Julian of Norwich and Hope

Hope is not looking on the bright side of things, although looking on the bright side doesn't hurt. Hope is not optimism. Optimism predicts that things are going to be okay. Hope is something different. When I think about hope it is helpful for me to reference Julian of Norwich. For her Hope always rests not on the circumstances of our life, but on who God is and who God has promised to be. One of my most treasured lines from Julian is the following:


“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

A good friend of mine and one of the greatest teachers I ever studied with, Amy Laura Hall, recently wrote a wise and wonderful book on Julian of Norwich. I had the privilege of reviewing it here.

The book is a powerful reflection on what Julian's theology means to our present moment and Julian's work becomes all the more prescient in the time of an epidemic. Julian was writing in the shadow of the great plague. Her own window into the sufferings of Jesus were shaped in part by her own travail of sickness.

Julian insists that Christians see God as not only "all powerful" and "all knowing," but also as all-loving (Hall calls this God's omniamnity) In Julian's words:

"Love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ending."

That God is ALL LOVE provides a shape to Christian Hope. Julian's hope is a significant departure from a vision of Christian hope that merely relies on an account of God's power and providence. Hall claims that a vision of Christian hope that places all its eggs in the eschatological basket (things will work out in the end) downplays the drama and the beauty of each individual life. What Hall's account of Julian seeks to recover is the deep personalism of God. Julian envision a God who is powerful enough to hold the entire world like a woman holding a hazelnut, but who is also present with us in each breath and through each of our very human sighs.

As Julian writes in a well known passage:

"He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God."


Hope is not founded only on an eschatological promise that God will make a way for all creation to be with God at some future moment. Hope also rests in the assurance that God is even RIGHT now loving us each into being--each breath we breathe in God and through God.

Hope is not simply looking on the bright side of things and yet I cannot deny that to be hopeful is to be constantly looking for signs of God presence within us and all around. As Jesus would say: look to the lilies of the field; look to the sparrow and remember somehow that God has counted all the hairs on your head.

Finally, something that I am really struggling with is this: is hope something that we do? Or, rather, is hope something that God accomplishes within us? I think that it must be the latter. For Julian hope rest in the absolute fact of the universe that despite all evidence to the contrary that God holds us all firmly and that God has never and will never let us go.

I will find hope in this even if I am not optimistic.