> > Brunnen-"could also refer people to that line about sparrows falling, and/or Julian of Norwich's hazelnut vision"G
>
> All right, I dutifully went and read the first two chapters of the Amherst manuscript before deciding that Middle English still gives me as much a pain as Chaucer ever did, viz.:
>
> "THere es Avisioun. Shewed Be the goodenes of god to Ade=/uoute Woman. and hir Name es Julyan that is recluse atte/ Norwyche and 3itt. ys oun lyfe."
>
> I'm sufficiently phenomenally lazy that I'm thinking: It might be a whole bunch easier just to ask our leading English expert, Brunnen-G, what the hazelnut vision actually MEANT? :-)


(I'm an expert? Cool! I never realised.) OK, the only reason I know about the hazelnut vision is because it was sufficiently close to the *beginning* of Julian's long visionary ramblings that my tenuous eye/brain/academic integrity connection hadn't completely shut down yet. Be warned, future prophets: when revealing your path to enlightenment, try to fit it into the first few pages, huh?

Here is my version of the Hazelnut Thing.

"And in this he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my understanding it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon and thought, 'What may this be?' And I was answered generally thus, 'It is all that is made.'

"I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might fall suddenly to nothing, for being so little. And I was answered in my understanding, 'It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it, and so hath all things their being through the love of God.'

"In this little thing I saw three parts. The first is that God made it. The second is that he loves it. The third is that he keeps it."

Considering that Julian spent the entire rest of her life trying to figure out what her visions meant, I'm not sure if I have much chance. However, what I personally take from the above is simply the rather comforting thought that everything is indeed very, very small and insignificant and temporary, but that doesn't *matter*.

Also, it made me think that, although people think of love as the natural result of something's intrinsic worth, it actually goes the other way. Something can have value *because* somebody loves it. Being loved makes that thing important in itself. (I'm not sure if this will make any sense to anyone. I can't figure out how to put it so it even makes sense to *me*.) In terms of the discussion in this thread, it somehow doesn't matter so much if the universe finally vanishes in a Horrendous Space Kablooie, if it has been given this sort of importance through the existence of people who cared about various small bits of it and found it beautiful.

Finally, I find that image of space, time, life, the universe and everything, seen held in the palm of your hand, to be very poetic and beautiful. This is probably why it stayed in my mind when the other several billion pages of Julian's visions unfortunately did not.

Brunnen-"the book is called Revelations Of Divine Love if anybody out there wants to read it"G