10. Julian of Norwich Had a Near Death Vision From God | John Ortberg

"All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

HERE'S HOW:
Reflect on the things in your life, or this world, that are not “well”. We invite you today to remember the sovereign rule and power of God, to remember his pervasive goodness, to remember Christ’s victorious death and resurrection. With this in mind, we invite you to speak these words from Julian of Norwich aloud: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Amen.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to the Become New Podcast with John Ortberg. Hi, my name is Ginny, and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I'm a listener just like you. We are on a journey to grow spiritually a little bit each day as we engage with teaching from our friend John. So we invite you to join us. Subscribe and tune in each weekday. Now here's John.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

How will your story end? Everybody has a story. Everybody's stories matter. Nobody gets to have the story they want. We all wonder what the ending of the story will be. I am not a psychic, although California is reputed to have many of them. I have much more reliable information on this. On May 8, 1373, in the city of Norwich, a priest is called to administer last rites to a woman who has lain near death for three days. He brings a boy in a crucifix with him. The cross is most likely made of wood, with the carved figure of the crucified Jesus impaled upon it. When he arrives, the priest finds a young woman just thirty years of age on her bed near death. This is when the black plague was again revisiting England. She is unable to move or change expression. The scene may be new to the boy, but not to the priest. He has witnessed it too many times. His part has become routine. Boy lifts the crucifix. The priest says, Daughter, look upon him who died for you and me. She doesn't respond. All the feeling is gone from below the waist. Now the upper part of her body is beginning to die. Her arms are limp on the bedclothes. She can only obey the priest and lift her gaze onto the cross. How long can the boy hold it steady? She will not imagine a heaven that exists apart from this cross. No golden street, no clouds, no pearly gates. She thinks I choose Jesus as my heaven. The room is growing dim for her, except an ordinary household light that clings to the crucifix. With her eyes fixed upon it, she waits, and then something begins to happen. She begins to see, she begins to have a vision of Jesus and his suffering. Her mom closes her eyes and she is saddened because she wants to see what's happening, but this vision goes on and she doesn't die. Eventually she would recover and live on for many decades, and she would write a book about this, Revelation of uh Divine Showings, it's sometimes called. And um it was the first book published in the English language by a woman. You might have heard of her. We know her as Julian of Norwich. But if you're thinking, um, I'm pretty insignificant, I will never be known, my life doesn't matter much. We actually don't know her name at all. She got the name Julian from the church, St. Julian's, who's actually named for a man. Um, we have no idea who she was. We'd know nothing about her. Was she married? Did she have children? What was her life like? Um, she remains the unnamed anonymous woman, but she had a vision that stirs the world to this day, and I want to share out of that vision for you today, one image for you to hold on to, and then one task for you to accept. Here's part of what she would write about what she experienced on that one occasion when she was 30 and she almost died. She never had experiences like this again later on. She didn't ask for them, they just came to her. They were deeply mysterious. Frank Laubeck said one time, it's my favorite definition of a mystic. A mystic is somebody who believes that when you talk to God, God can call back. God can talk back. God sometimes does talk back. That's a mystic. She wrote, In the same revelation, suddenly the Trinity filled my heart full of the greatest joy, and I understood that it will feel like that in heaven. For the Trinity is God, God is the Trinity. The Trinity is our maker, our protector, our endless lover, our endless joy and bliss. At the same time as I saw this sight of uh the blood of Jesus, our good Lord showed a spiritual sight of his familiar love. I saw that he is to us everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces and shelters us, surrounds us, for his love is so tender that he may never desert us. Paul talks about clothing yourself in compassion, in love. So when you put on clothes, just think it is God who ever since Adam and Eve has been clothing human beings, and he does that with you, with his love and with me. And then she writes this. And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought, what can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness, it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding, it lasts and always will, because God loves it, and thus everything that has being through the love of God, that little hazelnut she came to understand, kind of stood for, all that has been made, and it rests in the hand of God. Now this is the image, and it has to do with the size and the competence and the love and the care of God. Often we think that uh God is kind of like the figure that you see in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and that he lives in this enormous universe. No, no, no, no, no. The universe is the size of a hazelnut, and it lives in the hand of this enormous God. God is much bigger than the universe, so running the universe is no problem to God. It only continues to exist because it rests in the palm of his hand. That is the God to whom we pray. And Julian of Norwich, who almost dies in the midst of the Black Death, ends up writing these remarkable words. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. But now we have to understand those are not untethered words of uh unrooted optimism. This is not just this is not a message that says things will turn out the way that you want them to turn out in a time of greatest angst and suffering and pain and fear in my own life. The f it was not helpful to me, and it still isn't when people will come sometimes and predict that circumstances will end up the way that I want them to. Or that other people will end up making decisions that I want them to make. I don't find that particularly helpful. The thought that was really helpful was not it will be okay, but we will be okay. And there is a foundation for that. All that is is the size of a hazelnut and the hand of God. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. And then a part of this vision is the nature of the goodness of the one who holds us. By the time of Julian of Norwich, people had been writing and reflecting on the parable of the Good Samaritan for centuries. And from the time of Augustine all, Lisha writes about this, they would often think about that as a little parable of the human condition. That in that story, the guy that gets beaten up and ends up in a ditch on the side of the road is kind of Adam, kind of Eve, kind of like all of us, and Jesus is the Good Samaritan who will rescue and will save. And Julian of Norwich begins the story in that direction, and then it takes a sudden turn, and all of a sudden it's Jesus lying in the ditch. It's Jesus who comes to us without the kind of protective gear that would keep him from suffering. And so the plague, the black death, sin, guilt, death, he takes. He's the one that ends up in the ditch alongside of us to let us know that we are loved by God, that God suffers with us, that all shall be well. And then that leads to an assignment. It's very strange. This is very strange. Julian lived in a different way, that day, a different day than us. At some point after her illness, this unnamed woman made a momentous decision. She chose to become an anchoress and to live permanently in the anchor hold of St. Julian's Church in Norwich. Now, an anchorite or an anchorist was different than a hermit. A hermit was somebody who was going to live on their own, but they were free to travel from place to place. They were kind of a free agent, they were kind of a nomad that could pick up and leave anytime. Uh, an anchorite, an anchorist was someone who chose to commit themselves to being in a church. They would live in a cell surrounded by four cells, and they would be there permanently so that they might in that place come to know God. And so that paradoxically, in that place, they would become available to anybody who wanted them. They would always be there. Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single seed. But if it falls into the ground and dies, if it's buried, it will bear much fruit, and that's what Julian If Nowitz did. And there would be a little window leading out to the street and one that was available to people who came to the church and they could come to her. So she became a spiritual director and a mentor and a prayer and a confessor and a friend and someone who poured out her life for the sake of other people. So the assignment today is how can I bless you? I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday named Greg, and he said, when he goes to the gym, he'll just think that question, how can I bless you for the people? And then the goal is to learn to say that to everybody in my life as I go all through my day. He was telling me he had just met friends, and he and his wife decided we'll have them over for dinner. Um, what he didn't know was that their new friends were Jewish. What the friends didn't know was Greg had fixed them pork chops for dinner. And that actually ended up leading into a really rich, very deep spiritual conversation. Um, Julian of Norwich, out of the hope and the security and the confidence, here's the image. Everything that is is a little hazelnut in the hand of this enormous and good God. All shall be well. Whatever you are going through, I am not telling you that circumstances will turn out the way that you want them to. You name what it is that you're dealing with, your suffering, your battle today. Circumstances may be hard until you die. She encloses herself in a little cell in a church out of the outrageous optimism, out of the infinite, grounded hope that because of our God, because Jesus ends up in the ditch next to us, because he takes on the plague together with us, all shall be well, all should be well. We are blessed in order to be a blessing. Who can I bless today? Who can you bless today? I don't know what your story is gonna be in this world. I know the end of it. The end of it is all shall be well, and all should be well. This is my story.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

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