Walsingham’s Tales
I took a sip of cider.
The flavor coated my throat, dry of everything but coffee and convenience-store sandwiches. The light outside was dim, and the subtle murmurs of pilgrims and other visitors permeated the room. I lay plastered in a compact room with a bed, a desk, and little more. After a long day on the road, I had finally allowed myself a break. Maybe it was the effects of alcohol on an empty stomach, but, while lying down in the bed, I smiled like an idiot. For by being here, I proved to myself—and to my parents back in London—the adult I could be.
“I really made it,” I said aloud, forgetting at once all the fatigues and worries of the day. For a moment, I basked in this reality.
The day had started with a morning train from London to King’s Lynn, in East England, where I then exchanged the rails for the roads, taking a taxi to Little Walsingham, the “English Nazareth,” at Norfolk. Quite the epithet, earned after Lady Richeldis de Faverches (a local noblewoman) reportedly had a vision back in the second half of the eleventh century where she was shown the house of the Annunciation in Nazareth and commanded to build a replica. A pilgrimage center that didn’t survive Henry VIII and the religious troubles of the sixteenth century.
Despite that loss, Walsingham caught my eye as a place where the old medieval faith had made a small comeback, with pilgrimages resumed at the end of the nineteenth century, and new shrines erected by both Catholics and Anglicans. I had planned this trip as soon as my family bought the tickets to England for that September. Although it is something one wouldn’t say out loud, in my mind, I was picturing this side trip as a consolation in British skin after not going to Lourdes a couple of years ago when visiting France. But I knew well the other, hidden reason waiting for me in the English countryside: I needed to prove to myself that I could escape the comforting claws of a family vacation by going my own way, apart from the main dish of that voyage, London. It’s difficult to explain. It was a weird time for me, a man in his early twenties, with all the angst and childish desire to be a “real adult” (whatever that meant). I resented the idea of merely following after my parents’ travel agenda, the proxy of a much larger fear of being a child in an adult’s world, with not a clue about what to do.
Religion, in that sense, became my scapegoat: my sister wouldn’t dare “waste” a weekend in the countryside, just for her older brother’s religious whims. I knew that my parents wouldn’t leave her alone in the big city. It was the perfect excuse to go on my own, something which was never flat-out demanded, and yet, silently understood by everyone.
“Call us when you arrive,” my mother said when I left the hotel room in London that morning, the outside clothed in the gray opaqueness of September. She was the only other one who was fully awake, ready to see me off. I could sense her nerves.
“And take a lot of photos!”
And a lot of photos would be taken.
The first universal rule about traveling is that no matter how thorough your plans are, something is always going to go awry. In my case, problems started when my card was rejected while trying to buy a baguette and juice at one of the train stops. Without data and lacking any Wi-Fi hotspot to try to see what was wrong with my card, I hoped that enough businesses in what was by then a mostly cashless England would accept cash. They wouldn’t, in that station café, forfeiting any plans for lunch.
After deciding to take my chances and continue my way—hoping to survive off the lodge’s breakfast if worse came to worst—I managed to arrive by late afternoon in Walsingham, riding the last stretch of the way with a Romanian taxi driver, our mutual non-native English accents not getting in the way of conversation. Time flowed slower in this little village of narrow streets and buildings older than some countries. Few people were outside by that hour, and the sun was setting already, promising an early evening.
I was too tired to go out of town to visit the Catholic National Shrine, just recently promoted to the rank of basilica by the late Pope Francis. So, after checking in at my lodge, the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, I satisfied myself with a walk around the village. I entered one of the few shops still open: a religious store, no denominational marker at first glance. It was cramped as only a religious bookstore could be, its different shelves stuffed with crosses, wall decorations with Bible verses, statuettes in wood, plastic, and stucco of the Virgin and baby Jesus, of bearded or veiled saints of centuries past, even of demure Saint Joseph, always of few words. And of course, Bibles. Headlining the ensemble, a row of black tomes with gilded letters: Holy Bible: King James Version. I stopped short, like I had found a penguin in an aviary.
It was difficult to distinguish between Anglicans and Catholics in Walsingham, credal identities thinned by a shared aesthetic sensibility bound to surprise newcomers. In this little shop geographically in the middle of Anglican and Catholic churches, an ecumenical buffet was only to be expected.
“So, is this store Anglican or Catholic?” I asked the cashier, ready to pay for a statuette of Our Lady of Walsingham, small enough to carry in my backpack.
“Actually, we are Baptists,” the woman said, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many times she answered that same question.
There was something for everyone here in this nook of East England.
The next day, I woke up early to enjoy the benefits of free breakfast in the pilgrim lodge. It was a calm morning, and I let myself take my time to find the dining hall within the complex. I noticed the poles distributed through the courtyard, signaling the stations of the cross, each one marked with a Roman numeral and reliefs of the Passion not any different from the ones I would find in a Catholic church. After getting my fill of eggs, beans, sausages, and coffee at the hall (and concluding that the hate on English breakfast is overdone), I was ready to start the day. It was time to visit the Catholic National Shrine.
Walsingham was small enough to make it impossible to really get lost, and yet, I found myself asking for directions at the local Catholic church.
“Walk until you reach the bus stop, and then continue to the left.”
Right. Easy enough.
Walking five minutes uphill, I had already reached the outskirts of the village, where a small Orthodox chapel was starting to bloom, away from the prying eyes of most tourists. I continued upward for one minute, reaching the “bus stop,” with three or so buses in a prairie and heaps of pilgrims crowding the area. That was my cue to go left.
Aside from the distant sounds of cars, all was calm. The soft serenade of air, the touch of a mild sun, and the vast expanse of fields only interspersed by tree-lines filling the horizon. Only splashes of country manors and the red contours of the Catholic Shrine inhabited this portrait of English countryside. Walking that path, soon leaving behind the remnants of the village, this last reminder of civilization felt like stepping into a journey of my own to obtain from it a mute assurance that I was a real adult, always with an elusive definition to escape me.
I couldn’t help thinking about my family. That day, they were going shopping at London. I wondered if they were okay, a pang of uncertain guilt—more the product of overthinking than of reflected remorse—spurring me to try and reassure myself: no moral treatise ever condemned taking a solo-trip far from one’s own family. Besides . . . if there was a certitude to have, it was that my sister would have hated coming down here. But maybe I was just making justifications, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t being antipathic to my family. Perhaps I was just someone who had missed his teenage rebellion, now trying to wash away my fears of a nascent adulthood with this coat of pious travel.
After about fifteen minutes of an uninterrupted dirt pathway, I turned to the left onto a downhill slope that connected to the basilica. Soon I reached the Slipper Chapel, the oldest building within the complex and a late-medieval survivor of the Reformation, welcoming me in with its strong and well-defined stone façade. I mentioned before the aesthetic similarities between Catholics and Anglicans in Walsingham, but there was something that had differentiated the two in my mind: the color. I came to associate the Anglican shrine with a regal and calm deep blue, the same color of the robes of Our Lady of Walsingham, but also present in a multitude of small ways throughout their shrine, such as the backgrounds for their reliefs of the Stations of the Cross. The Catholic shrine, instead, became fixed in my head with a mix of warm brick-red and hardened grey, first from the village church where I had asked for directions, and then from the faraway glimpse of the basilica and its newer chapel of Our Lady of Reconciliation. It wasn’t until I entered the Slipper Chapel that my easy categorizations came to naught once again.
Inside, the room was awash in multicolor lights reflecting against white walls, sunlight filtering through kaleidoscopic stained-glass windows. An altar of gilded wood and blue backgrounds stood beside a statue of Our Lady of Walsingham with the infant Jesus on her lap. The two were vested in royal paraphernalia of crowns and scepters, and seated upon a throne. The Queen Mother wore robes of red and blue, the same deep blue that I had solely attributed to the Anglicans. I soaked in the beauty for a moment, like I was partaking in a lineage of pilgrimages stretching back centuries, a look back into what had been before the turbulences of the sixteenth century, a look that made me wonder and ache a second for what was lost.
And yet, here they stood. The basilica, the chapel, and Walsingham.
I took my time meandering around the complex, relatively full of Indian families resting in the benches spread throughout the courtyard. It was calm as a slow Saturday afternoon: there were no more Masses for the rest of the day, and the on-site cafeteria offered only a handful of pastries to go with the tea.
A part of me was disappointed at not having that cinematic experience; you know, the heartfelt conversion, tears flowing freely while kneeling before the tabernacle, before Jesus, a pious passion overwhelming the senses and giving my life a renewed purpose and direction. But I was never the sentimental type.
Nonetheless . . . I felt peace while drifting in the compound, walking in the soft sun-sprinkled hallways and corridors of the Shrine; nothing to do, except being. I paused from worrying about my family and my goal of “proving myself” to them. Instead, my thoughts were flooded with optimism, imagining that they too might have enjoyed themselves here with me.
The day was coming to a close, and my time in the Basilica, and Walsingham, was nearing its end. There was no golden goose of adulthood in those red halls and yet, I felt the weight of tomorrow lift off of my shoulders, at least for today. For perhaps, by merely arriving here in this place withdrawn from the noise of the world, I was already looking at tomorrow, my tomorrow, one step at a time.
Eduardo Jáuregui is a writer from Irapuato, Mexico, now based in Southern California. He enjoys brewing coffee, reading books of long-dead authors, and writing about faraway worlds and melancholic protagonists. Right now, he is finishing his debut novel, set in a Colonial-Mexico-inspired fantasy setting where ghosts and the scars of the past abound. He has been published in Kelp Journal’s The Wave, Pelican’s Plume and Academy of the Heart and Mind. You can follow him on Instagram at @eduardo_ajm.
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