Welcome, friends…to Still Point 12:10, where we Breathe. Reset. Rise.
As Advent unfolds, we step into its second rhythm — Peace — the deep stillness at the heart of all creation.
Not the kind of peace we negotiate, or the kind we promise ourselves when life finally slows down, but the peace that simply is — the divine pulse moving through everything, the rhythm of God’s order beneath all apparent chaos. I’m Sharon Campbell Rayment, and this week we walk with Julian of Norwich, a woman of silence and astonishing courage. She lived during the 14th century, through plague and loss, yet she came to know an inner peace so radiant it still speaks across time.
Her most famous words — “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” — are not naive optimism.
They are the fruit of vision, born of communion, born of trust in divine harmony.
Julian saw that the universe is not spinning out of control, but dancing to a rhythm of mercy — a rhythm that holds wolves and lambs, sorrow and joy, beginnings and endings, in one vast, loving circle.
So today we come home to that rhythm.
We pause to rest in the peace that has never left us.
We listen for the heartbeat of God within the heart of the world.
🌿 1. Ready
Before we move further, take a moment to ready yourself.
Let your feet come to rest on the floor,
feeling the ground’s quiet solidity beneath you.
This same earth that holds the forests and oceans holds you too.
Let your body receive that support.
Rest your hands gently in your lap, palms open — a gesture of release, a gesture of willingness.
Let your shoulders ease down from your ears.
Let your jaw soften.
Let the lines of your face rest.
The air moves in and out of you without effort.
You don’t need to make it happen.
You only need to allow.
In this simple act of arrival, something already begins to shift.
The soul catches up to the body.
You are here — present, alive, beloved.
Julian said, “The greatest honour we can give God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of love.”
To ready yourself, then, is to allow that gladness to rise quietly, even before the world gives you a reason.
2. Release
Now, begin to let go.As you sit here, perhaps whisper inwardly:
“Here I am. I am ready to rest in peace.”
Imagine that your thoughts are like the surface of a lake.
The winds of the day have stirred it up — ripples, waves, reflections scattered.
With each exhale, the surface smooths.
The light begins to settle.
Let go of what has been demanding your attention —
the conversations replaying in your mind,
the worries that tug at your heart,
the to-do lists waiting for completion.
Each one can rest now, like silt drifting to the lakebed.
Nothing is lost; it simply returns to stillness.
Julian lived in an age when fear filled the air.
People came to her window to ask how peace could exist when death was everywhere.
And she would tell them: “The pain does not last forever. The light and the love of God are everlasting.”
Peace, she knew, was not the absence of suffering, but the Presence that holds even suffering inside it.
It is the divine rhythm that does not falter when we tremble.
It is the slow heartbeat of love that continues underneath everything else.
3. Receive / Reflect Let that truth sink deeper now.
Each breath an exhale of release.
Each breath a quiet return to order.
Now, in the space that’s opened, begin to receive.
Peace is not something you must create.
It’s the natural state of the soul when everything unnecessary falls away.
Like a still pond reflecting the sky, the soul reveals its divine clarity when undisturbed.
Bring to mind the image of Julian’s hazelnut — that tiny, fragile seed she saw in a vision, cradled in her palm.
When she asked God what it was, the answer came:
“It is all that is made. It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.”
Imagine that now — the vastness of existence, from galaxies to sparrows, contained in that small sphere of light.
Nothing outside it.
Nothing excluded.
All moving to one rhythm — the rhythm of divine love.
This is peace: to know that even what feels broken is still held together by love’s gravity.
To know that you belong to a harmony larger than your comprehension.
Isaiah envisioned this long ago:
“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid… They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
It is not a dream of escape; it is the awakening of wholeness.
The wolf remains the wolf, the lamb the lamb, but they are reconciled in a love that transcends fear.
Julian saw the same — opposites reconciled, tensions dissolved into divine order.
Take a moment now to rest in that image:
your life, too, held in that same vast order —
every contradiction, every tension, folded into a greater peace.
Feel the chair supporting you, the air around your face, the rhythm of your breath.
You are returning, but not leaving peace behind.
You are bringing it with you — carrying it in the quiet cadence of your being.
Julian once said, “God is the stillness in the middle of the storm.”
That stillness is now within you.
It does not vanish when you move; it moves with you.
It is the divine order pulsing quietly through your life.
As we move into the reflective reading, let your body remain soft, your heart receptive.
Let peace be the doorway through which you listen.
📖 Reflective Reading — Julian of Norwich
The Rhythm of Divine Order: Peace Born of Communion
Advent peace is not fragile; it is ancient.
It is the deep pulse that thrums beneath everything that exists.
Before there was light or time, before sound or thought, there was rhythm — the steady out-breath of Divine Love calling creation into being.
Every atom still vibrates with that first sacred breath.
Every heartbeat, every tide, every turning of the seasons echoes the same pulse.
This is what Julian of Norwich saw when she said, “All shall be well.”
She did not write those words from comfort.
She lived through plague, through the collapse of order, through a world that believed the end was near.
Yet in a small anchor-cell built into the side of St Julian’s Church, she looked through a narrow window at a dying world and saw not destruction but harmony.
What her eyes saw as ruin, her heart saw as unfolding grace.
Julian’s revelations began in sickness.
She was young and near death when she received sixteen visions — “showings,” she called them — of Christ and of divine love.
When she recovered, she devoted her life to prayer, enclosed within that stone cell, listening to the world breathe through her window.
It was there that peace became her language.
Her entire life became one long exhale of trust.
She wrote:
“God made everything in love, for love, and by love; and this love is the meaning of all that is.”
That sentence could be carved across the sky.
If love is the meaning of all that is, then nothing that happens can fall outside divine order.
The wolf and the lamb, the night and the dawn, the dying leaf and the newborn child — all move within one vast rhythm of mercy.
The Great Pattern
Julian looked at creation as if gazing at a woven cloth.
Each thread — some dark, some bright — crossed and knotted into another.
From the backside it looked chaotic.
But when the cloth was turned, she saw a tapestry so intricate it took her breath away.
“This,” she said, “is how God weaves the world.”
Peace, for her, was learning to trust the Weaver even when you see only tangled threads.
She once held that famous hazelnut in her palm and marvelled that it did not crumble.
It was small enough to disappear between her fingers, yet she heard a voice say, “It is all that is made. It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it.”
In that moment she glimpsed divine order — the whole cosmos contained and sustained by love.
Nothing is outside the circle; nothing is discarded.
If the hazelnut can endure by love alone, so can we.
Our lives, though fragile, are held in the same hand.
Every breath, every heartbreak, every joy belongs to the rhythm of divine peace.
The Music Beneath Chaos
Julian teaches us that peace is not silence but music — a harmony too vast for the untrained ear.
When life sounds dissonant, it is because we are listening too close to a single note.
Step back, and you begin to hear how pain resolves into compassion, how endings turn toward beginning, how even loss hums within love’s refrain.
She wrote: “Our Lord showed me that there is a deed, the which the blessed Trinity shall do at the last day, and I saw not what manner of deed it shall be; but it shall be glorious, and it shall make all things well.”
She did not need to know the details; she rested in the certainty of harmony.
Imagine, she might say, standing inside a great choir.
Some voices tremble, some are strong, some lag behind.
Yet the Conductor hears the whole and draws beauty from the seeming confusion.
So it is with God’s rhythm — a peace born not of control but of communion.
Peace and the Body of Creation
Julian’s peace was incarnational.
She saw the divine not hovering above but pulsing within the world.
She called Christ our “true Mother,” feeding creation from his own being.
In that image she captured what Isaiah saw: a creation so reconciled that predator and prey lie together, nursing from the same breast of peace.
Think of that: the wolf and the lamb, the fierce and the gentle, each necessary to the whole.
The universe is built on relationship, not rivalry.
Peace is not the erasure of difference; it is the dance of difference in harmony.
When we come into rhythm with this truth, even our bodies respond.
The breath slows.
The heart steadies.
The nervous system remembers what trust feels like.
This is why prayer, for Julian, was physical as much as spiritual — a return to the body’s own participation in divine order.
You might try it now:
Breathe in slowly, and inwardly say, “All shall be well.”
Breathe out, “And all shall be well.”
Breathe in again, “And all manner of thing shall be well.”
Each breath a joining of your rhythm to God’s.
Each exhale a surrender to the order already holding you.
Circle of Mercy
Julian shocked her world by calling sin “behovely” — necessary, even useful.
She did not mean that suffering is good, but that nothing can finally thwart divine love.
Even our errors become the soil of wisdom; even failure turns toward healing.
This was her radical trust in peace.
She wrote, “For I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, for anger is not in God.”
If God is never angry, then divine order is never retribution; it is restoration.
The movement of peace is always toward wholeness.
Where we see punishment, God sees mending.
Where we see ruin, God sees rebirth.
This awareness changes how we live with ourselves and one another.
When you truly believe that nothing is outside love’s circle, you stop dividing the world into good and bad, saved and lost, us and them.
You begin to see everything as returning home.
Resting in the Womb of Love
Julian often described the soul as resting in God’s womb.
Just as a child grows unseen yet secure, so do we live within divine peace.
We are nourished, she said, by the very substance of Christ — fed with compassion, strengthened by grace.
Think of it: the womb never sleeps.
It holds, it pulses, it circulates life around the child.
Even when the mother rests, the body keeps working for the sake of love.
So it is with God’s order.
The Spirit’s heartbeat continues even when we lose awareness.
Peace is always there, carrying us between each moment like the tide carries the moonlight.
When you wake in the night and cannot calm your thoughts, remember this image.
You are still inside Love’s body.
You are surrounded by the rhythm that keeps galaxies spinning and hearts beating.
You cannot fall out of it.
The Storm and the Still Point
Julian never claimed that peace erases the storm.
She knew storms well.
She wrote, “He did not say, ‘You shall not be troubled,’ but He said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’”
Peace does not deny the wind; it discovers the still point within it.
Picture a hurricane from above: chaos at the edges, perfect calm at the center.
That center is God.
And because we are made in God’s image, that center lives in us.
To live from that center is to move through the world without being consumed by it.
It is to respond instead of react, to love instead of fear, to forgive instead of fight.
It is not passivity — it is powerful composure, the composure of one aligned with divine order.
Peace as Participation
Julian’s peace was never a retreat from the world.
She understood that divine order invites our participation.
“Prayer,” she said, “is the deliberate union of the soul with God.”
When we align our hearts with the rhythm of love, our actions naturally bring harmony to what is around us.
Lighting a candle, tending a garden, comforting a friend — these become sacraments of peace.
Each small gesture joins the cosmic pattern.
Each act of kindness steadies the world a little more.
This is what Isaiah foresaw: a creation so infused with divine wisdom that “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
To live peacefully is to become part of that knowledge — to let your life mirror the way water knows how to flow, how to reflect light, how to return to its source.
When the World Seems to Fall Apart
Even now, centuries later, Julian’s message meets us in our own age of upheaval.
She would tell us: the rhythm of divine order has not ceased.
What looks like unraveling is often the Weaver adjusting the pattern.
She would remind us that despair is a form of short-sightedness.
When you cannot see the whole, you assume the story has ended.
But peace sees farther.
Peace remembers the unfinished melody.
If you find yourself overwhelmed, return to her words as a doorway:
“All shall be well.”
Say them slowly.
Let them descend from mind to body, from body to soul, until they hum beneath your heartbeat.
They are not magic; they are alignment.
They tune you back to the key of divine harmony.
The Deep Assurance
Near the end of her writings, Julian confesses that she asked God why suffering exists if love is supreme.
The answer she received was simple: “Love was his meaning.”
Nothing else needed to be said.
In that sentence is the rhythm of divine order: Love as origin, Love as process, Love as completion.
Every question, every ache, every joy folds back into that one word.
This is the peace the angels sang over Bethlehem.
This is the peace the Christ-child embodied — a love so wide it could sleep among animals and still bless the stars.
It is not sentimental peace; it is structural peace.
It is how the universe itself is built.
Julian discovered that when you rest in this peace, gratitude becomes your native language.
You no longer strive to make things right; you begin to recognize that rightness already pervades creation.
Even pain, seen through the eyes of peace, becomes transparent to grace.
The Unbroken Circle
At the end of her life, Julian described seeing a circular motion, an endless turning of love within love.
“There is no beginning and no end,” she said.
“This is the meaning of God.”
Everything moves, yet nothing is lost.
Everything changes, yet all remains held.
The rhythm of divine order is perpetual becoming.
Imagine that circle now — luminous, slow, infinite.
Within it, the stars swirl, oceans breathe, trees grow, hearts beat, prayers rise.
You are part of that motion.
You are already within peace.
Let that truth settle into your bones:
You are not striving toward peace; you are swimming in it.
You are not building order; you are part of it.
You are not seeking love; you are made of it.
ThankfulnessLet us rest for a moment in gratitude.
Think of three things, however small, that remind you the world still holds beauty.
A candle’s steady flame.
A friend’s laughter.
The breath moving in and out of your chest.
Whisper softly: Thank You.
Thank you for the rhythm that keeps all things turning.
Thank you for the peace that never leaves, only waits to be noticed.
Thank you for the assurance that all shall be well.
✨ Closing Reflection
As we close, may you walk this week attuned to the rhythm of divine order.
When you see disorder, remember the hidden harmony.
When you feel fear, return to the heartbeat of peace.
When you grow weary, rest in the circle of love that surrounds you.
Let Julian’s mantra become your breath-prayer through these days of Advent:
Together, softly, we say:
Inhale — All shall be well.
Exhale — And all shall be well.
Inhale — And all manner of thing shall be well.
Peace begins within me.
Peace moves through me.
Peace restores the world.
Until next time,
may you Breathe… Reset… and Rise.
