The Machine To The Merrie

Cheering On The Saints To Come

Martin Shaw

Those that made it through the storm: pilgrims to the Slipper Chapel led by my sister Anna. All photography Charlotte Bromley Davenport.

It’s a funny old world when the notion of a pilgrimage seems oddly radical, but last weekend at Walsingham, that was how it felt.

And we got our work cut out for us: anyone that made it likely wrestled Storm Claudia all day Friday just trying to get into Norfolk. It was about eight hours all in from Devon, and it’s fair to say I was a little deranged by arrival. I met old companions for a fat-headed, creamy Guinness in the back room of The Bull as we stared wide eyed and compared harrowed notes on the buffeting winds, scandalous detours and endless sheets of black rain. We had friends coming in from Canada, Holland, Scotland and all over, so we were praying them safe through the fury.

Take Courage

I was also Keeper of the Keys at St Seraphim’s Orthodox chapel, so in the swirling dark of early evening I was shown the ropes by Joanna – a friendly face – in the rock’n’rolling weather. That little chapel would provide me with tremendous, prayerful solace in the good natured but relentless bustle of the weekend. After a tossing and turning night I was heartened to see a few of us had actually made it through the weather and were gathered for a little pilgrim walk up to the Slipper Chapel.

From Henry III onwards Walsingham became a major shrine in Northern Europe, and a place visited by Kings, Queens and a steady stream of folk looking for peace, healing and depth of feeling. It was a name familiar to Christians all across Europe. Pilgrimages were of course good for business: inn keepers, shoemakers, boatmen to name but three all felt the benefit. There was a route from Shoreditch all the way to Walsingham, roads often being repaired by charitable work from the Religious Houses.

The Milky Way was known as the ‘Walsingham Way’, because the stars were meant to illuminate the pilgrim paths, known as ‘Greenways’. This was a period when the very roads of England were made holy by crosses going far back as Anglo-Saxon times. Some marked their way to shrines, needed when crop was high across the fields and you couldn’t see a thing. There was estimated to be more than five thousand crosses accompanying our tracks and roads at one point.

Well, like pilgrims of olde, we eyed each other friendly-like and prepared to walk to the Slipper Chapel.

My sister Anna gave a beautiful welcome and some reasoning for what we were about to do, and then off we all shuffled, the day suddenly much calmer, and the fields shimmering bright with all that fallen rain. Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, and all sorts of folk simply seeking a deeper life.

I managed to find a bed for a couple of hours, and then it was time to be back at the Parish Hall and for the wider day to begin. Spotting my mother, father, brother, sister, heroic nephews and one beautiful niece in the assembled horde brought a delighted smile to my face.

Kernow Class: Lucy Cooper

First up we had Lucy Cooper giving us some wider context for the whole notion of pilgrimage. Lucy is a fabulous writer, and also editor at the small press Cista Mystica. She walked us through some of her own considerable experience of ‘intentional strolling’ (maybe I just created a new phrase), and gave us all a lovely flavour of the west of Britain. Afterwards we chatted for a little while around the strange rebirth of interest in Christianity, and the urgency of our times. In the absence of my old friend Paul Kingsnorth I talked a little about the abiding notion of the Machine, and the possibility of being an Angel in the Machine ourselves. How do we move from the Machine to the Merrie?

Small Intentioned Steps Matter

Please don’t mistake this for me assuming one stomp across some soggy English fields eradicates the endlessly displayed and often terrifying spiritual turbulence of our age. But even so, one has to direct one’s feet somewhere, and this is, after all, Good News.

When you are lost in the forest it is tiny little breadcrumbs, small intentioned steps, that can lead you home. Circling darkness, and only focusing on circling darkness can lead to absolute paralysis. The weird titillation of paranoia. Drink some freshly squeezed orange juice, put on a James Brown record, spend an hour polishing your shoes. These things help.

I repeated something at the Merrie I wrote here a few weeks ago – the Devil hates a hand-made life.

• Demons Want To Be Needed. Don’t be a life coach for a Demon’s self-esteem issues. If you want to disturb a Demon, a Machine, or a Monster, think about making a hand-made, human-sized life. Sometimes things are simpler than we may think. Find the Angel in the Machine, not just the Demon. Be the Angel in the Machine if you can. It’s radical to be a pilgrim.

The artist Heather Pollington picked this thread up talking about her relationship to art and religion and place. Hugely experienced, she brought with her little glimpses of her work over the years on various very well known movies, and talked about the need to actually be able to create things we can hold in our hand. I was reminded of words she wrote recently here on Substack:

My own search for The Merrie has taken me on quite a path over the last few years. I’ve yearned for pre reformation church in England filled with the kind of things that Martin speaks of. I’ve struggled with the Protestant Reformers who destroyed many of the places and art objects that I long to see and visit. The journey eventually led me to Eastern Orthodoxy where this kind of integration between church, art, village and forest still exists.

This year, on the Feast of the Annunciation, having spent now hours in splendid Orthodox liturgies in various languages, I started to yearn for a service in English. I found a wonderful one in Shrewsbury one bright Spring morning crowned with daffodils. Hearing the chanting in my own native language, I felt almost moved to tears – a deep sense of home and belonging. Then, as often happens in the Christian life, I heard the word ‘hypocrite’ ringing in my ears. Suddenly I felt very close to those sixteenth-century Protestants and ashamed of my naivety. I’ve come to realise that everyone is yearning for the incarnation, we might just be looking for it in different ways.

The point I’m making is, there’s no going back. As Martin says, it is not a re-enactment festival, we are not in the business of nostalgia. So how do we find a way to rekindle something for the modern age? If there are embers, where do we look for them and what do we do?

Back at the ARC conference earlier this year I sat with renowned iconographer and liturgical designer Aidan Hart and we talked about a dream of our own. To find an old pilgrim route in England and build a small but beautiful ‘gem-like’ chapel. Inspired by Blake’s poem, it might be called the ‘Jerusalem Chapel’ an earthy vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the green hills of England. That evening I shared the idea with Martin Shaw and asked him, but what reliquary could we have? Martin had the wonderful invitational idea of the reliquary of the saints to come. At the moment our chapel is still a vision, but soon there’ll be drawings then by the Grace of God, one day we might actually be Making Merrie.

We then had time to chat amongst ourselves and find out a little of the journey we’d all taken to get here and quite what the motivation could have been.After that we had the first real time encounter with these new versions of the Carmina Gadelica with Natasha, Tristan and myself (we’ve been hearing them here for that last weeks). I wish I could tell you we painstakingly created that backdrop but it was already here. Natasha’s compositions were absolutely gorgeous, and Tristan’s fiddle is a roguish hint of heaven, right here amongst us. We need music! The room deepened around us again.Mind-Blowers: Natasha and Tristan

The afternoon finished with a deep dive into the story of The Voyage of Brendan: a pilgrimage to the hidden country and the story that kicked off Beasts and Vines almost four(!) years ago.

How do we dive as soulfully deep as Jasconious, roam as spirit-high as the angel-birds, dwell as deeply silent as the hesychastic monks? What Book of Life like Brendan are we quietly creating? What exactly is the hidden country?

Well by now darkness had settled on Walsingham and we took these questions out into the wider village for a few hours. Time for food and reflection. What would the fields and the tavern and the stars have to say about what we are brooding on? Medieval Brigands

By 7pm we had lit the incense, sparked the candles, and smiling pilgrims slipped back in and shook off the night, hopefully restored, and well fed. There were more glorious reels, jigs and a spell-binding ballad from Tristan and Natasha, then we were into a night of story. I began with a couple of personal tales of when strange providence landed in my life, and asked for us to track our own narratives where events greater and more wonderful than our own ambitions announced themselves.

Asmodeus the Destroyer of Love

The big tales were Joseph in Egypt and Blind Tobit. Both have something of an Underworld journey in them, Joseph down in a variety of pits and seemingly endless testings, and Tobit blinded as an old man and thrown into despair. In Tobit there’s a woman called Sarah who’s had seven potential husbands strangled on their wedding night by a terrible demon called Asmodeus.

Sarah wants to know love, but this demon-of-lust (that’s his particular role) keeps killing the men. Every time we are beset by factory-formed pornography rather than fulsome mysteries of real love, Asmodeus could well be involved. Good to be able to name him. All these tales have an initiatory resonance to them (including Brendan) and my invitation was to go and work with an image or two from the story that speaks most specifically to you. Be light with it, see where it takes you.

Well, finally our time together was at a close. Pilgrimage to Walsingham, story, song, conversation, it was glorious. People have asked me what my highlight was, I find myself saying it was a feeling rather than a moment. This could really be something.

Why are we doing all this? To become real human beings I suppose. Old growth people. To have a wider bandwidth to the still, small voice. To be fully storied by the great God of the storytellers.

The next morning many of us worshipped at local churches, and there were a few final goodbyes in The Black Lion before the spluttering, rarely spotted bus to King’s Lynn, or Cambridge, Stamford or far further afield. It was precious, suddenly spotting a new friend striding out into the Norfolk fields with a rucksack, or a cheery wave as they squeezed into a car full of travellers as the light started to fall. You wanted everyone home safe.

Later it was night and the village was suddenly empty, I sat on a bench under the high blue stars.

I watched my breath frostily puff out into the darkness. Winter. I rubbed my eyes as if coming round from a great slumber. This is still a wonderful world, and opportunity as well as peril, is everywhere. And I thought about you. Where will your pilgrimages take you? To the tree by your window may be plenty. Keep an eye for the Merrie – much is cooking.

An article from Rod Dreher’s Substack… he and Martin Shaw stayed with us in 2022.

“On this day twenty-five years ago, my wife and I pledged our lives to each other at the altar of Our Lady of the Rosary parish in New Orleans. Today, though, is our last wedding anniversary. The divorce will be final in the spring. It seemed somehow fitting that, having prayed to Our Lady for years for a wife, if that was God’s will, and then having been married in a church dedicated to her, that I would solemnly mark the end of the marriage in medieval English Catholic shrine where she is honored. Funny how things work out that way.
Maybe “funny” isn’t the right word. This should have been a day of tears and grief. But it wasn’t. In fact, this is not a sad story. This is a story of a small (but for me, life-changing) miracle of mercy. And I did not see it coming. I’m going to tell you about it,“ because I know it will give at least some of you hope.
Our Cambridge hosts Helen and James Orr wanted to go to Walsingham to visit old friends. It turned out that my friend Martin Shaw (remember our interview about his miraculous conversion?) was also in Walsingham visiting family, so it would be a chance for us to meet, and me to introduce my son Matt to him. Lo, when we discovered that The Old Bakehouse, the very guesthouse where Martin and his daughter were staying was the home of the Orrs’ friends, it seemed somehow providential.
Martin had told me that Walsingham — where the Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared to a noble woman in 1061, with it later becoming a massively popular pilgrimage site in medieval England, before being destroyed by Henry VIII in the Reformation — was “a magical place.” When someone like Martin Shaw tells you that, you had better take it seriously — especially if you are writing a book about places where the barrier between this world and the next is thin.
On the drive there, I tucked back in to C.S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra. It is the second volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. It is set on a planet that is unfallen, but which is under attack by Lucifer, who tempts the Eve figure of this world to betray God. Elwin Ransom, the protagonist of the previous novel, Out Of The Silent Planet, returns to do battle with the Demon for the soul of the Woman, and to protect Paradise. I had never cared to read Lewis’s novels, until a sophisticated ex-occultist I interviewed recently for my book told me that Lewis had uncanny insight into how the world of the demonic actually works.
In the part I was reading as we approached Walsingham, Ransom realizes that as insignificant as he is — he is a middle-aged philologist who teaches at Cambridge — God has arranged it so that the fate of this other world depends on his willingness to accept this mission to fight the Enemy. That as crazy as it seemed, there was real meaning to the drama taking place in front of him, in which he was an actor. Even a small, insignificant man like Ransom could discover that the lives of others — an entire world! — depended on how he responded to the challenges presented to him. From the book:

He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern. He knew now why the old philosophers had said that there is no such thing as chance or fortune beyond the Moon. Before his Mother had borne him, before his ancestors had been called Ransoms, before ransom had been the name for a payment that delivers, before the world was made, all these things had so stood together in eternity that the very significance of the pattern at this point lay in their coming together in just this fashion. And he bowed his head and groaned and repined against his fate—to be still a man and yet to be forced up into the metaphysical world, to enact what philosophy only thinks.

I thought, oh, I see! He is meant to be a “ransom” for the salvation of Perelandra, a sacrifice. If he does not succeed in persuading the Woman to refuse the Tempter, the fate of this entire world will be radically different. And this had been God’s plan all along. Even the smallest things we do can, over time, have eternal significance.

He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river. He was that stone at this horrible moment which had become the center of the whole universe.

Helen, our driver, asked me to find something online about Walsingham and read it aloud, so the kids in the car would know of its significance. In my searching, I learned that Our Lady of Walsingham’s feast day falls on what until recent times was also the feast of Our Lady of Ransom — so called because of a medieval apparition of the Virgin in which she called for the founding of a religious order dedicated to freeing Christian prisoners captured by the Moors. I read that and thought, What a lovely synchronicity.
I know from experience that synchronicities — meaningful coincidences — usually mean that something important is about to happen, so pay attention. But I brushed that thought aside, because it seemed too on-the-nose for a visit to Walsingham.
Well, we arrived at The Old Bakehouse, met our hosts Justin and Charlotte, who are faithful Catholics, and settled in by the fire with Martin and his beautiful daughter Dulcie. The oldest parts of the house date to the Tudor era. It is believed that Erasmus stayed here when he made his own pilgrimage to Walsingham. Here is the view behind us, of the dining room:

Soon enough we were all gathered round the table to eat Charlotte’s delicious lamb stew. I happened to be sitting next to Charlotte during the meal, and we got to talking about what brought me to England this Christmas. I told her about the sad divorce news. Now, I told you that Charlotte and Justin are faithful Catholics. Their home feels like a place of palpable grace. I don’t know what moved her to say the words she did to me then, but I say she spoke as an angel, as God’s messenger. I won’t disclose the words she said, because they are too personal, but it was as if a key fit into a lock, turned, and a door swung open. I understood a degree and kind of meaning in this painful sacrifice that I had never, ever imagined — even though I have been pondering the mystery of sacrifice since at least the time I first saw Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, back in 2020. Somehow, this Catholic woman I had met only an hour earlier saw right to the bottom of things, and spoke words that landed in my ears with the force of revelation.
I thought for a moment, and said, “Well, I accept it.”
And just like that, a huge weight lifted from me.
Martin and Dulcie had to be off for the long drive back to Devon. As for the rest of us, we ate panettone by the fire, and talked and talked. Full of lamb and cake and wine, Matt and I excused ourselves after dark and went upstairs to our room, where we soon fell asleep. I felt so light, and prayed joyfully, in thanksgiving for the mercy Charlotte had shown me, not even knowing the part she played in the plan.
Matt and I made a plan to wake up early and walk the mile out of town to the Slipper Chapel, which is the Catholic shrine in Walsingham. It is almost all that remains of the great medieval foundation of Walsingham, whose priory was smashed by the Reformation iconoclasts, leaving only a single wall. So too was the “Holy House,” a replica of the house in Nazareth where the Holy Family dwelled, according to the vision of Richeldis, who said she was told by the Virgin to build a replica there in Walsingham. The Slipper Chapel, built in 1325, was so called because pilgrims approaching Walsingham — whose number included many English monarchs — would stop there to pray and remove their shoes before walking the final mile into the town.
It was cold, wet, and windy when Matt and I set out. We stopped for a quick prayer in the tiny Orthodox chapel at the edge of the village, and then reached the country lane leading to the Slipper Chapel a mile away. We hadn’t made too many steps down the path when Matt said he would need to turn back, because he wasn’t dressed for this weather. So I ventured forth alone, which, when I think about it, is probably as it should have been.
I prayed my prayer rope as I walked, offering my wife, our children, and myself to God through the Theotokos, his mother. I asked for healing for us all. As I neared the chapel, I asked her to pray for me, so that whatever else God will do with me in this life, He will find no resistance in me. The Woman’s words from Perelandra lingered in my mind: “To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.”
I was not walking into nowhere. I was walking to Walsingham.
But the chapel was closed. Here is what it looked like standing before it, on the pilgrim path:

I thought: how many hundreds of thousands of Christians have stood on this very spot over the centuries, beholding this very church. What sorrows did they carry in their hearts? What hopes? What joys? The royals and the rabble, and everyone in between, they’ve all come to Walsingham — and in this place, removed their shoes to walk in bare feet the final mile to England’s Nazareth.
Here’s what the church looks like from a few steps down the road to Walsingham proper:

O cold, lonely, wintry England! How meet and right it was for me to be there today. I was just about to leave when a kind man with a faded golden beard spotted me, and said he was the sacristan, and would be opening the chapel momentarily. I waited, and then in I went. Here is what I saw:

It was so small, this chapel, but radiant with grace. I only had a few minutes before Justin was to pick me up. I prayed for my wife, my children, and myself. I thought of myself as somehow like St. Galgano, leaving his sword in the stone, or Andrei Gorchakov from Nostalghia, placing his candle on the side of the stone bath. Twenty-five years ago on this day, I could never have imagined spending this anniversary by myself in cold, damp England, mourning the end of what began with so much love and hope and happiness. But such is the way of this fallen world, and I have discovered on this difficult journey that I have been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern.
This is why I had the strange feeling that I had not come to this place, on this day, by happenstance. I had long believed that Our Lady had brought my wife and me together, and given us our marriage. Indeed, the one daughter we had, born ten years to the day we met (on an important Marian day!), we dedicated to Christ through Mary. The rock-solid confidence that Heaven meant for us to be married gave me the strength to remain committed to this marriage long after it had ceased to exist, except as a formality. I was sure that God was going to work some kind of miracle to save the marriage when it no longer appeared that my wife and I had the strength to do so.
But the miracle never came. The marriage ended. I never felt abandoned by God, but I did wonder why He, and why Christ’s mother, could have allowed this to happen. I mean, yes, theodicy and all that, but seriously: why? This marriage seemed so unusually graced.
In Walsingham, in the words of a new friend spoken over lamb stew and red wine, I found my answer. It was a harsh one, but I think Charlotte spoke truth. She talked about the meaning of love and sacrifice, and in that instant, it all made sense. I was being invited by the events in the life of my marriage, I now understood, to share in a dimension of love that I had not known before. I could say no, and maybe most people would, but how very strange it was to find that when Charlotte said those words, my heart leaped, not so much by instinct but as the faculty of a man trained to know what to do because he knows the story by which he lives.
I cannot explain to you why all this had to happen this way. But it did. There is deep meaning here, meaning that logicians can’t fathom, but priests and poets can. I don’t expect to fully understand it until the next life, and that is fine with me. I live in a world of wonders, a place of enchantment, in which God draws us onto pilgrim paths, sends messages through art and literature, and puts words into the mouths of kindly innkeepers at Christmas.
Charlotte’s husband Justin, knowing that we had to get back on the road to Cambridge soon, drove to pick me up at the Shrine. As we walked to the door of The Old Bakehouse, I told him that his wife had uttered at lunch yesterday perhaps the heaviest thing anyone had ever said to me, but they left me feeling almost impossibly light, and changed everything for me.
Justin said, “It was a severe mercy.”
“Yes!” I replied. “That’s exactly what it was!”
The gift I was given in Walsingham, through Charlotte’s unwitting words, was the relief that Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor, spoke of when he said: “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” I knew now why all this grief was my fate. And I also knew that as long as I did my very best to walk in His will, I would not be a lost and lonesome wayfarer on the road to nowhere, but a pilgrim who might find misery, or might find magic, around the next bend in the road to Paradise. Strangest of all, I would have near to hand the grace to observe how, through the inscrutable formulas of divine alchemy, magic can turn misery into a miracle of mercy.
As the kids were loading our bags in the car, I sat by the fire and thanked Charlotte again for her words, a gift that redeemed what should have been a day of deep mourning for me. She smiled sweetly and said, “These things tend to happen in Walsingham.”