Our Lady of Walsingham

The Feast of Our Lady of Walsingham

The Episcopal Cathedral of All Saints [Choral Evensong] – 15 October 2023

_{Ezekiel 37:1-28; Romans 8:12-23}

“Son of Man, take a stick, and write on it,

For Judah: then take another stick, and write on it,

For Joseph: and join them together and they shall be one in your hand” [Ezekiel 37:16-17].

A wonderful image of unity, is it not?

If you will allow me to rework the prophetic words.

“Mary, take a stick, and write on it,

For Anglicans: then take another stick, and write on it,

For Roman Catholics: then take another stick, and write on it,

For Orthodox: and join them together and they shall be one in your hand”.

Is Mary the bond of unity between our communities? Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox all gather at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, and for what reason?

The Virgin Mary instructed Richeldes de Faverches to build a replica of the Holy House in Nazareth where the Archangel Gabriel announced a message of good news and great joy. Joy fills the opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel. The birth of John would be a cause of “joy and gladness.” At the Visitation, John leapt for joy in Elizabeth’s womb as Mary sang that her spirit, her whole being rejoiced in her saving God whose angels pierced the cold darkness of the night for shepherds proclaiming “good news of great joy that will be for all people.”

Mary desires that we experience what she, Elizabeth, John and shepherds experienced – joy.

But what is joy?

Francis of Rome has said that joy is a grace, a gift of the Holy Spirit. “To be full of joy is the experience of the highest consolation, when the Lord makes us understand that this is something different from being cheerful, positive, bright…” I find it intriguing and reassuring that Francis calls joy a consolation of the Holy Spirit.

Mary had to be frightened after Gabriel left. The disciples were frightened, believing they were seeing a ghost. We live in a time of great fear, which is masked by anger, violence and hate. We need to be consoled.

The Sufi mystic Rumi says, “Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow”.

Violently, shaking, pulling up, unexpected, uninvited – Joy arrives. It “is not the consequence of emotions that burst for a wonderful thing… No, it is more,” Francis teaches. That is why even in the deepest of life’s burdens a person can still experience joy, this consoling gift of the Holy Spirit.

When was the last time you and I felt filled with this unexpected gift?

Are we afraid of feeling overjoyed?

We may ask ourselves, how can we feel joy when others are suffering? How can we look at the world, with the endless news of war, mistrust, racism, rising hate, institutional decline, ecological threats and terrorism, and rejoice? Joy can seem insensitive, can it not?

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI] explained that we struggle to express joy because we feel guilty when we do. “When someone rejoices, they are afraid of offending…the many people who suffer. I don’t have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice. This attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better – and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. It always strikes me that in the poor neighborhoods of, say, South America, one sees many more laughing happy people than among us”.

In this light I would encourage us to read or reread the 1988 book, “The City of Joy” by Dominique Lapierre, which relates interlaced stories of people, true joy and spiritual rebirth that can be found in places like the poverty of Mother Teresa’s Kolkata.

Though joy may arrive unexpected and even uninvited such as the appearance to Richeldes de Faverches, Justin of Canterbury reminded us in his 2018 Advent Christmas message that volunteerism can be the ground in which joy arises. Thus Mary’s first response to Gabriel is to run in haste to Elizabeth who is beginning her third trimester of pregnancy.

An anonymous poet wrote “Joy is found in common things…” There is a simplicity to the experience of joy. A small house in an unmemorable part of a great and imperial empire, a teenage girl, an ordinary day, a town in Palestine, a town in the Land of the Engels, pilgrims traveling in hope. It is all gift of the Spirit. Joy.

Our Lady of Walsingham, bind, bind us together and we shall be one in your hand.