Despites to Holy Deeds: Our Lady of Walsingham, Second Part:
The caravan moved slowly, as all caravans do when the desert wind blows in dry heaves and the light is red behind sand clouds. A young man, leaning his shoulder into the hot air, had just given up peering into the sand for any sign of the foothills and the monastery for which they were headed; but suddenly there was a singing sort of shout, a Bedouin sound, and the young man, Marcion, glanced up to see the walls of St. Catherine’s monastery rearing up in the distance, the massive walls appearing to be covered in blood, the huge sandstone blocks reflecting the dying sunlight; light which moved in slow waves, light filtered through the blowing sand.
Finally, Marcion could hear and see normally. Everything looked so clear inside the walls. He went immediately to the ancient chapel to kneel before the relics of St. Catherine of Alexandria, to help him on his quest to do homage at the places of God here at Mt. Sinai, at Bethlehem, Jerusalem and farthest north, Nazareth. Up above him, he saw the icon of St. Catherine. “She was beautiful”, he thought, and saw the image of the spiked wheel, the palm in her hand, and shuddered. He said outloud, “How could anyone murder such innocence and loveliness?” Marcion turned suddenly, thinking that he heard laughter, not derisive but happily amused, laughter tinkling like many small bells on the hem of a veil. He then remembered her story, and knew why she had laughed at his musings. A picture of her, before her conversion and espousal to Our Lord, came before his imagination. Beautiful, yes, young; heir to a throne and learned beyond many men; she was sought above all other women by the powerful, the wealthy for a bride. She harbored inside, however, a rough-sculptured desire, one, which made her desist from ideas of marriage. In the darkness of her unbaptized soul, she was not able to ascertain clearly why she felt she must find a man who was worthy of her. Finally, in desperation, her mother took her to a hermit high in the desert mountains, a man reputed wise beyond all. He told her of a man beyond her, like the stars are beyond the sands of the desert. She sat before him, yearning for this man to be her husband, caring not about her robes in the dust, receiving from him an icon: a small painting of a lady with a small child on her lap.
Going home, thoughtful, she prayed late into the night, until her head fell on the bed in sleep. She dreamed as if awake, she dreamed of the lady with the child. She recognized in the child’s face the man of whom she’d been told; but He would not look at her after the first quick glance. Stung, she looked pleadingly at His mother. The Mother pleaded with the Child, but He refused, saying, “She is darkness and ugliness. She must learn from My servant on the mountain and be baptized. Then I will accept her as My spouse.” Catherine woke, and as soon as she could, rushed to the hermit, receiving instruction and finally, baptism. She was then favored with another dream of the Lady and the Child, and He put a ring on her finger.
After this, St. Catherine witnessed far and wide to the infinite beauties of her Spouse, and was finally beheaded by the Emperor for her great faith and powers of persuasion regarding her heavenly Spouse. It is said that immediately after her execution, her body was found on Mt. Sinai, where a monastery was built in her honor.
Marcion’s knees were hurting from kneeling for hours on the stone floor of the chapel. He rose, bowed toward St. Catherine’s relics, and asked her intercession for a fruitful pilgrimage up the many steps of the great mountain. He went outside into the starlight. The next morning he rose at dawn; taking off his shoes at the gate leading to the stars, he ascended the mountain as Moses had done, shoeless as Moses had been before the burning bush.
Many months and hundreds of dusty leagues peeled away, and Marcion again found himself thinking of St. Catherine, his patroness; he thought again of the merry laugh, like the tinkling of bells- and a broad smile, full of the joy of a journey’s goal, spread itself across his swarthy pilgrim’s face. He was standing once again outside a place named in St. Catherine’s honor, an hour’s walk from the Church of the Annunciation, the great monastery and Church built over the site of Our Lady’s girlhood home and the place of the Conception of Our Lord. Strange, how the furthermost and last part of his trip should, by necessity, lead him to the place of the Lord’s beginning- in His humanity, that is. Marcion, reminded by the thoughts of St. Catherine and her monastery on the slopes of Mt. Sinai, the many-staired climb to the heights- with no shoes, in acknowledgement of Moses’ taking off of his shoes- he decided that in honor of Our Lord’s Humble Love, Love Who came to such a humble girl in a tiny house built in an insignificant Galilean town, in honor of this, he, Marcion, should do what he intuited that St. Catherine would do: take off his shoes again and walk barefoot the last thousand steps of his long journey. He knelt in front of the little chapel dedicated to his Helper, St. Catherine, and in the same movement downward, began to unlace his strong shoes. He wriggled his feet in the hot, tiny pebbles and fine dust. He smiled again and made his way to the humble house of Nazareth, encased in its great Church.
Ten centuries later, a group of Saxon pilgrims, joined by a growing number of Normans, reached the little chapel that stood about a mile out of Walsingham. It was elegant, and tiny, and built so that on the twenty-fifth of November, the sun would rise directly behind it, lighting the pilgrims’ faces in jewel colors who stood attending Mass. The twenty-fifth of that month was the feast-day of St. Catherine of Alexandria, to whom this little chapel was dedicated. The people, in that very English way of giving everything nicknames, had dubbed St. Catherine’s English chapel (sister to that one outside of Nazareth) “The Slipper Chapel”: in that other English ingenuity, the nickname had two levels: the Old English, Saxon word “Slype” had the connotation of “an in-between place, a stepping off into another world”. That is, The Slipper Chapel, St. Catherine’s, was the final station chapel on the way to Walsingham, and Walsingham, with its Holy House, was another world, another Nazareth, a remembering in the Jewish sense of the word remember: to re-call, to be actually, miraculously, transported to the place of the Annunciation, to learn its lessons afresh as if one were really present with Our Lady at the moment of her fiat; to participate in that humble and trusting “let it be done”; it was the same kind of real “remembering” as the Real Presence in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, although of differing degree in the way that only God understands. Thus the Saxon “Slype-er Chapel” was the place where St. Catherine, as a Holy Helper as she was in Nazareth and Mt. Sinai, interceded for the pilgrims to truly journey to Nazareth and to Humble Love, to help from Our Lady at Walsingham.
The more pedestrian meaning of the nickname, “Slipper Chapel” was quite a literal one: it was here that the pilgrims took off their slippers, or shoes, to walk the last mile into England’s Nazareth with bare feet. To feel each step, to feel the gritty and wet English road slowly transform into the pebbly and powder-dust-dry road into Nazareth, to remember our humility before the greatness of God, as Moses had done in taking off his shepherd’s sandals, to learn humility by seeing and knowing the Humility of God in coming to the tiny house as His place of Conception, to the gentle and unknown maiden who would be His Mother.
The pilgrims, like St. Catherine, would come seeking answers, come in need, and leave in love. Like St. Catherine, they would see a child in His Mother’s lap, slightly turned from them, His blessing elsewhere; but with a Mother who smiled and gazed at them, her very posture and gaze an intercession to the reluctant Child.
