This was the talk I gave at the Society of Mary meeting at Holy Cross on Saturday, October 4, 2008.
First I would like to consider the historiographical message of our Lady of Walsingham – that is, what does the HISTORY of the shrine have to say to us today, as 21st century Christians?
Before we can answer that question, we must first ask: what IS the history of Walsingham?
Walsingham was one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in medieval Europe. At Walsingham (in Norfolk, England) the Virgin Mary appeared in a vision in the year 1061 to a Saxon noblewoman named Richeldis de Faverches. The Virgin asked Richeldis to build a wooden house in imitation of the holy house at Nazareth, where the Annunciation took place and where the Word took flesh. This simple wooden house, with its image of our Lady and our Lord, was the most popular pilgrimage destination in England for five hundred years. During the Reformation, in 1538, the shrine and its adjoining priory were destroyed, and all of its gold and silver treasures were confiscated. The ancient image of Mary and Jesus was taken to London and burned. The sub-prior of the monastery, Nicholas Milcham, and ten others were convicted of high treason for resisting the destruction of the shrine and monastery, and were hanged, drawn and quartered. The site of the shrine was sold by Henry VIII to a private citizen who built a mansion there. An anonymous ballad, “The Lament of Walsingham”, records the sentiments of the people: “Weep, weep O Walsingham, / Whose days are nights, / Blessings turned to blasphemies, / Holy deeds to despites. / Sin is where our Lady sat, / Heaven is turned to hell, / Satan sitteth where our Lord did sway, / Walsingham, O farewell!” In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the shrine was restored by devout Catholics (Romans and Anglicans). In 1897 Pope Leo XIII blessed a new image, now housed at the “Slipper Chapel”. And in 1931 the Anglican vicar, Father Alfred Hope Patten rebuilt the Holy House. Walsingham has once again become an important place of pilgrimage and blessing for the faithful, and a place of cooperation and unity for Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics.
The history of Walsingham is the history of our Lady’s perennial invitation to each of us to make a home for Jesus - even as our Lady had done first: creating the space within her own soul for the Word of God to drop, “like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth” (Ps. 72.6); and then as Mary conceived within her womb, within her own finite materiality, and nurtured Jesus in that most intimate of human relations, that of expectant Mother and Child, and again as she made a physical home for him at the Holy House of Nazareth.
Mary’s “yes” to the Angel, her obedience to God’s summons, which is the message of the Annunciation, and therefore the message of Walsingham – Mary’s “yes” gives content to the Lord’s own word to all of his disciples: “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo, there! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Lk. 17.21). The Kingdom of God, the domain within which God’s will is carried-out, is of course Jesus himself. He is the location of the enactment of God’s will, the place where God reigns, and therefore Jesus is himself the Kingdom of God.
It was Mary’s vocation to nurture this Kingdom of God within her, to hold on in faith to God’s promise there, to give birth to him, to bring him forth to the world; again to make a home for him at the Holy House, and to watch as Jesus, the Kingdom of God, grew beyond the circumscription of her ability to hold onto him – her ability to make of God’s Kingdom something susceptible to her own custody. For as surely as God had chosen Mary, he had chosen others; he had determined indeed that the whole world was to become subject to his election in Christ.
Jesus perpetually outgrew the confines of his Mother’s embrace. He outgrew her womb; he outgrew the Holy House at Nazareth; he outgrew Galilee; he outgrew the Nations; and indeed he outgrew the cosmos: For indeed “he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1.18-20).
So of course as we walk in faith with Mary, we come to the cross, to the place of desolation, the place of a skull, where, if we are willing, a sword will pierce our own souls too (Lk. 2.35). And here we realize, with Mary, the mutuality of divine love. At the cross, the one-sidedness and self-seeking which each of us secretly hopes to smuggle into heaven, at the foot of the cross, with all its violence, we find stripped away. Here we discover the painful reality of what it means to have “found favor with God” (Lk. 1.30): that his taking hold of us means our desperate clinging to him in faith, in hope, and in love.
(And incidentally, here with Mary at the cross, and then at the tomb; we see what was proleptically, and prophetically, figured by the finding in the temple: when Mary and Joseph rediscover Jesus in the temple, after thinking that they had lost him, worried then too that the Kingdom of God had come to nothing.)
This is the narrative played out time and again in the history of the Catholic Church, and in our own personal histories too. We say “Yes” to the summons – “be it unto me according to your word” – and we live for a time in the expectant joy and intimacy of communion with the Lord. We become fruitful theotokoi – bearing Jesus to the world around us, making a home for him, and perhaps even finding that home to have become a place of pilgrimage for others.
But following Jesus in faith means allowing the universal scope of his mission to outstrip our need to enfold him in the embrace of our expectation. He is more than we can imagine, as he himself said: “I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn. 10.16). And we experience as desolation his seeming to withdraw, though in truth he has said, “I will never fail you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13.5). But our holding on in faith leads us to the experience of his presence as absence, it leads us eventually to Calvary, where we can listen only to the echoes of his anguished cry, receding into silence, as he yields up his spirit (Matt. 27.50).
How do we hold on in faith in this place? Only by allowing faith to give birth to hope. Because we have believed that “these words are trustworthy and true” (Rev. 21.5), that his “faithfulness endures to all generations” (Ps. 119.90).
And here we can imagine Walsingham, on a silent morning in the year 1538, the priory and shrine a smoldering ruin, the faithful canons dead and hacked to bits, and the ancient image of Mary and Jesus taken to London and burned – the desolation of Calvary reenacted at England’s Nazareth. And the words of the Lament of Walsingham” receive their meaning: “Weep, weep O Walsingham, / Whose days are nights, / Blessings turned to blasphemies, / Holy deeds to despites. / Sin is where our Lady sat, / Heaven is turned to hell, / Satan sitteth where our Lord did sway, / Walsingham, O farewell!”
But faith gives birth to hope. Our Lady lost Jesus, but found him again in the temple after a three day search. She sat disconsolate by the cross, but was there again on Easter morning, another third day. And English Catholics, maintaining the faith for three dark centuries, would find Walsingham restored, the Holy House rebuilt, a new image enthroned, thanks to Pope Leo XIII and Father Hope Patten.
When we receive Jesus into our lives, when we make a home for him, inevitably we find the insufficiency of our circumscriptions, our efforts to hold on to him. As Augustine asked: “What place is there in me to which my God can come, what place that can receive the God who made heaven and earth? Does this mean, O Lord my God, that there is in me something fit to contain you? Can even heaven and earth, which you made and in which you made me, contain you?” Our holding onto the Lord must inevitably become a holding-on-to-him even as he withdraws beyond the horizon of our expectation. He has come to give us life – his own life. And so we find that his self-sacrifice never expends itself, on every altar of every catholic church at every mass in every century – that Jesus pours himself out in the deaths of a million martyrs, through the disastrous violence of the Reformation, and in the hours of our own darkness. This is the loving process of his taking us to himself, that where he is, there we might also be (Jn. 14.3).
But the Reformation will have run its course, and the dead shall be raised. The 20th century story of Walsingham is an Easter story: that God looked with mercy on the years of faithful hope, and through his servant Fr Hope Patten, restored England’s Nazareth. For he withdraws himself from us to take us to himself – he overflows the boundaries of our hearts, he goes about his Father’s business, leaving the feeble homes we make for him, so that we can find our home with him, in his Father’s house (Jn. 14.2). So the 20th century renewal of Walsingham is a sign of the restoration of all things in him by whom, and in whom, and through whom, and for whom all things were made – its a glimmer of the Apocalypse, when the Pantokrator will break his silence with the words “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21.5).
