sermon for the feast of our lady of walsingham

In the photo above, from left to right, Fr Michael Heidt, Fr Lucas Grubbs, Fr Will, in front of the icon of our Lady of Walsingham.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is the feast of our Lady of Walsingham. Walsingham, a place mystery and healing for a thousand years, has, since its destruction at the Reformation, been largely forgotten by Christians. For those, like us, in whose consciousness Walsingham has again taken root, are apt to make of it a touchstone for a certain kind of cultural religiosity: the kind of dogged and spikey Anglo-Catholicism, which Charles Ryder’s cousin Jasper thought to be the province of “sodomites with unpleasant accents” in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Or we are prone to allow Walsingham, and more blasphemously OUR LADY under that title, to become, by a kind of subconscious synecdoche, to become the chaplaincy wing of an anachronistic, tory-ish aestheticism.

These things, of course, Walsingham is NOT. But what is it? And more importantly: who is our Lady of Walsingham? The story of our Lady of Walsingham begins with a devout Christian noblewoman named Richeldis, who lived in Walsingham in the 11th century. Richeldis was widowed early in life, and giving herself to prayer, she was rewarded in the year 1061 by an ecstatic vision of the blessed Virgin. In her vision, Richeldis was taken in the spirit to Nazareth, where Mary showed her the holy house, where Mary had made an earthly home for the child Christ. Mary invited Richeldis to build a house in Walsingham representing the holy house of Nazareth. This vision recurred three times, and according to legend, after acquiring the materials to construct the house, and while keeping prayerful vigil, Richeldis watched as the house was miraculously constructed overnight.

A wooden statue of our Lady and our Lord was placed in the holy house, and the shrine was left in the care of a community of Augustinians. It became one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Europe – a place of healing and renewal for Christians for five hundred years. English kings visited and patronized Walsingham, including Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Henry VI, Henry, VII, and Henry the VIII.

King Henry VIII’s capitulation to political expediency is well known. When he could not obtain a fourth annulment from the pope, Henry set himself against the Church and her defenders. And some of her staunchest defenders were the monasteries, and unfortunately for Walsingham, the shrines in their care. In 1538, the government authorities arrived in Walsingham and destroyed the priory and shrine. All that could not be carried off and sold was burned, including the ancient statue of Mary and Jesus. The monks were hanged, drawn and quartered.

And so Walsingham became a memory until the year 1897 when Pope Leo XIII, at the behest of the English faithful, blessed a new statue of our Lady of Walsingham, which was installed in the Roman church at Walsingham, now known as the Slipper Chapel. In 1931, the Anglican Vicar of Walsingham, Father Alfred Hope Patten reconstructed the Holy House, and commissioned the remaking of the statue of our Lady, based on the image on the seal of the medieval priory. Ever since, Walsingham has again become a place of pilgrimage, of healing and renewal for Christians the world over.

That’s a brief sketch of the HISTORY of Walsingham; but what does it mean? As TS Elliott said in his great poem “Little Gidding” – “there are other places / which are also the world’s end.” Walsingham is, at its best, like every other locus of the sacred: a minor apocalypse, a place of theophany; a liminal space on the border between time and eternity. Walsingham is about Mary, and because it is about Mary we hold honor it as sacred, sacred because of HER sanctity – because all generations call her blessed, because the Almighty has kindly regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden, and exalted her humility and meekness. And while the Gospel is not about Mary, Mary is ALL about the Gospel.

Because of the shrine of the Holy House at Walsiingham, it has been called “England’s Nazareth”. And in the memory of the holy house at Nazareth, we are mindful of Mary’s unique vocation in the economy of salvation. We are mindful that Mary made a home for Jesus. In the holy house at Nazareth, Mary held Jesus close to her heart. There she guarded and nurtured him. There she contemplated the supernatural otherness of her divine Son, allowing his strangeness to begin to outpace her preconceptions about the vocation of Messiah. There Mary began the terrible journey of faith that would lead her to the very slopes of Golgotha, the highest, thinnest pinnacle of createdness, where her only Son would be transfixed, alone, beyond her reach, suffocating under the weight of the world’s sin – before the justice of God and the calumny of men.

Our Lady of Walsingham made a home for Jesus. She made herself vulnerable to the affliction of knowing Jesus, of constantly following after his receding strangeness, never abandoning hope, but daily enfolding him anew in her arms. Therein lies Mary’s greatness: the faith, hope, and love, that HOLDS ONTO JESUS, even when he is laid in her arms as a corpse, slain to take away the sins of the world.

We know Walsngham therefore to be a symbol for our Lady herself – who wrapped Jesus in the intimacy of her own body for nine months, who accepted the vocation of afflction for the sake of the redemption, life and glory Jesus would give to the world by dying. She accepted it though it meant a sword would pierce her own soul too (Lk. 2.35), and she persevered in love to the very end.

If our encounters with Walsingham, with the Holy House, with our Lady herself, are to be fruitful, if we are to find in them – and in HER – a pilgrimage destination, a locus of healing and renwal, then we must encounter them and encounter her as pilgrims, becoming vulnerable to the affliction of transience in the service of Jesus Christ. For at Walsingham, and in Mary, we find ourselves on the frontier of creation, in the borderland “between promise and fulfillment” (Rowan Williams), in the pathway of grace and the interplay of familiarity and strangeness. Here we stand with Mary, our Lady of Walsingham, malleable in God’s hands, subject to the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, and by grace with our Lady’s prayer on our lips: “be it done to me according to your word” – giving ourselves to the conception of Jesus within our own hearts and homes, and discerning, with her, and we may pray JOINING the angelic choir, heralding the advent of the Savior: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth: peace, goodwill toward men.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.