The Two Paths of Life — And the Ecstatic Peace of Standing in the Middle of the Muddle
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“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”— Julian of Norwich
There is a pattern in human life that many of us slowly discover. Some seasons feel bright and expansive. Life flows easily. Gratitude rises without effort. Beauty catches us by surprise.
Other seasons feel darker. Plans collapse. Certainty disappears. We find ourselves walking through confusion, grief, or struggle.
For centuries spiritual teachers have described these experiences as two great paths of life. They gave them Latin names: via positiva and via negativa. Even if you are not interested in spirituality or religion, you may find some of this thinking useful as you journey toward living a rich and full life (Also scroll down to the end of the article to a link and a summary of recent findings about the kinds of people who see the world either through a religious lens or a scientific lens or both and an article that seeks an answer to the question, "Does science destroy spirituality or enhance it?").
The via positiva is the positive way. It is the path where we encounter goodness through beauty, love, awe, gratitude, and compassion. When a sunset stops you in your tracks, when a child bursts into laughter, when someone offers kindness at just the right moment, something inside whispers that life is good.
The via negativa is the negative way—not negative in the sense of pessimistic, but in the sense of letting go. It is the path where illusions fall away. It includes grief, uncertainty, humility, and the realization that we do not control everything.
Most of us would gladly choose the first path and avoid the second. Yet life insists on introducing us to both.
And according some psychologists and philosophers AND even more remarkable, one astounding female medieval mystic, the secret to a deep life is not choosing between them but learning to hold them together.
That mystic was Julian of Norwich. I have had the book, “Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic- and Beyond,” by my bed for several years. It just didn’t call to me, but lately I started reading a series of medieval novels about a Benedictine monk who grows herbs, heals people, and saves people wrongly accused of crimes by his sleuthing.
That dark period of history seemed to have more to offer than I had realized.
And it's the Lenten season, a time often used for deeper reflection. The snow is still coming down in earnest here...nature redeeming herself to the skiers and farmers and all of us worried about the bare mountain tops after a spring-like winter. John has plowed the driveway. Time to sit still. Read a little about Julian.
Julian lived in England in the 14th century, a time when life was anything but secure. The Black Death had devastated Europe. Fear, illness, and instability were woven into daily life. Yet from this difficult century came one of the most hopeful spiritual voices in Christian history.
Very little is known about Julian’s early life. Even her birth name is lost to history. The name “Julian” comes from St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, where she lived as an anchorite—a person who chose a life of prayer and contemplation in a small cell attached to the church. Though anchorites (sometimes the females are called anchoresses) lived quietly apart from society, people often came to their window seeking wisdom and spiritual counsel.
Julian’s life changed dramatically on May 8 (auspicious for me because it is my birthday), 1373, when she was about thirty years old. Gravely ill and believing she was near death, she began experiencing a series of vivid spiritual visions she later called “showings.”
Against all expectations, she recovered. Over the next twenty years she reflected deeply on what she had seen and eventually wrote them down in a remarkable work called Revelations of Divine Love, widely believed to be the first surviving book written in English by a woman.
One of Julian’s most famous visions involved something surprisingly small.
She wrote that she saw an object resting in the palm of her hand. It was about the size of a hazelnut. She wondered what it could be.
Then she understood.
It represented everything that exists.
The entire universe.
She wondered how such a fragile thing could endure. The answer came to her in three simple insights:
God made it. God loves it. God sustains it.
Because of that sustaining love, she realized, everything continues to exist.
From this insight grew the line that has comforted readers for centuries:
“All shall be well.”
Julian was not ignoring suffering. She lived in a world full of hardship. What she believed was that beneath the chaos of life there is a deeper reality holding everything together.
Love.
Julian also noticed something psychologically honest about human life. Our inner experience is rarely pure joy or pure distress. Instead we live in what she described as a strange mingling.
At times we feel peaceful, hopeful, and connected. At other times we feel anxious, uncertain, or distant. Sometimes the mixture is so subtle that we cannot even tell which state we—or the people around us—are truly in.
Life, she suggested, is a weaving of well and woe.
Centuries later the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung would make a similar observation. Jung believed that psychological maturity requires integrating both the light and the shadow of life. Avoiding difficulty keeps us shallow. Facing it allows deeper wholeness.
Psychology has also discovered something else that Julian seemed to intuit. Many modern therapies emphasize the importance of acceptance.
When people spend their energy fighting their feelings—pushing away grief, resisting fear, denying uncertainty—they often become more distressed. But when people learn to acknowledge their experiences with honesty and openness, something begins to shift.
Acceptance does not mean liking pain. It means allowing our human experience to be present without constantly struggling against it.
This insight lies at the heart of approaches like mindfulness and acceptance-based therapies. In a way, they teach a modern psychological version of the via negativa: allowing reality to be what it is rather than trying to force it into something else.
Interestingly, acceptance often creates space for something new to emerge.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow described what he called peak experiences—moments when people feel awe, unity, meaning, and deep joy. These experiences often arise after periods of struggle or breakthrough, when clarity suddenly replaces confusion.
The negative path clears the ground. The positive path fills it with meaning.
Julian saw something like this long before modern psychology existed.
And this is where compassion enters the story. Compassion brings the two paths together. Compassion begins when we notice suffering—our own or someone else’s. That honest recognition belongs to the via negativa. It requires us to face the wounded places of life without turning away.
But compassion does not stop there.
Compassion moves toward care. It seeks to relieve suffering and promote well-being.
That movement toward healing belongs to the via positiva.
Psychologists today describe compassion as having two movements: noticing suffering and responding with care.
The first opens our eyes. The second opens our hearts.
You can see this pattern everywhere in the life of Jesus for example. He saw suffering clearly—the sick, the lonely, the excluded—and he moved toward healing and restoration. His compassion joined clear-eyed honesty about suffering with a deep commitment to love.
Julian believed that when we occasionally glimpse the larger pattern of life—when we see that joy and sorrow are both threads in the same tapestry—we experience something remarkable.
Peace.
The negative way humbles us as we live within life's 10,000 sorrows. The positive way fills us with wonder, as we live within life's 10,000 joys.
Standing in the middle of the muddle, holding them together brings wisdom and a moment of epiphany, even ecstasy. Deep down peace all the way to the bottom of the pit and joy high up to the tops of the peaks.
I knew a man. I liked him though I recognized his arrogance and preening. Eventually he confessed some of his more nefarious practices at work. He became quite ill.
Not despite it all, but because of it all, he became a most beautiful soul after exposure and going through the wringer. When I talked to him, he said the dark night of the soul had been good for him – it allowed him to simply surrender, let go of his ego and concerns about what others thought of him. I sensed real growth and peaceful joy even in the face of losing his job, family, and home.
Life, Julian reminds us, is not meant to be neatly divided into light and darkness, success and failure, joy and sorrow. It is a wondrous mixture, a weaving of well and woe that shapes the soul over time.
And when we stop fighting the mixture, and drink both the white wine and the red wine as one mystic put it—when we accept it, live within it, and respond with compassion—we sometimes discover something surprising.
Even in the midst of life’s complexity, the heart can rest.
And beneath it all, around it all, within it all something larger is quietly sustaining the whole tapestry. As well as the little hazelnut.
Divine Love.
How might we journey together to the Good Life, the Full Life, the Whole Life, the Rich Life by holding both the well and woe of life together - stand in the middle of the muddle with compassion and deep peace sustained by Love?
This part is for those of you who think more about how a religious perspective and/or scientific perspective comes about and whether either or both help us humans flourish together and make sense of it all.
I was acquainted with a somewhat well-known British psychology researcher who told some of us (off the record) that if he found something in his research that didn't line up with ancient wisdom literature (found in scriptures or early Eastern or Western philosophy) or with Shakespeare's writings, he looked it over very carefully...intimating that it would be a rare occurrence.
"Religion provides a metaphysical lens rooted in faith, spirituality, and belief in the divine to address moral values and existential mysteries." "Science offers a different approach using systematic observation, logical reasoning, and physical evidence to explain the natural environment."
Unsurprisingly one's growing up environment plays in role in which lens one may choose, but another factor is one's personality. One big five personality traits are extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.
Some of the other findings won't surprise you and some may.
Here's some different research that went in search of an answer to this question? Does science destroy or enhance spirituality? There's a case to be made that science provokes spiritual yearning.
From the abstract:
Scholars of secularization suggest that while the processes of disenchantment and the delegitimization of religious institutions have weakened religious belief systems, they also produced, as an unforeseen result, a renewed awakening of spiritual and existential longing. From this perspective, the search for meaning and spiritual yearning in contemporary Western societies is not simply a residual feature of human experience; rather, it emerges with new strength and urgency as an unintended consequence of secularization itself.
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In Character Strengths and Virtues, A Handbook and Classification written by psychology giants, Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson to counterbalance the DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Spirituality is classified under the strengths of Transcendence which include gratitude, awe, wonder, elevation, hope, and strangely enough - humor. Spirituality includes faith, purpose, and religiousness. The consensual definition of spirituality and religiousness refers to beliefs and practices that are grounded in the conviction that there is a transcendent (nonphysical) dimension of life.
Spirituality is universal though the content of spiritual beliefs varies. All cultures have a concept of an ultimate, transcendent, sacred, and divine force.
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Well, both passes were closed last night. Now Snoqualmie is back open after receiving 22 inches of snow! Some farmers and wildfire worriers believe their prayers have been heard. Here's how the world looks from up on Flowery Divide now that the sun has come out.
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