All Shall Be Well
August 13, 2000
Church of the Crossroads, Honolulu, HI
by Phyllis Roe
Jeremiah 29: 11-13
John 14: 15-17, 25-27
"All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things will be well." These words were first shared by a woman whom we have come to know as Julian of Norwich, her real name being lost to history, a 14th century English mystic. Julian was no stranger to pain and suffering. At age 30 she contracted a painful illness which nearly killed her. During this time of suffering she had a vision of God's love and goodness that changed her life. She devoted her life to a deeper knowledge of God and to praying for God's goodness to touch the sufferings of the world. She wrote of the visions which came to her in what is now published as The Revelation of Divine Love. These words "all shall be well" were ones she heard Jesus say to her one day and she found them enormously comforting.
This phrase has become well known as it obviously touches something in many people that needs comforting. And yet, on a bad day, when you have just learned that you have cancer, or a dearly loved person has died, or you are experiencing intractable conflict in a situation you care about, or sitting with a person who has been through the heart of darkness, these words may seem too easy, even glib. I can imagine, at certain heartbreaking times of my life, wanting to hit someone who said to me that all will be well, because at the moment I could not see how it could possibly be that anything would ever be well again.
Julian was no cockeyed optimist. She did not come by these words lightly. And she did not mean them in any way to cover over the fact that there is real suffering and heartbreak and darkness in this world. What she knew only because she had experienced it in a moment of her own darkness is that at the heart of darkness and who would ever believe this? there is peace and joy unimaginable because we are loved by God. She wrote: "God made us, God loves us and God preserves us. God's goodness comes down to us to meet our humblest needs. It gives life to our souls and makes them live and grow in grace and virtue. It is near in nature and swift in grace, for it is the same grace which our souls seek and always will."
This is not an affirmation that one can make from one's head. It is not an affirmation that makes sense on the surface of things. There is all too much evidence to the contrary. As Fredrick Buechner says "the world does bad things to us all, and we do bad things to the world and to each other and maybe most of all to ourselves." In the midst of all of this, the affirmation that all will be well is possible only because it wells up irrationally from within our experience.
As a community of life and faith I believe we know something about this here at Crossroads. I have been with you long enough to know that among those of us in this room we have experienced just about every sadness and tragedy that is within the human experience. And as a community we know what it is to live with the suffering of the world in our struggles to discover how to create a nonviolent, safe place for the homeless, in the risks this congregation took to provide sanctuary during the Vietnam War. We know what it is to feel the anxiety of the congregation failing and ceasing to exist. We face the ugliness of domestic violence and provide a safe haven for women and children to build a new life. We know the heartbreak of grief as we come together in the loss of beloved persons as we do this week in remembering Mary Liz and David. We are not strangers to darkness.
And I have seen it happen here again and again in the midst of the moments of darkness and discouragement, something rises up within us to affirm life and joy. I experienced that here one Ash Wednesday. I had just been in the counseling office with a person who did not want to live any longer. He finally agreed to go to the hospital in order to stay safe from himself. I had just come from taking him there and I came to the service with a sinking feeling that he might not make it and that none of us might know how to reach the desire for life that was deadened inside him. As part of the service, Beth Donaldson did a dance. It was a dance of life and brokenness and community. At one point in the dance she began tossing a clay ball in the air, higher and higher. You could feel our anxiety rising as we watched. All of a sudden it fell, breaking into a thousand pieces of the floor. The symbolism was clear the conditions of human brokenness lay all over the floor in front of us. Then Beth silently invited us to join her in picking up the pieces, grinding them into dust, mixing them with water, and making the sign of the cross on each other's forehead. As we crawled around on the floor, gathering those fragments and turning them into a sign not only of suffering but also of hope, I felt tears come to my eyes. The tears were ones of inexplicable joy. It was a beautiful moment of people of faith affirming that brokenness and darkness do not have the last word.
I imagine that many of you have had similar experiences moments when in the midst of pain and confusion and lostness something broke through for you perhaps the feel of rain on your face, or a friend's call, or the sight of a rainbow that gives you hope. This happens, I believe, because in creating us in God's image, God has left God's mark deep within us. Even when we cannot believe, even when we are the most spiritually desolate and alone, God's joy and peace are in our blood.
We are not talking about happiness here, which depends on things going the way you want them to go. The joy and peace that are at the heart of life does not "come because something is happening or not happening, but every once in a while rises up out of simply being alive, of being part of the terror as well as the fathomless richenss of the world that God has made". (Buechner)
Jesus said something similar to his disciples in the words recorded in John: "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither be afraid". This was not a sweet, sentimental thing that Jesus said. These words are part of his farewell discourse he was preparing the disciples to be without him. They were words given to help them find strength in the face of loss, to be able to face the new circumstances in which Jesus' death will put them. It was not a guarantee of security, or the end of conflict and difficulty that Jesus gave them. He gave them the peace that is at the heart of his life, a life lived from the heart of God. The peace Jesus gives is the fulfillment of the hopes of the prophet Jeremiah: "surely I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope, When you call on me I will hear you. When you search for me with all your heart, I will let you find me and I will bring you back from the exile you have been in."