St. Augustine's, Kilburn, London

PILGRIMAGE ITINERARY

LONDON is the most secular of cities, yet haunted by the husks of neglected churches, historic buildings served by clergy whose efforts to attract worshippers can seem embarrassingly lame.  When these efforts are successful, they often include elaborate music of the highest quality, and, as I wrote in my journal in 2007, “it would be easy [for a person like me living in London] to become a “sampler of religious products, hopping from one splendid edifice to another in search of musical perfection and liturgical excellence.”

Such obstacles make “sacred enchantment” all the more credible when, as it did for me in 2007, it asserts itself, like the sudden appearance of an island in the fog.

In my experience, the antidote for ecclesiastical dilettantism is community, which can seem elusive in the London churches. For this pilgrimage, as for my life’s journey in general, my primary “community” will be Nancy and I. Anything else we discover along the way will be gravy.

THE SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM, in Norwich, is very much off the beaten path, and was “medieval England’s most significant pilgrimage site devoted to the Virgin Mary, [and] …was revived in the Twentieth Century, and in 2006 voted Britain’s favorite religious site.”(Google review of Walsingham and the English Imagination, by Gary Fredrick, Waller, 2011).

My own imagination has been tweeked by this place since I first heard of it in the 1950’s. The shrine is conducted under Anglican auspices, but just barely, as it has the reputation of being the most over-the-top example of ultra-catholicism to be found anywhere in the world, including the great majority of Roman Catholic churches.

So why go there? If I find myself badgered and scolded by opponents of women’s ordination, I will probably regret having done so, but I am not going to Walsingham to argue church politics. I am going there because I feel a call, familiar yet strange, emanating from that place, emanating from the pages of novels, poems, and autobiographies wherein it is mentioned, emanating from the illustrations in an Anglo-Catholic book of devotions that I was given as a teen-ager, pen-and-ink drawings of Mary as “Mother of God,” and “Our Lady of Sorrows,” devotions that appalled and fascinated me at the time, and apparently still do.