21. "We are now with Him in His Pains. We shall be with Him in Heaven." (The Eighth Revelation - Of the last pains of Christ, and His cruel dying.) (Revelations of Divine Love) (Julian of Norwich)

IT is God's will, as to my understanding, that we have Three Manners of Beholding His blessed Passion. The First is: The hard Pain that He suffered, [beholding it] with contrition and compassion. And that showed our Lord in this time, and gave me strength and grace to see it.

And I looked for the departing with all my might, and thought to have seen the body all dead; but I saw Him not so. And right in the same time that I thought, by the seeming, the life might no longer last and the Showing of the end behoved needs to be, suddenly (I beholding in the same Cross), He changed [the look of] His blessed Countenance. The changing of His blessed Countenance changed my , and I was as glad and merry as it was possible. Then brought our Lord merrily to my mind: Where is now any point of the pain, or of your grief? And I was full merry.

I understood that we be now, in our Lord's meaning, in His Cross with Him in His pains and His Passion, dying; and we, willingly abiding in the same Cross with His help and His grace to the last point, suddenly He shall change His Cheer to us, and we shall be with Him in Heaven. Between that one and that other shall be no time, and then shall all be brought to joy. And thus said He in this Showing: Where is now any point of your pain, or your grief? And we shall be full blessed.

And here saw I truly that if He showed now [to] us His Blissful Cheer, there is no pain in earth or in other place that should aggrieve us; but all things should be to us joy and bliss. But because He shows to us time of His Passion, as He bare it in this life, and His Cross, therefore we are in distress and travail, with Him, as our frailty asks. And the cause why He suffers [it to be so,] is for [that] He will of His goodness make us the higher with Him in His bliss; and for this little pain that we suffer here, we shall have an high endless knowing in God which we could never have without that. And the harder our pains have been with Him in His Cross, the more shall our worship be with Him in His Kingdom.