Faithful Skeptic

(x = space)

Faithful Skeptic

(spiritual humanist)

I sin

And then I go to church

How does that work?

We sing that it is well,

Which Saint Julian proposes

We pray for the world

And for concerns

In the parish

We sing some more

We’ll pray some more

Then there will be teaching

(word and sacrament

for those who have sacraments)

Through it all,

We’re singing now

And thank goodness there is

Justice in that

Mingled with grace and mercy

Through sin and virtue

Through indifference and zeal

Through exhaustion and desire

There is something

Going on,

Something moving

Call it spirit

Call it the orbit of the Earth

And the pressing down of gravity

Call it God’s

Call it nature’s

Call it ours

And, yes, through it all

It is well

C L Couch

Saint Julian of Norwich is a saint in the Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran churches. Other traditional Protestant churches recognize her standing. Many Christians of all kinds respect her work in parish service and the service of the Christian Church, overall. Her name is not known: she is called Julian because that was the name of the church in Norwich, England where she lived. She had a cell there, not a jail cell but a hermit’s. She had a cat. Each day people of the town would come to her to speak with her through a window, asking her for wisdom and advice. I’m sorry, I should have mentioned that she lived and worked from the latter decades of the fourteenth century into the first years of the fifteenth century.

She wrote Revelations of Divine Love, a widely-read spiritual text. It is also taken as the oldest book written in English by a woman. Two things Julian is popularly known for asserting are the metaphor of the world as a hazelnut (long before William Blake asserted perceiving the world as and through a grain of sand). And she claimed that, no matter how grim or unhopeful or destructive the world might seem, all shall be well. She says this many times.

And all shall be well.

Photo by Külli Kittus on Unsplash