The mystic’s Julian of Norwich's book, Divine Revelations, is a devotional exploration of the lavish love of God in the form of 16 visions of Christ. These are simultaneously lofty and transcendent, yet hunkered down in embodied analogies that can resonate with both medieval peasants then and laypeople today. She sees God in the seemingly insignificant, saying, ‘The fullness of Joy is to behold God in everything’. Take this famous quote about a hazelnut. See how she employs a simple concrete image to unlock a palpable sense of being held by an affectionate God.
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.
In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.
