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# The Mystic Of The Plague
- URL: https://seeingbeyond.tech/the-mystic-of-the-plague/
- Published: 2026-10-06T19:19:22.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-06T19:19:22.000Z
- Description: Renowned mystic Julian of Norwich was around six years old when the Black Death broke out in England. Wagons full of the dead, the sounds of the sick and dying, and the terror of everyday exchanges must have been as familiar to her as normalcy is to us.
- Author: Diane T Adams
- Tags: #Threshold Diaries, Threshold Diaries

Renowned mystic Julian of Norwich was around six years old when the Black Death broke out in England. Wagons full of the dead, the sounds of the sick and dying, and the terror of everyday exchanges must have been as familiar to her as normalcy is to us. Surely such conditions shaped her future, perhaps in surprising ways.

It is said by the sages that the darkest nights bring the brightest dawns. In a society that had become completely destabilized by the plague, and by the shortages and hardships that came with a disordered and reduced population, Julian began to have visions from God. She wrote her first manuscript, *Revelations of Divine Love*, after suffering a severe illness around the age of 30.

Afterward, Julian dedicated herself to God. She lived the rest of her life as an anchorite, a religious devotee living in isolation. Julian was enclosed in a tiny stone cell attached to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich. From a slit in her cell, she participated in the activities of the church and became a counselor to many who were in distress and despair.

Julian of Norwich expanded her writings on divine love, a concept that in the late 14th century was not well understood, and one that might have been difficult for the survivors of the plague to believe. Nonetheless, she spoke and wrote about the nearness of divine love, the meaning of Christ’s Passion, and the ultimate coherence of all things in God.

In her visions, she saw the crucifix bleed, the crown of thorns, and the changing color of Christ’s face. She also received quieter revelations, among them the famous image of a hazelnut lying in the palm of her hand. Asked what it was, she was told that it was all that is made. It endured, she understood, because God loves it, keeps it, and made it. The smallness of creation relative to its Maker becomes, in her reading, not a reason for contempt but a ground of trust.

Everything that exists is held, and nothing held by love can finally be lost. From this conviction flows her most characteristic teaching. Sin exists, and she does not deny its harm, yet she insists that it has no substance of its own. In one of the showings, she is told that sin is “behovely,” necessary or fitting within the larger economy, because it occasions the compassion and the remedy that display God’s love more fully.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” is Julian of Norwich’s most enduring phrase. Julian lived through the Black Death and the subsequent social upheavals of her day, yet believed in the most positive message perhaps ever to come from the Church of Rome: All will be well. This assurance, born in one of the darkest periods in human history, has comforted many for hundreds of years after her death.

It is a message from the 14th century to us today. In our own time, when so much fear, and even talk of plagues, surrounds us once again, we can trace the same road Julian of Norwich blazed when she began to deeply meditate on the love of Christ and the birth of creation in the midst of unimaginable disaster. At the end of meditation, we can find the same message taught by Norwich centuries ago.

All will indeed be well.