62. "God is Very Father and Mother of Nature: and all natures that He has... (Observations (regarding certain points in the foregoing fourteen Revelations)) (Revelations of Divine Love) (Julian of Norwich)

FOR in that time He showed our frailty and our fallings, our afflictings and our settings at nought, our despites and our outcastings, and all our woe so far forth as I thought it might befall in this life. And therewith

He showed His blessed Might, His blessed Wisdom, His blessed Love: that He keeps us in this time as tenderly and as sweetly to His worship, and as surely to our salvation, as He does when we are in most solace and comfort. And thereto He raises us spiritually and highly in heaven, and turns it all to His worship and to our joy, without end. For His love suffers us never to lose time.

And all this is of the Nature-Goodness of God, by the working of Grace. God is Nature in His being: that is to say, that Goodness that is Nature, it is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is Nature-hood. And He is very Father and very Mother of Nature: and all natures that He has made to flow out of Him to work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him by the salvation of man through the working of Grace.

For of all natures that He has set in diverse creatures by part, in man is all the whole; in fulness and in virtue, in fairness and in goodness, in royalty and nobleness, in all manner of majesty, of preciousness and worship. Here may we see that we are all beholden to God for nature, and we are all beholden to God for grace. Here may we see us needs not greatly to seek far out to know sundry natures, but to Holy Church, to our Mother's breast: that is to say, to our own soul where our Lord dwells; and there shall we find all now in faith and in understanding. And afterward truly in Himself clearly, in bliss.

But let no man nor woman take this singularly to himself: for it is not so, it is general: for it is [of] our precious Christ, and to Him was this fair nature adight for the worship and nobility of man's making, and for the joy and the bliss of man's salvation even as He saw, understood, and knew from without beginning.