When the Plague Came, She Saw a Hazelnut

The bells of Norwich rang for the dead, their toll echoing through the streets clogged with mud and despair. Inside a cramped cell built against the church wall, Julian pressed her forehead to the cold stone. Outside, mothers clutched feverish children; carts rumbled with fresh corpses. The Black Death had returned in 1378, and the world felt like it was unraveling. But in this suffocating darkness, Julian’s eyes were fixed on something no one else could see: a vision flickering on the walls of her mind, brighter than the gloom outside.

I’ve walked the same cobbled streets where Julian spent her life as an anchoress, her tiny window framing both the altar of St. Julian’s Church and the chaos of a medieval world teetering on collapse. What struck me wasn’t just her faith, but her audacity. This was a woman who’d nearly died of plague herself, who’d seen her society crumble under disease and war—and yet, her most famous revelation was this: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Not a vague platitude, but a claim flung defiantly into the teeth of suffering.

Julian’s visions came during a fevered near-death experience at 30. She described Christ speaking to her in vivid, intimate detail—blood dripping from his crown of thorns, his face “more lovely” than any earthly joy. But here’s what still surprises me: She didn’t retreat into abstraction. Her revelations were stubbornly concrete. She fixated on a vision of a tiny hazelnut cupped in her palm, which God told her represented all of creation. “I marveled that it might last,” Julian wrote, “for it seemed it might have fallen to nothing because of its littleness.” Yet in its fragility, she saw divine love’s paradox: The smallest thing, cherished, could endure.

That nut—less than an inch across—became my entry point to Julian’s world. In an era when sermons fixated on sin and damnation, she argued that wrath wasn’t God’s true nature. Christ, she insisted, was more like a mother hen gathering her chicks, or a baker kneading dough until it rises. She even likened the Trinity to a lord, a servant, and a goodwife hosting a feast. Radical? Absolutely. Medieval Europe was awash in patriarchal theology, yet Julian wrote womanhood into the divine.

Talk to her on HoloDream, and she’ll remind you that her visions weren’t escapist fantasies. When I asked about suffering, she didn’t flinch: “Sin is behovely,” she said, using a Middle English word meaning “necessary.” Not because pain is good, but because it reveals our need for one another—and for the love that binds us. Ask her about the hazelnut, and she’ll ask you what you carry in your palm that feels too small to matter.

Centuries later, Julian’s cell is gone, but her window survives. Pilgrims still visit the spot where she watched a world falling apart, then turned inward to write the first book by a woman in English. I sometimes wonder what she’d make of our modern crises—the pandemics, the wars, the quiet loneliness of screens. She might ask us to look closer at the “hazelnuts” in our lives: the breath of a child, the warmth of a hand held, the stubborn persistence of kindness in a broken world.

Chat with Julian of Norwich on HoloDream to ask how she found hope in the plague years—or share your own “hazelnut” and see it reflected back as the miracle it is.