October 18, 2026

Loved Into Being

It lasteth, and ever shall last for that God loveth it.

Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century English anchoress who lived walled into a small cell attached to a church in Norwich, having devoted her life to prayer after surviving a near-fatal illness in 1373. During that illness she received a series of visions, which she spent the next twenty years writing down as Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving book in English written by a woman. In one vision she was shown something as small as a hazelnut resting in her palm and told it was all that is made; she marveled that something so small and fragile could endure, and was told it lasts simply because God loves it. That image is a quiet way to meet a new day, since nothing, including this morning, holds together by its own strength alone.