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Good Morning It wasn’t that long ago that, in the West at least, reports of widespread plagues, the outbreak of war or general upheaval and unrest felt like something you would read in a history book rather than experience in real life. Nowadays, in a world that has known the Covid pandemic, is currently rocked by countless wars and feels more fearful than I have ever known it to be, to say that we live in turbulent times, feels like something of an understatement. Today, the Church of England commemorates Julian of Norwich, a female saint named after the church – St Julian’s – in Norwich where she lived in the 14th and 15th centuries. Julian’s world was, like ours, beset with plagues, revolts and uprisings. On this day, the 8th of May, in 1373, Julian was herself gravely ill and thought she was about to die, when she had a series of visions of Christ which spoke to her of God’s love. After she recovered, she wrote them in a book – Revelations of Divine Love – which was the first book in the English language written by a woman. The best known and best loved quote by Julian is ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well’ but I have to admit that I have never really liked it as a saying. While I know what she means -- that beyond all the suffering and pain of life, eventually all will be well, held in the love of God – it can feel as though it trivialises whatever we might be going through right now. ‘What’, I always want to respond, ‘if it isn’t all well? What then?’ Although I may not much like her most famous saying, Julian’s wisdom still speaks to me through the ages. Her writings talk powerfully of the never-ending love of God but also of facing illness and difficulty. In her Revelations she notes that God did not say to her ‘you shall not be tormented, you shall not be troubled, you shall not be discomforted,’ but God did say ‘You shall not be overcome’. What Julian knew personally was that life is full of joy and of sorrow; full of love and of loss; full of good things and of those we dread with every fibre of our being. What she also knew was that no matter what happened she was known and loved and kept by God. What shines through everything that she wrote is her certainty about God’s love which surrounds us all no matter what life throws at us.