Containers for God?

 Holy Island is raw, natural, and exposed to the elements. In contrast, the Anglican shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is enclosed, confined, and  sequestered from the world around it. Holy Island earned its status as a pilgrimage destination through the rough edged  sanctity of its monastic founders, Aidan and Cuthbert, whose  reputation for wisdom and holiness was good while they lived, but went ballistic after they died and were buried (like any member of their monastery) on the island where they had lived and laboured. The Walsingham shrine was founded specifically to be what it is, the result of a vision afforded to a Norman gentlewoman in the 1100's. 

     Both are thin places, inviting pilgrims to suspend disbelief, however tentatively, and see the world through the eyes of a less skeptical age. At Holy Island, it is a wild and potentially dangerous spirit that assaults the wall separating us from the world of the "Island Saints". At Walsingham, God is domesticated, contained within the walls of the "Holy House" (a recreation of the house where Jesus lived with his parents in Nazareth). Yet the God of Lindisfarne and the God of Walsingham are the same: incarnate; accessible; contained; uncontainable.