Oct 25 Wed
March 13, 1373 was an important day in the life of Lady Julian of Norwich. She recovered from a life-threatening illness, during which she claimed to have had sixteen visions from Our Lord. She recorded them in a text today known as "Revelations of Divine Love". Many call it the first surviving English text by a woman.
One of Julian’s visions is evoked in a Norwich church by a small table with a hazelnut on it:
… And in this, He [Christ] showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, “What may this be?” And it was answered, “It is all that is made.”
I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.
In this little thing I saw three properties:
The first is that God made it.
The second that God loves it. And
the third, that God keeps it.
The tiny hazel nut is all creation, “all things visible and invisible” as the Creed puts it. For us, so often seduced by the world, the flesh, and the devil, the fact that all of creation in all its splendors can be contained in a single hazel nut puts things in perspective, a Divine perspective.
Julian’s commentary on the “three properties” of creation likewise deserves our attention. “God made it.” Creation is not a chance or an accident, the fortuitous emergence of Shakespeare from a typewriter pounded by monkeys. It is a plan, a plan of Wisdom. Creation is, as Joseph Ratzinger puts it, a “divine project.”
Nor is God some cold intellect, a supernatural Spock “ordering” things. What God does, He does out of love because He Is Love. The revelation Julian claims to have received affirms that: what exists does so because “God loves it.” God is not indifferent to His Divine Project. His Divine plan is in fact intended to advance our salvation and the universe with us, because salvation is nothing more (or less) than God drawing back, in freedom, what He loves to Himself, i.e., to a communion of persons.
Finally, “God keeps it.” People today tend to overlook providence as an essential dimension of the theology of Creation. Although modernity babbles a lot about “sustainability,” it frequently overlooks the fact that, without God’s sustaining it, the splendorous hazel nut of Creation would all revert to nothingness.
Fragment by John M. Grondelski
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