“And all manner of thing shall be well.” --Julian of Norwich
If there is one quasi-religious spiritual slogan I despise, it is everything happens for a reason. “Nothing happens in God’s universe by accident.” Try telling someone who just lost a child to a drunk driver that everything happens for a reason. Try consoling a husband who lost both his wife and newborn child in delivery with “God has a plan.” If it were me, I may not be able to resist the impulse to punch you. I am sorry, but there is a beauty in randomness and there is also danger. Accidents happen, evil happens and there is no easy explanation. It cannot be dismissed with a platitude.
However, in the face of evil, in the face of darkness and tragedy we can find meaning. Perhaps (or likely) we will not find it, not immediately. Pain and grief are the natural response to tragic events. There is a radical vulnerability to being human and sadness is correlative to joy. As much as we may want the supposed comfort of invulnerability, to be invulnerable is to be alone. To love is to be in relationship.
There is a risky-ness and a cost to love. To love is to participate in God’s own life. It is a gift of Godself to us. There is cost to love that even God experienced. True love is a giving away of self which is so radical as to entail death. Jesus Christ showed us God’s willingness to love in the face of darkness and persecution and pain when he freely chose to die on Golgotha. God atoned humanity. God entered into human living and lauging, and suffering by living a human life. God and humanity are at-one-d . Jesus was and is God’s love incarnate- God’s love made flesh.
There is so much more to the Incarnation than anything that we could ever say about it. Honestly I am certain that I do not understand the crucifixion. It doesn’t make sense. Couldn’t God come up with a better way to expiate the sin of the human race? Is there a more peaceful way to show the depth of God’s love? It is mystery, in that I could never exhaust the meaning in it no matter how much I knew, or how much I said. I am left to love, to enter into that life. How utterly frightening!
In the 14th century in Norwich lived a woman who entered into that life in a profound (mystical) way. She left behind one of the most subversive texts written in English, yet one which is utterly orthodox in its faith: a radical orthodoxy, if you will. She wrote Revelations of Divine Love or simply the Showings. She experienced visions of God so profound, she spent 20 years praying and reflecting on them. In one the Lord spoke to her and said, “And you will see yourself that every kind of thing will be well.” She goes on to say about this, “It is God’s will that we should know in general that all will be well., but it is not God’s will that we should know it now except as it applies to us for the present, and that is the teaching of Holy Church.”
So it all will be well in the end, but it is not all well now. And sometimes the reason for things appears to be entirely inadequate, unless we work with others to give it reason, to find meaning or perhaps assign meaning. Respond in a new way to the same old sad stories. I love the way T.S. Eliot wove this writing into his masterpiece poem Little Gidding, the fourth poem of Four Quartets. He ends it this way:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
And that is good news…
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