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Sermon for 23rd September, 2018 – Our Lady of

+ In Mark’s Gospel Jesus takes a little child in his arms, saying: Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me. Jesus wasn’t suggesting we should welcome the child-ish - those who behave like a child – but rather that we should welcome those with child-like characteristics – the innocent, the obedient, the trusting. Qualities which are hard to find, but which we associate with one Biblical character in particular: Jesus’ mother. Every Evensong we hear Mary’s voice in the Magnificat as, newly pregnant, she trusts in God’s promises: My doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the lowliness of his hand-maiden. For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

If you glance at the ’s September Services and Music list, you’ll see that tomorrow is a Marian commemoration, as we celebrate Our Lady of Walsingham. Walsingham is a sleepy village in north east Norfolk and I’m going to focus on its and the Blessed Virgin Mary this morning, as I’m guessing that many Anglicans are unaware of the history or the significance of this place of pilgrimage, known as ’s and widely recognised as a place of healing, much like Lourdes.

Shrines are commonly the destination of a pilgrimage and to undertake a pilgrimage is generally understood as a journey to a place of religious significance. This may be undertaken as a physical journey, or it may be understood as the meaning of our entire lives as we journey towards the eternal Kingdom. In our secular age, pilgrimage has become associated with going virtually anywhere significant – for Beatles fans it might be Liverpool, or football supporters may make a pilgrimage to walk on the hallowed turf of their club. At Cribbs Causeway the other day I heard some shoppers discussing their forthcoming pilgrimage to the original Lakeland shop in Windermere.

Pilgrimage of the religious kind was popular in the middle-ages and people travelled often in great danger, taking months to reach the Holy Land and places closer to home like Walsingham. It was the package tour industry of its day and were a popular destination.

Shrines are something we seem programmed to create. There are the great religious shrines of at Westminster Abbey and Thomas a Becket at Cathedral. More recently think of the aftermath of the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales when thousands of candles, flowers, messages and teddies were left in Kensington Gardens and every tree became a shrine. At times of great emotional upset we want to do something collective, something concrete, and if we aren’t familiar with the religious rituals of grief then we will find an alternative way to express our feelings. The shrines in Kensington Gardens have long since gone; the religious ones are more permanent.

A popular image at shrines is that of Our Lady – as in Our Lady of Walsingham. This is just another way of referring to Mary, Jesus’ mother who goes under various names: the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, in Greek Theotokos, Panagia, and so on. There is only one Mary – so Our Lady of Walsingham refers to the fact that she appeared there in a vision, as she did to people in numerous other places, such as Lourdes, Fatima, Mount Carmel.

Walsingham shot to fame in the eleventh century when its history as a place of pilgrimage began. At that time the Lady of the Manor was a certain Richeldis de Faverche, who was widowed as a young woman and left to bring up her son Geoffrey on her own. Richeldis relied on the inspiration of the Virgin Mary – she identified with her as someone who knew and understood what it meant to experience great sadness. Around the year 1080 Richeldis saw several visions of Mary, who each time showed her the simple house in Nazareth where the had lived. Richeldis came to understand that through the visions of Mary, God was asking her to build a replica of that house in Nazareth, in her own small corner of Norfolk. She set about doing this but her efforts repeatedly failed when the little houses she built either collapsed or were destroyed by some other disaster. Eventually she succeeded and the tiny house was built on a spot where a spring of clear water gushed up from the ground. The water was found to have healing properties and so England’s Nazareth, a place of healing, was born. After Richeldis’ death her son Geoffrey founded an Abbey in Walsingham, which in time became extremely wealthy. Pilgrims flocked there, including virtually all the English kings and noblemen.

There’s a certain irony that five centuries later Henry VIII went to Walsingham to pray for a son and then to thank God when his first son was born. Sadly that baby son died when he was two months old and a chain of 2

events - including his desperation for a male heir - led Henry to break with Rome, and with the ensuing Reformation all the ancient abbeys and monasteries were dissolved, including Walsingham.

Another five hundred years passed, Walsingham had reverted to being nothing more than a sleepy, remote Norfolk village. Then in the early part of the last century a remarkable man called Alfred became the parish priest of Walsingham. Hope Patten felt called to re-build the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. By then no-one knew the site of the original little house built by Richeldis, so Fr Hope Patten started from scratch.

Painstakingly, over the years he rebuilt the place – amazingly when they dug the foundations to rebuild the little house Richeldis had built, they struck water and this is now the well in the church which all pilgrims visit. The little house of Nazareth is now inside the larger church, all designed and built by Alfred Hope Patten. Slowly he renovated cottages in the village for the visiting pilgrims to stay in, beautiful gardens were established and the place became a Shrine which is visited by thousands of pilgrims each year – some for a few hours, some for a few days.

It needs acknowledging that the Virgin Mary may be a source of comfort and an inspiration to many, but she is also a controversial figure – one reason being our very long collective memory of the years leading up to the Reformation, when devotion to Mary seems to have got out of hand – it frequently descended into Mariolatry with Mary almost assuming a place as the fourth member of the Trinity. One result of this was that at the Reformation the baby was thrown out with the bathwater and for centuries Mary has scarcely featured in Anglican worship. It’s only now, 500 years later, that our collective memory is starting to fade. This has been helped enormously by the growing influence of ecumenical dialogue which has focussed on Mary as a uniting influence – we may disagree with our Christian sisters and brothers of other denominations on many crucial aspects of our faith, but we can agree on the place of importance held by Jesus’ mother.

There are still difficulties though, and one of the most common misconceptions is the accusation that people pray to Mary. This should never be the case, because as Christians we only ever pray to God, through his Son Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. We may however choose to ask the saints to pray for us, including Mary, in much the same way as we would ask a friend to pray for us. This can be healing and of great comfort, especially when we find personal prayer difficult through lack of faith, illness or weakness.

As we slowly reclaim the post-Reformation Mary, now is the time to remember that she was a real woman. If she is to inspire us – to be called blessed by this generation – then we mustn’t place her on a pedestal as happened in the past, we must resist the temptation to make her a rather worryingly perfect paragon of feminine virtue, like that of the perfect wife we heard about in the Proverbs reading. Mary’s inspiration to us stems not from an impossibly unrealistic, idealised example of obedient womanhood, but from her child-like trust in God our Father, which gave her the strength to accept the most important invitation ever given, God’s invitation to bear his Son: My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the lowliness of his hand-maiden. For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Amen.