ANNUAL WALSINGHAM PILGRIMAGE

SOCIETY OF MARY ANNUAL MASS

Grace Church, Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Saturday, October 18, 2025

 

 

Bishop Gunter, Bishop Burgess, reverend colleagues, fellow pilgrims: It is good to be here! On behalf of everyone who made the journey to this place today, I want to thank the people of Grace Church for their warm welcome and generous hospitality. On behalf of the Society of Mary, I especially want to thank Fr. Bulson for his kind invitation to combine our Annual Mass with the Annual Walsingham Pilgrimage this year.

 

The connection between the Society of Mary and the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is long and deep. In the 1920s, the League of Our Lady—one of the Society of Mary’s two precursor societies—organized the first Anglican pilgrimages to Walsingham. Fr. William Elwell, the rector of this parish who started the Walsingham pilgrimages here in 1951, became a founding member of the Society of Mary American Region Council eleven years later, in 1962. Our website lists the “American Walsingham Proto-Shrine” as one of our two Wards here in Wisconsin (the other being Our Lady of Glastonbury at Nashotah House).

Between the Society of Mary and the Society of Our Lady of Walsingham, there is a considerable overlap of membership, as well as friendly and cooperative relations. (I’m a member of both.) The only real distinction is that the Society of Mary is not associated with any particular shrine or place of pilgrimage, but promotes all legitimate forms of devotion to Our Lady equally. If anyone here would like to learn more about the Society of Mary, I’d be delighted to speak with you at the luncheon following this Mass.

 

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

This past summer, my wife and I participated in a pilgrimage to Turkey, organized by The Living Church magazine, to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. One of the trip’s highlights was Hagia Sophia, the stunning basilica built in the 6th century by Emperor Justinian in what was then Constantinople, today Istanbul. For nine centuries, Hagia Sophia was the largest church in Christendom. Although the Ottoman Turks converted it into a mosque in 1453, they inadvertently preserved some of its ancient Byzantine mosaics by covering them over with plaster. Today, visitors can see these exquisite mosaics, which were uncovered and restored in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For many years, I had wanted to view them in person, and on this pilgrimage, I finally had the opportunity.

 

Hagia Sophia’s mosaics include three iconographic depictions of the Virgin and Child. In one, she is standing, while in the other two, she sits on a throne, her feet resting on a pedestal. In all three, she faces the viewer, holding the Christ Child, who also faces the viewer, holding a scroll in his left hand and blessing with his right.

 

As I looked at these mosaics, a connection with the church’s dedication suddenly occurred to me. Hagia Sophia means “holy wisdom.” Dating from the ninth and tenth centuries, these mosaics of the enthroned Virgin and Child model a style that later became known in the West as the Throne or Seat of Wisdom—in Latin, Sedes Sapientiae.

 

Over the next two centuries, Throne of Wisdom statues became increasingly common in the Romanesque and Gothic art of Western Europe. And—perhaps you see where I’m going with this—the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham fits right into their pattern. Today, then, I’m going to reflect briefly on Our Lady of Walsingham in relation to Hagia Sophia—holy wisdom.

 

Votive Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the old Roman Missal often began with a reading from the eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs. This passage and others like it portray Wisdom as a woman, Lady Wisdom, who recalls that she was with God from the beginning, even before the world's creation. “When he established the heavens, I was there … when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always …”

 

Although the Roman Missal implies an identification of Lady Wisdom with the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Christian tradition, especially in the East, has generally recognized her as a feminine personification of the divine Word or Logos, God the Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Many New Testament scholars maintain that at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, Saint John drew on this Old Testament Wisdom tradition to describe the Logos, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. Saint Paul similarly refers to Christ in his First Letter to the Corinthians as “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

 

Against this background, the visual significance of the Seat of Wisdom statues, including Our Lady of Walsingham, is clear. Sitting on her throne, Mary herself becomes a throne for the divine Wisdom Incarnate sitting on her lap. 

 

But perhaps there’s more going on here. Mary is emphatically not divine but a creature—albeit the highest of God’s creatures, higher than the cherubim, more glorious than the seraphim. Through her humility, obedience, and faithfulness, she shows us what human life perfected by divine Wisdom looks like. In this way, she becomes Wisdom’s created personification and fulfillment. Thus, the statues may depict her not only as the Throne of Wisdom but also as Wisdom enthroned. A former rector of this parish has been quoted as describing Our Lady of Walsingham as “Holy Wisdom presenting the divine Logos to the world.”

 

The medieval Western Seat of Wisdom statues introduced two features absent from the earlier Byzantine mosaics: a crown and a scepter. With Our Lady of Walsingham, the scepter has become a flowering lily. And so, we gain a glimpse into eternity. All of Mary’s earlier appearances in the New Testament—the joyful Virgin at the Annunciation, the Mother of Sorrows at the foot of the Cross, and the Mother of the Church in the Upper Room with the disciples—are taken up and brought to completion in this final image of Mary, the Mother of God, now crowned Queen of Heaven.

 

In 1946, the Boston poet Robert Lowell included a section entitled “Our Lady of Walsingham” in his poem The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket. He dedicated the poem to his cousin, lost at sea during World War II. While much of the poem is filled with menacing images of maritime death, full of allusions to Moby Dick and other literary sources, the Walsingham section provides a brief respite, describing a weary pilgrim’s final approach to the shrine through an idyllic rural landscape.

 

There once the penitents took off their shoes

And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;

And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file

Slowly along the munching English lane,

Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose

Track of your dragging pain.

The stream flows down under the druid tree,

Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad

The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad

And whistled Sion by that stream …

 

Surprisingly, Lowell never visited Walsingham, but anyone who’s ever walked the Holy Mile between the village and the Slipper Chapel knows exactly what he’s talking about. Finally, the pilgrim sailor—whom we now recognize as Lowell’s dead cousin—enters the shrine and gazes upon Our Lady. “This face,” Lowell writes,

 

Expressionless, expresses God: it goes

Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,

Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem

Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.

 

The power of these lines lies in their depiction of Our Lady’s contemplation of the divine mysteries in heaven. She knows what God knows. Holy Wisdom. The promise of these lines is that, in the end, we also shall arrive where she is and know what she knows. Whether in Istanbul, Norfolk, or Sheboygan, our pilgrimage destination becomes a figure of our eternal goal. And the world shall come to Walsingham.