In the Short Text account of her revelations, Julian of Norwich admits to having struggled with the concept of human sin, deeply troubled over an ontology of fallenness that prevents her from uniting with God: ‘If sin hadde nought bene’, she states, ‘we shulde alle hafe bene clene and like to oure lorde as he made us.’ Elsewhere, she records the ‘softe drede’ that the fear of sin elicits in her and in its ability to wound and separate a human from the goodness of God. Using the visceral vocabulary of the bodily wounding she has witnessed in her earlier vision of Christ's Passion, Julian attempts to articulate the damage and abjection inflicted by sin upon the human soul:

Such deep anxieties about sin are everywhere manifested in the Short Text, although Julian clearly attempts to dispel them by stating her trust in Christ's promise to her that ‘alle shalle be wele’ and in her belief that the healing of spiritual wounds can be effected by contrition, confession and penance. Here, of course, as on numerous occasions in her writing, Julian shields herself behind the orthodox teachings of the Church – in this case the edict of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 which required all Christians to undertake regular confession and penance at least once a year in order to cleanse the soul. In Julian's Long Text, however, the product of some twenty or thirty years of musing on her visionary experiences, Julian adds to this list of orthodox remedies a ‘bodely sicknesse of Goddes sending’, no doubt fully mindful of her own illness which she had so desired as a young woman, and which was granted her in 1373 when she was just over thirty years of age. This illness, which brings about excruciating pain followed by an almost total paralysis, is one rooted in an abject female body: dependent on others, even to move her into an upright position, Julian gradually loses physical sensation, including her eyesight and the ability to breathe.