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All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Tag Archives: Walsingham

A Reflection on Walsingham

26 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by Neo in Faith, Marian devotion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Holy Land, Middle Ages, Our Lady of Walsingham, The Shrine at Walsingham, Walsingham

CIMG2202I was touched when Chalcedon brought forward Jessica’s posts on her pilgrimage to Walsingham. Most of you know that Jess and I are very close friends indeed, and one of the bases of that lies in her pilgrimage. I was moved beyond words when she lit a candle there for me–even though such was well outside my experience. In fact, I knew something had changed before she told me of it, a sort of peace went through me at nearly the exact time she did.

Many of you are like me in this, she is our friend, our teacher, and in many ways our guide. She taught me much, about my faith, yes, but also about many other things, not excluding civil life, and working for a living as well. She also revived my early love of poetry, and has helped greatly in learning to apply it to our lives

It is also true that last year when she was ill and continuing into her recovery at Walsingham, her posts were a very great comfort to me, and during the early part of her convalescence helped me to believe that I would once again hear her (written, anyway) voice again. The posts that we have mentioned this week are among my especial favorites, not least because they bring to minds Eliot’s words:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.

And so it has come to pass. Will we again be privileged to read again her thoughts here? God only knows, and He ain’t telling. But I continue to hope and pray that it will be so. Not least because she has a way of explaining even the most complex things such that even I can understand them.

The vandalism of Henry VIII’s troops is shocking to this day, and it is hard to see what he gained by it. Henry was a rather Catholic sort of reformer, his problem was with the Pope, not with the beliefs of the Church. And yet, if England was going to progress, something needed to change, the Church in England held too much of the land, too much of the wealth, and to much of the secular loyalty of the people, and the turning away from Europe is the beginning of the march of the freedoms we enjoy. In truth, all that Britain (and America) has accomplished in the world, mostly good although some bad, started off as a Tudor enterprise. And in truth, it likely wouldn’t have happened if Catherine’s uncle hadn’t been occupying Rome at the time.

Jess said this:

The Holy House at Nazareth was rebuilt in Anglo-Norman England here, in this far corner of Norfolk – a testament to the piety of Richeldis de Faverches and the power and wealth of her lord. It was utterly destroyed by the vandals of Henry VIII. I cannot begin to imagine what the canons of Walsingham felt when they saw the famous statue of Our Lady taken from the sanctuary to be burnt in London. How could that have been for the faithful? How could even the rudest of soldiery not have felt the stain of what they did, as they transported the object of so much veneration to its fiery end? Eliot’s lineshaunted me:

Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
       This is the death of water and fire.

The Shrine itself is a rather incredible story in itself. In a way it is reminiscent of the reports we all read of the desevration of history today, in the Middle East. From the history of Walsingham:

England’s Nazareth

Walsingham has been a place of pilgrimage since the Middle Ages — one of the four great shrines of medieval Christendom, ranking alongside Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago da Compostella.

The Vision

In 1061 the lady of the manor, Richeldis de Faverches, had a series of visions of the Virgin Mary, who showed her the house in Nazareth where the angel Gabriel made his revelation of the forthcoming birth of Jesus. Our Lady asked Richeldis to build a replica of the holy house here in Walsingham.

Founded at the time of the Crusades when it was impossible to visit the Holy Land, English Christians were able to visit ‘Nazareth’ in their own country. Walsingham became the premier shrine to Our Lady and around it grew a large monastery.

Every Anglo-Norman king from the Conquest right through Hevry VIII came to the shrine, and it’s memory never really died. I find it interesting to note that the first Roman Catholic Mass celebrated in Walsingham since the Reformation was by American soldiers on 17 May 1945, they certainly had something to be celebrating, since it was just shortly after VE day.

I spoke a bit more about it as well this week, on my blog as well, because as one of my commenters (a Southern Baptist) said:

Moving yes. I never read here without realizing Jess’s influence on you. And silently say Lord Bless and Keep Her as a prayer […]

But I think Jess is the messenger, I believe the influence is really Our Lady. And in that I simply follow Luther’s example, as we discussed here.

This is one the places where, as Eliot wrote in the dark days of 1940, where it is true

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Even across all the miles and centuries, She still speaks to us all

Robert Lowell in his The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket says this

OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM

There once the penitents took off their shoes
And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;
And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file
Slowly along the munching English lane,
Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose
Track of your dragging pain.
The stream flows down under the druid tree,
Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad
The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad
And whistled Sion by that stream. But see:

Our Lady, too small for her canopy,
Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless
Face with its heavy eyelids. As before,
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque decor,
Expressionless, expresses God: it goes
Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,
Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem
Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.

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Rest

31 Saturday May 2014

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Faith, Marian devotion, Prayers

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Christianity, love, Marian Devotion, Prayers, Walsingham

mary_rosary-31

By the time this is posted, I shall be on my way to, amongst other places, Walsingham. My thanks to Neo for his very kind comments, and to others for their many kindnesses.

Holiday, of course, comes from ‘Holy Day’, and I intend to restore the link between the two, at least for me. One of the hardest parts of Christian life for me is living it every day, and not letting it become ghettoized to morning and evening prayers. When St Paul tells us to pray constantly, we know it is a good idea, but I, for one, find it problematic, not least with the deadline for a report to the boss looming, and several meetings’ worth of minutes to be prepared – and then there’s that business of lunch, and, goodness, it is 2 o’clock and it didn’t happen. It is as though the whole pace of life is designed to give one no opportunity to draw breath, let alone pray.

I carry my Rosary with me everywhere, and sometimes find that just clutching in my hand helps; it gives a moment’s oasis in the desert of work. The place where I have been working had a ‘quiet room’, but when I asked the chaplain how often it was used by staff, he looked at me as though that was an odd question; “hardly ever, they’re too busy”. The medieval Church was better than we are at providing spaces in the year for people to spend time with God. I should love to have been able to go to Church on Thursday to celebrate the feast of the Ascension, but work beckoned, and apart from a short morning service first thing, I had no opportunity before prayer-time in the evening to reflect on this important event in our calendar. These sacred spaces which the Church used to provide in such abundance were swept away during the Reformation, and I am told that the English have fewer religious holidays than any country in Europe; this, I think, it a great shame. If we have no time in our days for God, then we suffer; well, I know I do.

I am hoping that this period away will be one which allows me to reorient my prayer-life in preparation for my new post, which will allow, I hope, some real place for it. The school has an act of Christian worship every morning, and I look forward to treasuring that, as I do to the period of ‘quietness’ at the end of the teaching day. One of the attractions to me of this new post is not simply that it puts me back doing what I was trained to do – teaching primary school children – but it puts me into the atmosphere of a Church school which takes its ethos seriously.

I see the next week as a period of spiritual ‘detox’ where I can slough off old practices and begin to acquire some new ones. I will light candles at Walsingham.

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Endings & Beginnings

30 Friday May 2014

Posted by Neo in Faith

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

England, Good News, McDonald, Our Lady, Protestantism, Satan, Vicar, Walsingham

Well, I seem to have become the town crier for the AATW community. It’s something I relish, since it nearly always means that I am conveying good news, related to The Good News and it doesn’t get much better than that.

Today marked Jessica’s last day on her old job, in which we watched in awe as she staged a demonstration of how meteoric one’s career could be if one, was honest, forceful and not cowed by a bureaucracy. From a part-timer to the PA of the big boss in a bit more than a year, and probably the best PA a man has ever had.

Congratulations, Dearest Friend 🙂 xx

As all of us who have worked in a corporate environment know, the strain is great, and all of us who know her well cheered in relief when she decided to go back to teaching the little ones. Not to mention that it is her first love, and now she carries an immense amount of administrative know-how that I suspect her new employer will be most grateful to have.

And this is where I get to tell you that she will be MIA for the next week as she reprises her pilgrimage to Walsingham. Rather than me telling you about it, there are several articles about Walsingham on the site from her last visit, nearly two year ago. It hold a deep personal meaning for me as well, because it was on that trip, that our friendship deepened immeasurably, this was when something other-worldly moved both of us and we became in our terminology, ‘dearest friend’ rather than merely good friends. Being a rock ribbed Protestant, I have no especially good argument, but Jess found me much more open to The Lady after this.

And so, that you’ll know one or the other of us wrote this, a bit of the poem we have both quoted so often, from Sir Philip Howard

Weep, weep, O Walsingham
Whose days are nights,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to despites.
Sin is where Our Lady sat,
Heaven turned into hell,
Satan sits where Our Lord did sway,
Walsingham, oh farewell!

And yet for those of us at the watchtower and especially perhaps for me, Walsingham turned out not to be about the past and regrets and destruction but about new beginnings, and deepening relationships between people and their God.

This would be the point to say how much we all, and I especially will miss her for the week. As I told her yesterday, I will miss the emails from the McDonald’s along the way, but it is a time for her and her Vicar to really get to know each other. and so

And so, in some ways, we mark an ending, but we also note a joyful beginning, as when she returns she will be returning to her first love, as the Assistant Headteacher of a Church of England primary school. I’d call those some very lucky students because if she can teach us old curmudgeons, she can surely teach the bright young children, and so our heritage is passed on. Mathew Arnold says it well I think.

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill;
Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropped herbage shoot another head.
But when the fields are still,
And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,
And only the white sheep are sometimes seen
Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green,
Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest!


Go, and enjoy, and we shall surely miss you, and when you return, refreshed as before, we shall begin again, dearest friend.

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