Pineridge Blog

I recently had a chance to engage with Mirabai Starr in an online meeting. Mirabai is a scholar, author and deeply faithful person whose work has been inspiring to me. Her translation of the The Showings of Julian of Norwich has especially touched me. Not only does she do an excellent job of preserving the beauty of the writings of this 14th century Mystic, but she also captures the spirit of Julian who through a near death experience fell in love with the God of love.

Julian lived and wrote during the worst pandemic in recorded history. During her lifetime Europe experience three rounds of Bubonic plague. Not much is known about Julian’s personal life, but even statistically speaking we can trust that she lost about half the people she knew and loved to the disease.

I asked Mirabai what she thought Julian would say to us in this time of pandemic and loss? She said, in Julian’s visions, “The risen Christ says to her three times, ‘All will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.’” He says it not just once, but three times to underscore the foundational truth. “But he also says, ‘You probably are not going to believe me right now because there is a lot of evidence to the contrary, but at some point you will know all has been well all along.’”
“And so the question is how do we take that it without it being some kind of spiritual bypass,” as an excuse to look away? Mirabai said, that a mentor of hers said, “’At some cosmic level it is all a perfect symphony, but the human curriculum is to alle-viate suffering wherever we find it.’ So it is coming to know that the all is well is an assurance that we are eternally loved and lovable in order to open our hearts to God and others.

Mirabai said finally, “What I am harvesting from Julian right now is resting in the knowing that all has been well all along so I can step up to alleviate suffering wherever I can. So that my service is rooted not in a desperate sense of the good guys and the bad guys, figuring out who are the ones who perpetrate harm and who are the victims, but in a knowingness in my heart of the essential goodness of all that is…. And resting in that place bringing peacefulness and hope to my activism.”