All Shall Be Well, But Not Cheaply

Every now and then, history does us the kindness of putting our complaints in perspective.

That is not to say our complaints are unreal. A ruined morning can still be a ruined morning. The car will not start. The email you meant to send was not sent. The meeting went badly. The rain began just as you stepped outside. One should not despise the small aggravations of ordinary life. They are part of being human.

Still, history has a way of clearing its throat.

David Carpenter, the great historian of medieval England, reminds us that to live now—at least for many of us—is to live with protections our ancestors could scarcely imagine. We take for granted a political order in which conflict, however bitter, is ordinarily contained by law, election, debate, and institution. Thirteenth-century England knew no such settled blessing. Civil war meant burned property, slaughtered enemies, massacred Jews, hungry peasants, and towns pulled into the machinery of violence.

And then there was hunger. Bad weather could become a failed harvest. A failed harvest could become famine. Famine could empty cottages and leave fields untended. We live, again many of us, with a level of food security medieval people would have regarded as nearly miraculous.

And then came the fourteenth century.

If one is searching for the worst time to be alive, 1349 has a dreadful claim upon the imagination. The Black Death did not merely kill bodies; it wounded the moral and spiritual confidence of Europe. In some places, half the population disappeared. Norwich, later associated with one of the great voices of Christian hope, was devastated. Numbers like that are almost impossible to feel. Seven thousand dead out of twelve thousand sounds like arithmetic until one imagines streets emptied, houses silent, trades interrupted, prayers repeated over bodies faster than grief could keep pace.

Yet this is where the story becomes more than an exercise in historical comparison.

Julian of Norwich lived in the shadow of that world. She knew plague, social unraveling, ecclesial anxiety, and the nearness of death. Yet from that darkness came not despair, but Revelations of Divine Love. Her famous words—“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”—are not cheerful optimism. They are not the sentimental reassurance that things are not really so bad.

They are hope spoken from inside catastrophe.

History’s deepest gift is not that it allows us to say, “Others had it worse.” That can become a thin and even cruel consolation. Its deeper gift is witness. It shows us that human beings have endured terrible worlds before us. More than that, it shows us that some of them found, not escape, but faithfulness.

Julian’s hope was not naive. It was cruciform. It had looked upon suffering and did not pretend it away. She believed that the love of God was deeper than the wound, deeper than plague, deeper than fear, deeper even than the visible failure of things.

We should be grateful for democracy, medicine, sanitation, anesthesia, antibiotics, social provision, and all the fragile goods of modern life. We should not romanticize the past. Much of it was brutal, hungry, painful, and short.

But neither should we imagine that our age has solved the human condition. We have our own terrors: war, climate change, loneliness, technological bewilderment, and the old idolatries dressed in modern clothing.

So perhaps the lesson is not simply, “Be glad you were not born then.”

Perhaps it is this:

Receive the fragile mercies of this age with gratitude. Do not despise the protections you have inherited. Do not sentimentalize suffering. Remember Julian. Remember that even in a devastated city, even after plague, even when the world seemed to have come apart, someone could still say—not cheaply, not lightly, but faithfully—

All shall be well.


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