Our Lady of Walsingham (All the Marys, Part I)

One afternoon a few months into the pandemic, the director of Rahab’s Sisters asked about the extremely Anglo Mary statue at the back of the church. From behind a mask, she said,

“What’s up with that Virgin statue? The one with the kneeling bench?”

The particular version of Mary to which she referred sat like a queen in flowing blue and red robes, crown on her head and babe in her lap reaching for the lily in her hand. In front of the statue is one of those prayer bench votive-stands that often invites even the most irreverent agnostics to take a knee and light a candle for someone they love.

“That’s Our Lady of Walsingham,” I said, thinking to myself that the person asking, while not necessarily irreverent, was certainly agnostic. Most of the current volunteers and staff of Rahab’s Sisters reflected the dominant religious soup of inner Southeast Portland and ranged in theological perspective along a short continuum from agnostic to atheist.

“Why do you ask?” I wondered aloud.

“I was sitting in the sanctuary opening the mail”—a normal COVID-19 practice to avoid taking up air space in the small parish office where the mail arrived—"and I looked up at the statue while opening the last envelope and out came a twenty-thousand-dollar check! Maybe I’ll tell this story in our next newsletter.”

I was delighted by the idea that Our Lady of Walsingham cared enough about sex workers and the sexually vulnerable to send Rahab’s Sisters twenty thousand dollars. But this miracle sounded like the kind of thing I might read about on a conservative Catholic website, not a bi-monthly newsletter intended to inspire donors of all faiths and no faith. Although she never did write the newsletter article about opening the check in front of Our Lady of Walsingham, my conversation with Anneliese prompted me to learn more.

In a disintegrating cardboard file box of papers in the church office I found a stack of mottled photocopies telling the story of the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. When the current church was built in 1960, the statue was added as a small side chapel just inside what used to be the main entrance. Parishioners regularly referred not to the Mary of the statue but to the small altar, statue, and candle stand as “the Walsingham Shrine.”

The ladies--I’m sure they were ladies--who prepared the leaflet I discovered had done their homework, and written not just the history of the Walsingham Shrine at Saints Peter and Paul but also the history of its namesake. It seemed that at the time that Our Lady made her appearance in Walsingham, England in 1061, she was a bit of a troublemaker, wanting to remind the locals that Jesus was everywhere, not just in Jerusalem. Mary’s command to those who saw her was to construct a pilgrimage site that would be a replica of the original place in Nazareth where Mary heard the word from Gabriel that she was to bear the Son of God.

The original shrine and monastery built in her honor were destroyed during the wave of anti-Romanism that characterized the English reformation. In the 1800s, Roman Catholics began visiting a pilgrimage site as their own reminder that their favorite saint could be found in England as well as Rome. Anglicans, whence my little church descended, were reluctant to cede Mary to the Romans and so rebuilt their shrine as a pilgrimage site and retreat center.

In the context of the little town of Walsingham, the shrine to Our Lady was subversive, a root of Roman Catholicism not necessarily welcome in post-reformation England. I appreciated that subversiveness, a reminder that Christianity is not uniform and tidy, especially not my chosen Christian pathway of Anglicanism. Even today, there is something subversive about Mary among Episcopalians: some give her a central place in our faith and practice, and others don’t. But regardless of her place in the hearts of various Christians, few deny that she has been a source of particular comfort and inspiration to the poor over twenty centuries.

In Southeast Portland, the Our Lady of Walsingham shrine at Saints Peter and Paul became the locus of a weekly intercessory prayer group that lasted at least fifty years, ending when the last member of what was called the “Walsingham cell” moved on in the early 2000s.

Even though I arrived almost twenty years after the Walsingham cell group disbanded, and despite the dust and neglect surrounding the shrine, I feel its residual holiness. From her position in the back of the church Mary, with her wavy hair and elegantly draped robes, has a view of everyone who came and went between the sanctuary and the rest of the church building. The sanctuary was empty most of 2020, but the rest of the building had become a busy hub of mutual aid and radical hospitality. It always seemed to me that Mary approved; I was glad to think she was as connected to the sex workers and houseless people who relied upon the church as she was to generations of proper English pilgrims or the prayer group that gathered around her statue in years past.