of solitary prayer, and forged in the context of a world that had just watched the Black Death kill between 30 and 60 percent of England's population. She knew what broken looks like. And she still said: all shall be well.

If you're in a season where God feels absent or your faith has gone quiet and cold, this kind of holding is exactly what spiritual direction is designed for. It's also worth understanding what the dark night of the soul really is — because Julian's experience maps onto it more closely than most people realize.

God as Mother: Julian's Most Surprising Theology

Julian of Norwich taught that God is as truly our Mother as our Father — and she did so not as a theological innovation, but as a direct report of what she believed she had been shown. "As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother," she wrote in the Long Text of Revelations of Divine Love. This wasn't metaphor for Julian. It was revelation.

Her Trinitarian framework assigned specific qualities to each person of the Trinity — the Father as power, the Son as wisdom, and the Holy Spirit as love — but she also mapped the motherhood of God specifically onto Christ. It was Christ, she wrote, who carries us within himself, who feeds us with his own body, who tends to us when we fall.

Why does this matter for your prayer life?

Because many people carry an image of God that is almost entirely defined by authority, distance, and conditional approval. Not because theology tells them to — but because that image was formed in childhood by human fathers, or by churches that emphasized judgment over tenderness. When your operating image of God is a stern authority figure, prayer becomes a performance. You approach God trying to say the right thing, feeling vaguely guilty you haven't said it more often.

Julian's maternal image of God opens a different door. A God who holds you like a mother holds a child. A God whose response to your falling is not disappointment, but the instinctive reaching of someone who simply loves you. The Living Church has described Julian as "the patron saint of the anxious" for precisely this reason — her picture of God is one that anxiety cannot easily survive.

It's worth saying plainly: this theology isn't a modern import. Julian was writing in the fourteenth century, in the context of orthodox medieval Christianity, and she grounded her maternal imagery in scripture and in her visions. She wasn't inventing a softer God. She was reporting what she believed she had been shown about the God who already exists.

If Julian's maternal image of God is opening something in you — a question, a longing, a cautious hope — a contemplative spiritual director is exactly the kind of companion you need to explore it with. Find a spiritual director near you who is formed in the contemplative tradition and can sit with you in these questions without rushing you toward answers.

The Anchorite Cell: Julian as the First English Spiritual Director

Julian of Norwich's anchorite ministry at St. Julian's Church was, by every functional definition, the first formal spiritual direction practice conducted in English. After her visions, she eventually entered an anchorite enclosure — a small set of rooms built against the church wall, in which she lived permanently. The cell had three windows: one into the church so she could attend Mass, one for her attending servants, and one — covered with a black curtain — facing the street.

That third window was where people came.

Anchorites were known spiritual counselors. People traveled distances to consult them. We know from contemporary records that Margery Kempe — herself a remarkable figure in medieval English spirituality — visited Julian and spoke with her at length about the validity of her own spiritual experiences. Julian listened carefully and offered discernment. That's the oldest recorded conversation we have of one person bringing their spiritual life to another for reflection and guidance in the English language.

What did Julian's "direction" look like? From what we can reconstruct: she listened deeply without rushing to fix. She helped people interpret their experiences in light of God's love — not their fears, not their guilt, not their worst constructions of themselves. She was, in the language we'd use today, helping people find God in their actual life rather than in an idealized version of it.

Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, describes the spiritual life as a matter of training the whole person — not just acquiring information about God, but being genuinely transformed in the presence of God. Julian was doing exactly that — with pilgrims, through a curtained window, in fourteenth-century Norfolk.

The practice of spiritual direction as Julian embodied it — presence, patient listening, attention to God's movement in a person's life — is the same practice directors offer today. If you want to go deeper into Julian's life and legacy, explore our full resource on Julian of Norwich including primary text excerpts and formation guides.

What Julian's Teachings Mean for Your Spiritual Life Right Now

Julian of Norwich's core teachings translate directly into the questions that bring people to spiritual direction today. Her three central convictions — that God is love without condition, that suffering doesn't mean abandonment, and that the soul is precious beyond measure — are exactly the things people are searching for when they feel like their faith has gone flat.

Think about what it actually feels like to sit with someone who truly believes — not as a theological proposition but as a living reality — that you are deeply loved. Someone who isn't trying to fix you, correct you, or move you toward a program. Someone who is genuinely curious about where God is in your story right now. That's what it feels like to be on the receiving end of good spiritual direction. And that's what Julian was offering through the window of her cell.

Here are four of Julian's teachings that map most directly onto what people are working through in spiritual direction today:

• "Noughting" — the spiritual practice of releasing everything that isn't God. Not dramatic renunciation, but the quiet letting go of what you've been gripping. Julian taught that purification happens not by effort but by desire: wanting only God, and trusting that God will do the rest. The Order of Julian of Norwich describes this as her core directive for anyone in spiritual formation.
• Seeking goodness — Julian believed that actively looking for God's goodness in ordinary life was itself a contemplative practice. Matthew Fox, drawing on Julian's Showings, identifies 15 distinct practices of goodness in her writing, all oriented toward cultivating joy and awe as spiritual disciplines rather than emotional states.
• The "beholding" of God — Julian's word for contemplative prayer was "beholding." Not striving, not constructing, not producing. Simply looking. Resting the gaze of the soul on God and allowing that looking to do its work. This is the same instinct behind centering prayer, the prayer of examen, and the practice of sacred reading.
• "Oneing" — Julian's extraordinary word for the mystical union between the soul and God. She described it as the goal of the spiritual life — not a merger that erases the self, but a union that makes you more fully yourself. John Mark Comer, in Practicing the Way, writes about formation as the process of becoming "as Jesus" — Julian would recognize that language immediately.

These aren't abstract medieval concepts. They're the exact territory that comes alive in a spiritual direction relationship. If Julian's practice of "beholding" resonates with you, it's worth understanding how centering prayer builds on this same foundation — Thomas Keating's method draws deeply from the contemplative stream that Julian helped shape.

Finding a Spiritual Director in Julian's Contemplative Tradition Today

Directors formed in the contemplative tradition — the stream that runs from the Desert Fathers through the medieval mystics to Julian of Norwich and forward into the twentieth century through Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating — are practicing today in numbers that would have seemed impossible even thirty years ago. Spiritual Directors International reported approximately 6,000 certified directors globally in 2023, up from around 4,500 in 2018, with contemplative Christian programs accounting for a significant portion of that growth.

What does a director formed in Julian's tradition actually bring to the relationship?

They bring patience. They're not in a hurry. Julian spent forty years meditating on sixteen hours of visions — these directors understand that transformation doesn't run on a program timeline.

They bring a conviction that God is present in your actual experience. Not the experience you wish you were having, not the experience you think you should be having — the one you're actually in. Julian's genius was her refusal to spiritualize away the specific details of what she saw and felt. A good contemplative director does the same: they help you find God in your real life, not an ideal version of it.

They bring an orientation toward love. Julian's theology was relentlessly centered on divine love — not as sentiment, but as the fundamental nature of reality. Directors who've absorbed this tradition carry that same orientation. When you walk into a session carrying shame or confusion or spiritual dryness, they don't hear it as failure. They hear it as a place where God might be doing something.

You can explore the full range of spiritual direction traditions — including the contemplative stream that flows from Julian and her contemporaries — through our spiritual direction tradition guides. Understanding which tradition resonates with you is one of the most useful first steps in finding a director who's actually a good fit.

Not sure where to begin? Our step-by-step guide to finding a spiritual director walks you through the whole process — from understanding what you're looking for to scheduling your first session.

The Historical Thread: Where Julian Fits in the Long Story of Spiritual Direction

Julian of Norwich stands at a specific and important point in the long history of spiritual accompaniment — bridging the Desert Fathers' tradition of the "abba" (spiritual father) and the modern practice of one-on-one spiritual direction as we know it today. The practice didn't begin with Julian, but she gave it its first sustained English-language articulation, and she embodied it in a way that was unusually accessible to ordinary people.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the third and fourth centuries — the men and women who went into the Egyptian desert to pray and formed communities around spiritual guidance — established the pattern. If you wanted spiritual formation, you went to an elder and you asked, simply: "Give me a word." The elder gave you something to sit with. You went away and sat with it. The relationship wasn't therapeutic — it was formative.

That tradition flowed through the Celtic anam cara ("soul friend") practice, through the Benedictine emphasis on a spiritual father in the monastery, through the great Rhineland mystics of Julian's own century — Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Johannes Tauler — and into Julian's cell in Norwich. Each generation adapted the practice to its context. Julian adapted it for the lay person who couldn't enter a monastery but still needed someone to help them find God.

That thread continues forward through the centuries, picking up voices like St. John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, and — in the twentieth century — Thomas Merton, whose writings on the contemplative life drew explicitly from this medieval English stream. Explore how Merton brought this tradition into the modern era — his debt to Julian is more direct than most people realize.

The writers you might already trust — Dallas Willard, Ruth Haley Barton, Henri Nouwen, John Mark Comer — are all drawing from this same well. They didn't create the practices they describe. They received them, translated them, and passed them on. Julian is one of the primary sources they're translating from, even when her name doesn't appear on the page.

Knowing this doesn't just satisfy historical curiosity. It gives you permission to trust what you already find helpful. If Barton's writing on solitude and silence has opened something in you, you're already in Julian's tradition. If Comer's emphasis on unhurried prayer has felt true, you're drinking from the same stream. Julian is the earlier voice in a conversation that's been going on for seven hundred years and hasn't stopped.

Three Practices from Julian You Can Start This Week

Julian's teachings don't require an anchorite enclosure. They don't require a theological degree or a monastery. What they require is a willingness to show up — to come to prayer as you actually are and let God work with that.

Here are three practices rooted in her teaching that are immediately accessible, regardless of where you are in your spiritual life:

• The Hazelnut Meditation: Hold something small in your hand — literally, a stone or a coin or a walnut. Ask yourself Julian's three questions about it: Did God make this? Does God love this? Does God keep this? Then ask those same questions about yourself. Sit with the answers for five minutes without trying to fix or improve them. This is Julian's contemplative method in its simplest form.
• Beholding Prayer: Set a timer for ten minutes. Choose a single phrase from Julian — "You are enough for me," or "All shall be well" — and simply return to it whenever your mind wanders. Don't analyze it. Don't try to feel anything. Just look at it, the way you might look at a candle. This is the practice Julian called "beholding," and it's the same instinct behind centering prayer.
• Seeking Goodness Review: At the end of each day, spend three minutes identifying one specific moment where you noticed goodness — beauty, kindness, grace, presence. Not a grand moment. Anything. Write it down. Julian believed that actively seeking goodness trains the soul to recognize God's presence in ordinary life, and over time this practice reshapes what you notice.

That third practice — the goodness review — is closely related to the Ignatian Examen, which you can explore in detail through our guide to the Daily Examen. Both practices train the same attention — looking for God in the actual texture of your day.

The question Julian would ask you isn't "Are you doing enough?" It's "What do you notice?" She was profoundly interested in the specific — specific images, specific sensations, specific moments of grace. A spiritual director formed in her tradition will ask you the same kinds of questions. Not to evaluate your performance, but to help you see what God might already be doing.

Why Julian's Voice Is Being Rediscovered Right Now

Julian of Norwich is experiencing a genuine resurgence, and it's not accidental. Google Trends data shows roughly a 10-fold increase in searches for "Julian of Norwich" between 2019 and 2023. The Center for Action and Contemplation featured her as a full season of their Turning to the Mystics podcast series, positioning her specifically for people "searching for something more." Online courses, formation retreats, and spiritual direction training programs are increasingly drawing from her Revelations of Divine Love as a primary text.

Why now? A few things converge.

First, Julian is a lay voice. She wasn't a nun in the traditional sense, wasn't educated in Latin at a cathedral school, wasn't a theologian by training. She was an ordinary woman who had an extraordinary experience and spent the rest of her life trying to understand it. In an era when many people feel alienated from institutional religion but haven't left God behind, her story is recognizable. You don't need credentials to encounter God. You need honesty and willingness.

Second, her theology is genuinely hopeful without being naive. The cultural moment is one of genuine anxiety — political instability, relational fracture, the exhaustion of constant noise. Julian wrote in a century defined by plague, peasant revolt, and religious persecution. Her "all shall be well" comes from the same place that a lot of contemporary suffering comes from, and she doesn't minimize any of it. That combination — honest about darkness, convinced of love — is rare and it's needed.

Third, her understanding of God as tender, maternal, and unconditionally loving is a corrective that many people desperately need. Surveys consistently show that a significant percentage of people raised in faith communities carry a primary image of God as distant, demanding, or punitive. Julian's God is none of those things — and encountering her vision of divine love, even six hundred years later, genuinely changes people.

For people wanting to go deep into the primary texts and scholarship, julianofnorwich.org offers an extensive collection of resources, including editions of the Revelations in both Middle English and modern translation. And if you're looking for a formation community specifically shaped by her legacy, the Order of Julian of Norwich maintains an active ministry of spiritual direction rooted in her tradition.

Julian's resurgence also connects to a broader rediscovery of mystical Christianity in circles that have historically kept their distance from it. People are finding that the formational depth they're hungry for is available — it's been available for centuries — and voices like Julian are among the clearest guides into it. If you're navigating spiritual dryness, suffering, or a crisis of faith, our resource on the dark night of the soul explores this territory through the lens of St. John of the Cross — Julian's contemporary in spirit if not in time.

Julian spent her life making herself available — through a curtained window, in a small cell, to anyone who came. That impulse is alive today in the contemplative spiritual directors who've been shaped by her tradition and others like it. If you're ready to explore what this kind of accompaniment might mean for your own spiritual life, browse directors by tradition, location, and focus through the FindSpiritualDirector.com directory — and find someone who can sit with you the way Julian sat with pilgrims through her window.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Julian of Norwich and why does she matter for spiritual direction?

Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–1416) was an English anchoress and mystic who received 16 visions of divine love in 1373 and recorded them in Revelations of Divine Love — the first book written in English by a woman. She spent decades counseling pilgrims through a small window in her cell at St. Julian's Church in Norwich. The Order of Julian of Norwich describes this ministry as a foundational model for spiritual direction — patient, attentive listening in service of another person's relationship with God. That ministry functions, by every meaningful definition, as the earliest documented practice of spiritual direction in the English language.

What does 'all shall be well' mean in Julian of Norwich's teaching?

When Julian of Norwich wrote "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," she wasn't offering easy comfort — she was articulating a theology of radical trust rooted in God's nature as love. She received this phrase directly within her visions while meditating on sin and suffering, and understood it not as a promise that pain disappears, but that divine love holds every broken thing within a larger story. This conviction was hard-won: Julian wrote it in a century when the Black Death had killed between 30 and 60 percent of England's population.

What are the 16 showings in Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love?

Julian of Norwich received her 16 showings — or revelations — over a single day and night on May 8–9, 1373, while near death from illness. The visions centered on Christ's Passion, the famous hazelnut vision symbolizing God's holding of all creation, the motherhood of God, the meaning of sin, and the repeated assurance that all shall be well. She recorded them first in a Short Text shortly after her recovery and expanded them into the Long Text over roughly 20 years of contemplation — available in modern translation as Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics edition).

How does Julian of Norwich's theology of God as Mother apply to prayer today?

Julian of Norwich taught that God is as truly our Mother as our Father — specifically locating divine motherhood in Christ, who carries, feeds, and tends to us. For people whose prayer life has been shaped by a primarily authoritative or distant image of God, Julian's maternal imagery opens a different kind of relationship with prayer: one defined by being held rather than evaluated. When you approach prayer from within this image, the first question shifts from "Am I doing this right?" to "Am I letting myself be loved?" — and that shift changes everything.

How do I find a spiritual director trained in Julian of Norwich's contemplative tradition?

Directors formed in the contemplative tradition — including those influenced by Julian's approach to presence, patient listening, and trust in divine love — are actively practicing today across denominations. You can search for contemplative spiritual directors by tradition and location through the FindSpiritualDirector.com directory, filtering for directors who work with centering prayer, lectio divina, or the broader Christian mystical tradition Julian helped shape. Spiritual Directors International reported approximately 6,000 certified directors globally in 2023, with the contemplative stream being one of the fastest-growing areas of training and formation.

Originally published at FindSpiritualDirector.com.