Julian of Norwich — the English anchorite who called God 'mother'

Who Julian of Norwich was

Let me introduce you to a woman so modest that we do not even know her real name for certain.

She was born around 1342, in Norwich, England. We do not know who her parents were. We do not know whether she married young. We know that in her thirties, in May 1373, she became very seriously ill — so ill that her father was sent for to bless her for death. The priest came with a crucifix. Julian looked at it.

And at that moment — while she lay in her sickbed and thought she was going to die — a series of sixteen visions unfolded. Not hallucinations. Not dreamlike images. Something much more concrete: a penetrating seeing of reality beneath ordinary reality. An encounter with Christ in which he told her things that would occupy her for the rest of her life.

She did not die. Within a few days she was better. And she decided that what she had received must be preserved — not for her own fame, but because it might be useful to others.

She became an anchoress — a form of religious life that existed in the Middle Ages. An anchoress had herself officially walled into a small room beside a church. Three small windows: one to attend mass, one to receive food, one for visitors who came for counsel. And there she would remain for the rest of her life — not monastic life, not free life, but voluntary radical separation with one purpose: to pass on what you have received to whoever comes asking.

For thirty years she reflected on her visions. Then she wrote The Revelations of Divine Love — two versions, a short one (soon after 1373) and a long one (approximately 1395–1413). She is thereby probably the first woman to write a book in English. The oldest surviving manuscript dates from around 1413. We are therefore 650 years removed from her voice.

And that voice — that is what interests us now.

What she saw that no one before her had dared to write

The dominant religious language of Julian's time was strict. God as father, king, judge. Christ as Lord, as almighty, as the one who judges. Sin was everywhere. Guilt was the central feeling a believer was meant to cultivate. Paradise or hell depended on how well you had behaved.

In that culture Julian saw something entirely different.

She saw that God is not angry at people for their sin. That God is not angry. That God does not seek punishment. On the contrary — she saw that God had more grief over human suffering than they themselves had, and that everything that seemed wrong would ultimately come to wholeness.

Her most famous line — which still, 650 years later, stands on cards and walls in churches — is:

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

That seems simple. Even superficial. But notice the context. This was written in a time of the Black Death — Julian had as a child lived through the first great epidemic, in which in Norwich alone between 1348 and 1349 an estimated half the population died. She herself had nearly died in her thirtieth year. This is someone who knew what suffering was.

And yet, from that knowledge, she dared to write: all shall be well. Not as denial of pain. Not as cheap comfort. As something she had seen, at work beneath suffering.

God as mother

But the most radical thing Julian wrote — and the reason she only found a larger audience in the 20th century — is how she names God.

She calls God mother.

Not as metaphor. Not as footnote. Not as "and also motherly, in a certain sense." She says literally that Christ is our mother, that God is mother, that the Trinity works in a motherly way.

Listen to this passage:

Just as truly our Father is God, so truly our Mother is God. And He showed me this — that we are all established in Him, and He in us, and He receives all that we do with great joy.

And elsewhere:

Our mother, Christ, carries us in her body and feeds us with her breast. No human mother can do this as fully as He.

For Julian this was not a metaphor. She saw it so. In one of her visions she was shown how Christ nourishes us — not only with spiritual food, but with a presence so motherly that it surpasses the human mother figure.

This was, in the 14th century, dangerous ground. Some female mystics were declared heretics for less. Julian was wise — she placed all her insights within Christian orthodoxy, referred to church teaching, named herself "a simple woman." But the power of what she saw came through.

And equally important: it is not anti-masculine. Julian does not remove Father-God. She adds Mother-God. God is for her greater than the binary language of her time — and she dares to say so.

What this means for women now

You do not have to be Christian to be moved by Julian.

What she saw and wrote touches a universal problem: when the sacred or the divine or "the core of everything" is formulated exclusively in masculine terms, women lose a piece of access. Not because God is truly masculine. Because the words and images are only masculine.

Julian broke through that.

And she did not do it by rejecting Father-God. She did it by adding to it. By saying: look, this part — the carrying, nourishing, attuned — is also present. Let us call that mother, just as we call the other father.

For women struggling with a classical-religious background, that is a bridge. You do not have to choose between the tradition in which you grew up and a new feminine spirituality. Julian shows that they can lie beneath the language together. That feminine sacred and masculine sacred were both already present in the old sources — for whoever dared to look.

"All shall be well" as bodily practice

There is something particular about Julian's famous sentence that you may miss on first reading. She says it three times:

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Why three times? In the text itself she explains that the threefold repetition is not style, but content. The three repetitions stand for:

1. All now shall be well
2. All later shall be well
3. All manner of thing — every dimension, every layer, every scale — shall be well.

That is far more powerful than a simple optimistic phrase. It is a practice. A mantra, if you like. Something you do not say once, but breathe in threefold.

And it works as bodily practice:

Sit somewhere quietly. Breathe in. On the out-breath whisper, or think: all shall be well.

Second breath in. On the out-breath: and all shall be well.

Third breath in. On the out-breath: and all manner of thing shall be well.

Three breaths. Three repetitions. Nothing more.

That is an ancient feminine prayer practice, in one minute. You use no technique from the East. You use the voice of a woman from the English Middle Ages who saw this and wrote it down so that you could do it now.

What else she writes about

Julian's Revelations is a rich book. Besides the famous sentence and the mother-God passages, it contains:

Her vision of the hazelnut. In one of her visions Julian sees a small round thing in her hand, as large as a hazelnut. She asks what it is, and is told: "It is everything that is made." That is quite something. Everything that exists, summarized in something as small as a hazelnut. Keeping that intact, Julian writes, is possible "because God loves it."

Her teaching on sin. Julian's view of sin is nearly radical. She writes: "I saw no wrath in God." She saw that God simply does not have wrath — that this quality exists only in human experience and in our interpretations, not in what Julian truly saw.

Her understanding of "one-ing". Julian uses the particular verb one-ing (in her Middle English: oonyng) to describe what happens when a soul unites with God. Not merging. Not dissolving. Becoming one in a specific way — we remain we, God remains God, and yet we are one. That is what modern mystics now call non-duality, but Julian already had a verb for it 650 years ago.

The feminine line she carries forward

Julian does not stand alone. She belongs to a wave of female mystics who in the 12th–14th centuries appeared remarkably simultaneously in different parts of Europe:

• Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179, Germany) — the visionary
• Mechthild of Magdeburg (1207–1282, Germany) — beguine mystic
• Hadewijch of Antwerp (13th century, Netherlands/Belgium) — "minne" mystic
• Marguerite Porete (13th century, France) — burned for her book
• Teresa of Avila (1515–1582, Spain) — three centuries later, but in the same line

Each of them wrote something new that her male contemporaries had not written. Each was ignored, suppressed, or carefully marginalized in different ways. Porete's work was only recognized as hers again in 1946; Hadewijch's manuscript was only rediscovered in the 19th century; Julian's book only became widely accessible in the 20th century.

That is important to know. These voices were always there. They did not suddenly appear in our time. We are their listeners — not their inventors.

What you can take with you

If you take one thing from Julian: her threefold "all shall be well" is a practice that works.

Not because she says everything is okay. She does not say that.

She says: in the ultimate reality, beneath what you see now, something is at work that you cannot fully see now, and in time — not as heaven after this life, but as the deep structure of everything — wholeness will appear. You may rest on that, even when you do not know how now.

That is not cheap hope. That is tired wisdom.

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Going deeper

In Module IV — Schaduw & Schaamte, we use Julian's view of sin and her radical denial of divine wrath as textual counterweight in work with shame. Women who have walked through grief, shame, trauma stories often find in Julian a voice they had not heard before in Christian tradition — a voice that does not judge.

Trede 2 reads in week 9 the passage on "God as mother" aloud and works with how feminine images of the sacred can help you recognize your own motherly strength.