Revelations of Divine Love
All Shall Be Well
Long ago, a woman in Norwich was given a handful of small, shining truths about how loved the world is. A few of them are gathered here. Take your time.
She lived walled into a small room built onto the side of a church in Norwich, through years of plague, with one narrow window onto the world. People came to that window for counsel. From that hidden life of prayer came the visions she called her showings, and the book she wrote about them is among the first in English known to be written by a woman.
touch the drop
Her first vision was of Christ wounded on the cross. What rose in her was not horror but tenderness.
The great drops fell round as pellets, round as the scale of a herring, plenteous as the drops that fall from the eaves after great rain.
Her very first vision was of Christ wounded on the cross. What stayed with her was not the horror of it but the tenderness. She saw the blood as something small and almost gentle, and underneath it all she felt love rather than blame.
In the same vision He set something small in the open of her hand. She did not know what it was, and so she asked.
He showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand. I thought, What may this be? And answer came: It is all that is made.
touch the hazelnut
In this little thing I saw three properties: that God made it, that God loveth it, that God keepeth it.
touch the center
She was shown the soul itself, vast as a kingdom, and saw who dwells at the center of it.
I saw the soul so large as it were an endless world, a worshipful City. And in the midst of that City sitteth our Lord Jesus, for in us is His homeliest home.
She saw the soul as something vast, like an endless world or a great city, and at the very center sat Christ, at home there and never leaving. The soul, she understood, is where God lives.
She wrote something daring for her century, and tender in any.
As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother.
She wrote that God loves us the way a mother loves, not only the way a father does. Holding, feeding, staying near. For her, the love at the heart of things had the tenderness of a mother with her child.
The love that made us, she said, keeps us still.
He that made all things for love, by that same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end.
The same love that made us, she believed, never stops gathering us in and keeping us safe, the way a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wing.
touch where they join
She had her own word for what love finally does to us.
In our making He knit us and oned us to Himself; by which oneing we are kept as clear and as noble as we were made.
Oneing was her own word for being joined to God so closely that nothing can come between. She believed we were knit to God from the very beginning, and held there for good.
He did not promise her an easy passage. He promised her the ending.
He said not: Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted. But He said: Thou shalt not be overcome.
He did not promise her she would be spared every storm, every hardship, every sorrow. What He promised was this: she would not be overcome by them.
When she grieved over all that goes wrong in the world, she was answered not with an explanation, but with a promise.
Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: who showed it thee? Love. What showed He thee? Love. Wherefore? For love.
Love was His meaning.
Do you want to know what your Lord meant by all of this? Hold on to this: love was His meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did He show you? Love. Why? For love.
touch the flame
Long after the visions ended, the small light kept burning. Carry it with you.