All Shall Be Well

Four Weeks With Julian of Norwich

More than 650 years ago, a thirty-year-old woman lay dying of the Black Plague. A priest had already administered her last rites and placed a crucifix at the foot of her bed, expecting she would soon join the countless others who had perished around her.

She didn’t die.

Instead, Julian of Norwich awoke from a series of profound mystical visions that would consume the next twenty years of her life. In an age when nearly everyone around her interpreted plague, suffering, and death as evidence of God’s wrath, Julian searched her visions for signs of divine anger. She couldn’t find it.

That absence became one of the most revolutionary spiritual insights in Christian history. From the solitude of a tiny stone cell where she lived as an anchoress, Julian wrote Revelations of Divine Love—the first known book in English written by a woman—and gave the world a sentence that continues to comfort seekers six and a half centuries later:

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

How could someone who had witnessed so much suffering arrive at such an audacious conclusion?

Join me for four live online classes as we step into the life and teachings of Julian of Norwich, not simply to understand what she discovered, but to explore how her revelations might illuminate our own lives today. Together we’ll ask why her vision of divine love may be more relevant now than ever.

4 Weeks

Julian’s visions invite us to question the image of a God separate from ourselves, the assumption that suffering is punishment, and the deeply conditioned habit of dividing life into good and bad, sacred and ordinary, God and world. Rather than asking us to believe something new, her revelations invite us to see what has always been present beneath fear, identity, and separation.

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Week One: The Collapse That Opened Her
What has to give way before anything else can be seen?

We begin with the world Julian was born into: the Black Plague, the theology she inherited, and the extraordinary prayer she made in her twenties asking to experience the very illness that eventually brought her to the edge of death. How does a woman surrounded by suffering emerge with a vision of love rather than divine punishment? Together we’ll examine the assumptions we inherit about God, suffering, and ourselves—and discover how Julian quietly dismantles them.

Week Two: The Hazelnut
Julian is shown something the size of a hazelnut resting in her palm and is told it is everything that has ever been made. Her first response is fear that something so small could not survive. What she is shown next transforms her understanding of reality, moving beyond devotion into something far older, deeper, and more universal. Julian’s revelations challenge the mind’s habit of creating enemies, assigning blame, and searching for reasons. We’ll explore what becomes possible when experience is met before it is interpreted.

Week Three: She Could Not Find Wrath
This is the revelation that occupied Julian for twenty years: the parable she could not fully understand, her startling claim that what we call sin has no substance of its own, and her inability to find the wrathful God she had been taught to expect. This week will challenge anyone raised to believe otherwise. What if divine love is not something we earn, seek, or receive, but the very nature of reality itself? Together we’ll explore Julian’s most profound insights alongside the direct recognition found within the nondual traditions.

Week Four: All Shall Be Well
Julian’s most remembered words have often been mistaken for optimism or reassurance. They are neither. We will explore what they meant to her, what they cannot be reduced to, and what they ask of us today. Why would a woman who had glimpsed beyond the veil choose to spend the rest of her life in a small cell with a window opening onto an ordinary street, listening to the joys and sorrows of everyday people? Perhaps “All shall be well” is not a promise that life will unfold according to our preferences, but a description of what is recognized when awareness is no longer identified with fear—and what it might mean to live from that recognition.