The Power of Pilgrimage
Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 33)
As you came from the holy land of blessed Walsingham, met you not with my true love by the way you came?
My love is neither white nor brown, nor as the heavens fair; there is none that have her form divine either in earth or air.
I that loved thee all my youth, grow old now as you see, love liketh not the falling fruit, nor yet the withered tree.
Walsingham song
*
Shick-Shack entered the nave, & smelt the forest of the church.
Alan Garner
Never arrive in the dark. I mutter this to myself as I pull into an unfamiliar scene of freezing fog and utter darkness. Welcome to Great Walsingham. Great? Well Walsingham may be wonderful, spiritual, magnificent, but large in stature it is not. What it does have is atmosphere. Those with such inclination would proclaim it as a ‘thin’ place, or a ‘liminal’ place, certainly a ‘holy’ one for the many thousands on pilgrimage here every year. Arriving at night certainly amps up the pathos.
I pull my car up onto a sopping wet grass verge and park next to a moss-strewn old granite cross. This is where all instruction to the cottage ends. I had pictured ‘Great’ Walsingham as having streets and lamps and stuff like that, but this is something like the scene for an early seventies British horror movie. It’s absolutely wonderful, but will be more wonderful when somehow I have located my digs.
I drag my wheely bag in all directions but the right one, until finally, torchless, almost by feel, I locate the small wooden gate which leads to the back garden which leads to the keys which leads to the door of the merry little place I’m staying in. Next morning in daylight it’s less than a minute’s walk from the car, and the simplest of routes, but it’s amazing how the night can stray you.
It’s all fun & games in the daylight
Long before Walsingham was a centre for devotion to Christianity and especially Mary, there was a Roman shrine to wild old Mercury here, with devotions associated to Bacchus also. That’s Hermes and Dionysus to me, after many years of telling their stories. Now these two I am familiar with. I have told their myths in Crete and all over North America, Ireland and Britain. And out here in the dark, under the mossy cross, they seemed awfully near again. Easy to imagine a Roman soldier two thousand years ago giving libation to these strange, southern Gods. I hope they weren’t too appalled by the cold.
You called?
The reason I was late was books. It’s almost always books.