
While writing and researching, I came across a well-known statement by Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – after 1416), an English anchoress, mystic, and writer best known for her book Revelations of Divine Love. She lived during a time of plague, famine, and social upheaval, yet her writings express one of the most hopeful and inclusive visions of Christian spirituality in the Middle Ages.
Her central message is summed up in the famous phrase: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” She emphasized God’s love, mercy, and compassion over judgment, and she presented a deeply maternal vision of Christ and of God’s care for creation. She is often considered the first woman to write a book in English that has survived to the present day.
I contemplated this saying for a while. I sat with it in the chambers of my heart. It reminded me of an insight my son once had in a moment of deep spiritual clarity, when he heard within himself the words: “Everything is profoundly OK.” That insight brought him great comfort. It arose out of the grief he carried after the death of his mother, and at the time he shared it, we were at the funeral of my youngest daughter’s partner, who had been killed in an auto accident by a drunk driver. He hoped those words would bring her some solace in her own shattering grief. It took much more than a year before she could begin to breathe again.
The thing about Julian of Norwich’s saying is that her original statement leans toward the future. It offers reassurance that despite appearances, things shall be made well, which by implication suggests that all is not well in the present moment. As I continued to contemplate this, I came to the conclusion that the future tense brings little comfort. It denies the all-pervasiveness of the Great Harmony. The Divine is ever present everywhere, at all times—omniscient, omnipresent, all-pervading. I know this on a very deep level, as we all do, if we have ever touched the ground of our own being.
In deep strife and sorrow we struggle to find meaning. We grasp instead of letting go. Yet while all things have Divine meaning, most meaning does not translate into human meaning. Our sense of meaning is too small, too limited. The outpouring of Divine meaning is infinite, exquisitely beautiful, delicately poetic and vastly overwhelming to the human intellect. As individual beings we cannot absorb it all directly.
So, to bring Julian’s words closer to an embrace, I offer a restatement—shifting her pastoral promise into a cosmic axiom. With, of course, the caveat that: “Shit happens.”
Each of us must find our own way through. Healing takes time. Yet beneath our struggles, the whole Universe is working toward our maximal well-being. Still, it helps to remember that we are only a minuscule part of the Great Harmony. Precious and irreplaceable, yes, but serving a purpose larger than our own and that greater purpose is Life itself. To live with this awareness is to let go and to learn buoyancy, allowing ourselves to float in the vastness of what is profoundly, immeasurably well.
All is Profoundly Well Beyond Measure
“All is well, all has ever been well, all shall ever be well, profoundly well beyond measure. All things rise and fall, all are born and pass away, all struggle and take rest, all suffer and heal, all feel sorrow and joy, all cry and laugh and in the midst of all, all is ever well, profoundly well beyond measure. Rest assured in that.”
“All is well, all has ever been well, all shall ever be well, profoundly well beyond measure.”
These words are not a denial of change or suffering, but an affirmation of something deeper than change itself. They do not claim that life will always be easy, or that loss will never visit us. Rather, they speak of a ground beneath the shifting surface, a current that carries both storm and calm, both birth and death, within its vast embrace. The Great Harmony does not always appear harmonious. It is always adjusting, rebalancing and recycling.
All things rise and fall. The tides of existence know no permanence. Civilizations flourish and fade, stars ignite and collapse, friendships blossom and wither. To see this rise and fall is to glimpse the rhythm of creation in its infinite uniqueness, a dance without beginning or end.
All are born and pass away. Being born is a terminal condition. Every creature that enters the world must one day depart it. Yet this passage is not a flaw in being but its very form. Life is not a possession we can cling to but a flow we move through. Birth and death are not opposites but two gestures of the same hand.
All struggle and take rest. Every life contends with difficulty, yet every life also tastes reprieve. Struggle does not cancel rest, nor rest erase struggle. Each illuminates the other, teaching us the value of persistence and the grace of surrender.
All suffer and heal. Pain carves its marks into every body, every memory. Yet healing also arrives, sometimes in flesh, sometimes only in spirit. Even scars, long after their wounds are closed, can glimmer with a strange beauty—the reminder that brokenness can nurture strength and resilience.
All feel sorrow and joy. These twins walk together, teaching us tenderness. To know one is to be opened to the other. Sorrow deepens the vessel; joy fills it. Together they remind us that feeling itself is the gift, the raw pulse of being alive.
All cry and laugh. The voice at times trembles with grief, at other times bursts with mirth. To cry and laugh is to breathe the full atmosphere of humanity. One sound pours out our loneliness, the other our communion. Both are holy, both are necessary in their turn.
And in the midst of all, all is ever well. This is the paradox: not that suffering ceases, not that loss is erased, but that beneath the constant change there abides an unchanging wholeness. To rest in that is not to escape the world but to see it more truly. Wellness is not measured by circumstances but by the dimensions of its depth in which circumstances unfold.
Profoundly well beyond measure. This is the final assurance, the hidden axis around which all turning occurs. To know it is to find peace not after the storm but within it. To feel it is to breathe with the earth itself, which has known rise and fall, growth and destruction for eons, yet remains whole and strives ever onward.
Rest assured in that.