Dame Julian’s “Showings” and life’s challenging road
PATRICK S. WOLFE
Statue of Dame Julian of Norwich at Norwich Cathedral, England. Statue by David Holgate FSDC. Photo credit: rocketjohn (July 24, 2010). Via: commons.wikimedia
If you’re like me, you’ve experienced how life’s road can be going along smoothly when, without warning, it turns rocky. Sometimes the reason or reasons for the change can be gleaned, sometimes not. What is indisputable is the change and the newly bumpy ride. Then, another transition, and the road is smooth again.
On Sept. 6, 2025, Cathy Carphin wrote a Faith Forum article in the Times Colonist newspaper entitled “Looking back at midlife, do you see God’s hand in your life?” in which she observed that, upon looking back, she “was surprised by the thought that I was being looked after by a divine force.” I appreciate Cathy’s question and the thought that prompted it. Four years ago, I penned a Faith Forum piece called “Visible and invisible: The interlacing of worlds,” which covered some of the same ground.[1] While it spoke of “enigmatic moments” that people tend to shelve, it also addressed the notable frequency of people experiencing the presence of a dead loved one, most of whom don’t speak of the experience for fear of being “pathologized.”
To these threads—the relative roughness of the road we’re on and the interlacing of worlds—I want to add a third: a specific aspect of the magic of books. Whether it’s synchronicity or a form of divine intervention, people as diverse as monk-author Thomas Merton and actor Jane Fonda have spoken about how the right book has turned up at the right time for them.[2] In the 1990s, a good friend told me a copy of Joan Borysenko’s Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism “jumped out at her from the bookstore shelf where it had sat,” which is how it helpfully came to my attention.[3]
To draw these threads together, I need to refer to a book I gave my mother, for it illustrates a variation on the timely “arrival” of a special book. That book is Showings by Julian of Norwich, which is better known as Revelations of Divine Love by “Dame Julian,” a 14th-century anchoress in Norwich, England.[4]
Showings didn’t fire my interest when I gifted it decades ago. This changed earlier this year when I reread a 2019 essay about Dame Julian. Although the 20th and 21st centuries qualify as apocalyptic based on the perceived threats of one or more of nuclear weapons, global warming and potentially achieving Artificial General Intelligence, the essay argued that “If ever there were an apocalyptic century,” it was the 14th because of the Black Death which “ravaged across the world from China to England, killing an estimated one-third of the population.”[5] This prompted me to read more about Dame Julian, which led me back to Showings—now the right book at the right time—which I gave a close reading over several months.
Dame Julian is renowned for her optimistic belief that “All will be well.” As for the oscillating nature of the road of life and the hidden influence of the spiritual world on the material, she has much to say. The seventh of the sixteen revelations she received addressed our “frequent experiences of well-being and woe.”[6] She says life is “a marvellous mixture” of these qualities and that “we remain in this mixture all the days of our life.”[7] In pursuing the truth of our “own person,” sometimes “sweetness is hidden, [and] we fall again into blindness, and so in various ways into woe and tribulation.”[8] Yet as we proceed through “this changeable life,”[9] she repeatedly emphasizes that we are protected, but we are often unaware of this protection.[10]
Showings is an immeasurably rich work with deep relevance for a world increasingly unsettled by humanity’s trajectory.
Patrick Wolfe, “Visible and invisible: The interlacing of worlds,” Times Colonist, Saturday, August 7, 2021, C6. ↑
In The Sign of Jonas (1953), Thomas Merton writes: “There are times when ten pages of some book fall under your eye just at the moment when your very life, it seems, depends on your reading those ten pages. You recognize in them immediately the answer to all your most pressing questions. They open a new road.” In My Life So Far (2006), Jane Fonda states (556): “Often during periods of transition in my life people or books have appeared, like miracles, to teach me what I need to learn.” ↑
Joan Borysenko, Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism, Warner Books, 1993. ↑
Julian of Norwich, Showings, Translated from the critical text with an introduction by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A. and James Walsh, S.J., Paulist Press, New York, Ramsey, Toronto, 1978. ↑
David Spangler, “All Will Be Well,” David’s Desk #144 (a monthly letter to subscribers), Lorian Association, 2019. ↑
Showings (261) says: “And the rejoicing in his sight with this true hope of his merciful protection made me have feeling and comfort, so that the mourning and fear were not very painful. And still in all this I contemplated in this revelation by God that this kind of vision of him cannot persist in this life…. often we fail to perceive him, and presently we fall back upon ourselves, and then we find that we feel nothing at all but the opposition that is in ourselves…” ↑
Dame Julian’s “Showings” and life’s challenging road
Dame Julian’s “Showings” and life’s challenging road
PATRICK S. WOLFE
Statue of Dame Julian of Norwich at Norwich Cathedral, England. Statue by David Holgate FSDC. Photo credit: rocketjohn (July 24, 2010). Via: commons.wikimedia
If you’re like me, you’ve experienced how life’s road can be going along smoothly when, without warning, it turns rocky. Sometimes the reason or reasons for the change can be gleaned, sometimes not. What is indisputable is the change and the newly bumpy ride. Then, another transition, and the road is smooth again.
On Sept. 6, 2025, Cathy Carphin wrote a Faith Forum article in the Times Colonist newspaper entitled “Looking back at midlife, do you see God’s hand in your life?” in which she observed that, upon looking back, she “was surprised by the thought that I was being looked after by a divine force.” I appreciate Cathy’s question and the thought that prompted it. Four years ago, I penned a Faith Forum piece called “Visible and invisible: The interlacing of worlds,” which covered some of the same ground.[1] While it spoke of “enigmatic moments” that people tend to shelve, it also addressed the notable frequency of people experiencing the presence of a dead loved one, most of whom don’t speak of the experience for fear of being “pathologized.”
To these threads—the relative roughness of the road we’re on and the interlacing of worlds—I want to add a third: a specific aspect of the magic of books. Whether it’s synchronicity or a form of divine intervention, people as diverse as monk-author Thomas Merton and actor Jane Fonda have spoken about how the right book has turned up at the right time for them.[2] In the 1990s, a good friend told me a copy of Joan Borysenko’s Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism “jumped out at her from the bookstore shelf where it had sat,” which is how it helpfully came to my attention.[3]
To draw these threads together, I need to refer to a book I gave my mother, for it illustrates a variation on the timely “arrival” of a special book. That book is Showings by Julian of Norwich, which is better known as Revelations of Divine Love by “Dame Julian,” a 14th-century anchoress in Norwich, England.[4]
Showings didn’t fire my interest when I gifted it decades ago. This changed earlier this year when I reread a 2019 essay about Dame Julian. Although the 20th and 21st centuries qualify as apocalyptic based on the perceived threats of one or more of nuclear weapons, global warming and potentially achieving Artificial General Intelligence, the essay argued that “If ever there were an apocalyptic century,” it was the 14th because of the Black Death which “ravaged across the world from China to England, killing an estimated one-third of the population.”[5] This prompted me to read more about Dame Julian, which led me back to Showings—now the right book at the right time—which I gave a close reading over several months.
Dame Julian is renowned for her optimistic belief that “All will be well.” As for the oscillating nature of the road of life and the hidden influence of the spiritual world on the material, she has much to say. The seventh of the sixteen revelations she received addressed our “frequent experiences of well-being and woe.”[6] She says life is “a marvellous mixture” of these qualities and that “we remain in this mixture all the days of our life.”[7] In pursuing the truth of our “own person,” sometimes “sweetness is hidden, [and] we fall again into blindness, and so in various ways into woe and tribulation.”[8] Yet as we proceed through “this changeable life,”[9] she repeatedly emphasizes that we are protected, but we are often unaware of this protection.[10]
Showings is an immeasurably rich work with deep relevance for a world increasingly unsettled by humanity’s trajectory.
Text copyright © 2025 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved. Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.
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