After this He showed a most excellent spiritual pleasure in my soul: I was completely filled with everlasting certainty, powerfully sustained without any painful fear. This feeling was so joyful and so spiritual that I was wholly in peace and in repose and there was nothing on earth that would have grieved me.
This lasted only a while, and I was changed and left to myself in such sadness and weariness of my life, and annoyance with myself that scarcely was I able to have patience to live. There was no comfort nor any ease for me except faith, hope, and love, and these I held in truth (but very little in feeling). And immediately after this, our Blessed Lord gave me again the comfort and the rest in my soul, in delight and in security so blissful and so powerful that no fear, no sorrow, no bodily pain that could be suffered would have distressed me. And then the pain showed again to my feeling, and then the joy and the delight, and now the one, and now the other, various times-I suppose about twenty times. And in the times of joy, I could have said with Saint Paul “Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ.” And in the pain I could have said with Peter: “Lord, save me, I perish.”
This vision was shown me, for my understanding, that it is advantageous for some souls to feel this way sometime to be in comfort, and sometimes to fail and to be left by themselves. God wants us to know that He protects us equally surely in woe and in well. . . . But freely our Lord gives when He wishes, and permits us to be in woe sometimes. And both are one love, for it is God’s will that we keep us in this comfort with all our might, because bliss is lasting without end, and pain is passing and shall be brought to nothing for those who shall be saved.
Julian of Norwich
Showings 15
