Day 35 - All shall be well?

It is not often that a pop group references a text by a 14th century mystic, but the song ‘Perfume and Milk’ written by Florence Welch includes Julian of Norwich’s famous phrase ‘All shall be well’.

Statue of Julian of Norwich in the West Porch of Norwich Cathedral

Julian was an anchoress. She chose to be enclosed in a room attached to a church for the rest of her life. She was named after the Church rather than the other way around. It was a way of living as hermit while also being in an urban setting. Her room had a window whereby she could see the mass and receive communion and a second window into the street so people could come to her seeking wisdom. Some years ago, I visited the site of this cell. The 19th century church was bombed in WW2 but during the rebuild they discovered the foundations of the cell, so they rebuilt that too. I remember sitting in quiet while the rest of my family, Norwich City supporters, visited Carrow Rd.

After a serious illness in 1373 that brought her close to death, Julian had sixteen shewings or revelations from Jesus which led her to take up a life of an anchoress. The thirteenth revelation was in response to question that had troubled her. Why did God prevent sin since it caused so much pain? Jesus doesn’t directly answer her question but says ‘it was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’.

Her words are not blind optimism. Julian acknowledged her pain and heartache and doesn’t brush away hard questions. At first, she wasn’t comforted by those words (even though the rhythm of them is quite soothing) she is mournful and full of fear. She retorts ‘How could all things be well?’ According, to the longer version of her work ‘Revelations of Divine Love’, she then spent fifteen years contemplating the meaning of what had been said to her. Fifteen years contemplating every aspect of that line. ‘Revelations’ is considered to be the first book in English written by a woman. In the end, she concludes that ‘love was his meaning’. This is not a sop, it is born out of illness, suffering, living through the Black Death and the aftermath of the Peasant’s Revolt and asking questions even of God. It not the same as someone sitting at a patient’s bedside saying, ‘everything will work out OK in the end’.

Florence Welch’s song was written after an ectopic pregnancy and life-saving surgery. It is about her recovery, which she says wasn’t linear. She watches the seasons change while grappling with her own healing. At times she feels she is at odds with the optimism of Spring. Feelings of terror and vulnerability surfaced even as she was recording the album. Hope in the song is described as ‘pink ribbon’. Something fragile, maybe a pretty idea, but not always useful.

I love the line about ‘miracles often being inconvenient’. Healing and recovery don’t look like we think they will look. Indeed, we may never re-cover and go back to how things were. We may unearth new things about ourselves and how we see God and the world. In his poem, Birthday, Simon Armitage talks about finding unexpected joy in a tree blossoming in a carpark and then feeling embarrassment and rage. Hope can take us by surprise when we’ve got accustomed to living without it. In the process of recovery, we gain, and we lose and maybe even our ideas of hope and ‘wellness’ decay and are reborn.

I conclude with a poem by Ann Lewin,

‘All shall be well’…

She must have said that

Sometimes through gritted teeth.

Surely she knew the moments

When fear gnaws at trust,

The future loses shape,

Gethsemane?

The courage that says

‘All shall be well’

Doesn’t mean feeling no fear,

But facing it, trusting

God won’t let go.

‘All shall be well’

Doesn’t deny present experience,

But roots it deep

In the faithfulness of god,

Whose will and gift is life.

Written for, and shared at, the 2017 International Women’s Day service, St Thomas’s Church of England, Salisbury UK. Published in Ann’s book Watching for the Kingfisher by Canterbury Press.

Suzanne Nockels