“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 sits where Our Lord did
sway,
Walsingham, oh farewell!"
Sir Phillip Howard wrote these verses shortly after a visit to a tiny English village just off the North Sea in Norfolk; it was the year 1578, and Sir Phillip had been part of the group escorting Queen Elizabeth I. He had seen, probably for the first time, the devastation of the spiritual heart of England, shown here physically in this little hamlet: the empty spot where the Holy House once stood encased in its gold-and-jewel inlaid stone protection; the ancient Priory in slow decay, taken from the careful hands of the priests and monks and given to friends of the Crown; the Martyr’s Field, where the only priest and a layman to protest the desecration were hung, drawn and quartered; the Slipper Chapel, dedicated to the great saint, Catherine of Alexandria, on its way to being used as a barn.
Sir Phillip wept at the sight- he knew that with the ruin of Walsingham, England herself had been hung, her heart drawn, her spirit quartered. It was a betrayal by those in authority that had known no stopping, no bounds of decency: it was a satanic affront to Our Lady and her Child. The destruction of Walsingham was the destruction of the spiritual life of England: Isle of Saints, bulwark for the Faith- England’s demise was the break in the dam of heresy in the West. From this came the Wars of Religion, the de-stabilization of Christian Europe: and the beginning of the secularization with the Peace of Westphalia. England’s fall was the rocket-rise of Protestantism, for she was a place of fervent faith, depth of learning and spirituality; the British Isles were the flower of Christendom, so much so, that England was named, “Our Lady’s Dowry”. When this flower was plucked and stamped into the ground, her riches both spiritual and material, plundered by those intent upon seeing the destruction of the Church, there was left an unnatural vacuum which brought legion assertions of spiritual and material power in its wake. The organic whole of Christendom was shattered like a tree by an axe.
No, one cannot underestimate too greatly the power and purpose of the holy places in a nation; nor of the importance of each nation to the whole of the Church; like the underestimation of the Stable and the thirty silent years of Nazareth, the few words and quiet of St. Joseph and Our Lady, underestimation of these quiet things misses the essence of Our Lord, His love in humility. Walsingham, for England, and the West, is another possessor of the secret of Nazareth: the “fruitfulness in self-effacement, intimate prayer, immolation, silence” – “quotidie morior”- “I die daily”*, like the grain of wheat that falls to the ground to produce a harvest.
Walsingham is the fertile ground Our Lady picked to be a second Nazareth in a nation her Son knew would be a powerful force in the Church and the world. Like the Holy House of Loreto, a later “opened doorway to heaven”, Our Lady’s Shrine at Walsingham was a mysterious reminder of the center of Christian prayer and apostolic activity, which is self-immolation and humility in love: precisely because it was a doorway into the humble life God chose to live on earth.
In researching the shrine at Walsingham, I found many strange and wonderful synchronicities between Nazareth and Walsingham; it is a story set in three dimensions, for the pilgrim to read, pray, and ponder. In the ensuing parts, I will reveal some of these simple wonders; and try to “read” the live book Our Lady left us at Walsingham. I will relate the history of Walsingham, and finally, why it is laid on my heart to pray for the restoration of the actual Shrine.
In the year 1061 AD, a young and wealthy widow, Richeldis de Fevereches, was living in the little Saxon hamlet of Walsingham, a humble and rather backwater place; in those days, many days journey from London (seventy or so miles). It was five years before the cataclysmic invasion of 1066. This invasion of the Normans bears on the meaning of Walsingham. Before the advent of the French-speaking Normans, Britain’s society was made up of the Old Celts, living in the north and west of the Isles, what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland; Britons with old Roman blood, and the Saxons, who were the descendents of the Viking raiders of the middle of the first millennium. It was a society evangelized by the likes of St. Augustine of Canterbury, St. David and St. Patrick, and sustained by the monks in their great monasteries, like Venerable Bede. It was a Christian society, but of a rather humble and agricultural stock; there seemed to be an unassuming nature about it, but that all changed when the Normans came. Suddenly the Saxons, who lived in the south and east of England (wherein Walsingham is located) were dispossessed of power and land: this conflict and the pain is immortalized in the stories of Robin Hood and King Richard the Lionhearted; or in Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. The essential nature of the change in England’s society within a relatively short time is evidenced in the profound changes of the language. Suddenly, those in power were French speaking; and English was the lower-class form of communication. As English began to take in the French and become the hybrid that it is today, the words for table food were French: beef, pork- and the words for the corresponding animal on the farm were the old Saxon words: cow, pig. This is profound evidence of the strict class structure of post-Saxon England.
Our Lady came to Richeldis de Fevereches just before the Invasion of 1066, and she took the young widow in spirit to Nazareth, where Our Lady showed her the house of Sts. Anne and Joachim wherein she was greeted by the Angel and conceived, by God’s Spirit, Our Lord in her womb. Richeldis was asked to build a house with these dimensions in an area on her land. The house that was built was not a Jewish house, but rather a humble Saxon dwelling, although with the same dimensions of the house in Nazareth. Why not an exact replica, a Jewish house? Part of the mystery of Walsingham is that perhaps Our Lady wanted to speak somehow to the Saxons, who were about to become the poor, downtrodden, the dispossessed. She chose a backwater hamlet, northwest of the central city, like Nazareth is to Jerusalem; a place out of the way, a place that only those who were truly needy and truly seeking would come. She came to strengthen the faith of those who would, in time, become the spiritual and economic backbone of England.
…to be continued…
* quote from I Believe in Love by Fr. d'Elbee
