Pondering Julian of Norwich

Tuesday, Apr. 18, 2023

Sometimes I think too much.

Case in point is my mental gymnastics involving a passage in Revelations of Divine Love by the 15th-century English mystic Julian of Norwich. 

One of her sayings, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” is quoted to this day, but that quote comes a little later in the book than what first caught my imagination, which was her report of God showing her “a little thing, the size of a hazelnut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball.”

Julian said she looked at the thing “and thought: ‘What can this be?’ And it was generally answered thus: ‘It is all that is made.’”

I’ll get to Julian’s interpretation of the thing in a moment. My own effort at deciphering the image went something like this: Why would God choose to show “all that is made” as a tiny ball? Surely there must be something significant about the roundness. A circle is symbolic of infinity, and God is infinite. But why show infinity as something as small as a hazelnut, which is no more than an inch long and maybe half that in diameter?

I pondered these questions for a good while, then did some research on the Internet, but found nothing at all regarding the size and shape of the thing that God had showed Julian. All of the commentary is about the three characteristics that she saw in the thing: “The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third, that God keeps it.”

Finding no published commentary on the size and shape of the thing didn’t deter me; in fact, it did the opposite, because I thought perhaps I might have stumbled upon an opportunity to make a unique contribution to the reams of scholarship about Julian. For a week, all of my contemplation centered on why the thing representing “all that is made” that God showed Julian was small and round. 

Somewhere in that contemplation my imagination added that the thing was blue, which led me down a rabbit hole. From space the Earth looks like a blue sphere. Is that significant? The color blue has several biblical and spiritual meanings. For example, in the Book of Numbers the Israelites are told to wear a cord of blue on their garments, the sight of which is to remind them to keep the Lord’s commandments.

The Blessed Mother most often is depicted as wearing blue; Our Lady of Guadalupe’s mantle was blue-green, a color of royalty in that culture. On the other hand, in Byzantine iconography, blue represents heaven and mystery. 

After several hours of contemplating this, I reread the original passage and realized that nowhere was a mention of the color. So I returned to pondering the size and shape of the thing, but at the end of the week the only conclusion I reached was that they were of little consequence; in fact, Julian spends not one word (and apparently no thought) on the topic. Rather, her conclusion was that she could “never have full rest nor true joy” until “there is absolutely nothing that is created separating my God and myself.”

She further adds, “It is necessary for us to have awareness of the littleness of created things and to set at naught everything that is created, in order to love and have God, who is uncreated.”

 By inference, then, the meaning of the size of the thing shown to Julian is that “all that is made” is nothing compared to our need to love and have God. 

Julian writes over and over again about hope and trust in God’s goodness, themes that are as pertinent in today’s world as they were in six centuries ago, and I think the lesson for me is to spend time contemplating those rather than seeking my own interpretations.