Many, if not all of you will have heard of the Norfolk village of Little Walsingham. Even if you’ve never visited the village, you may have heard of it because it’s a famous place of Christian pilgrimage. And if you haven’t heard of it for that reason, you’ll at least have heard or read about Walsingham in the Sunday notices in church or online when I’ve advertised our own parish pilgrimage to Walsingham.
Walsingham is the site of the most famous Marian shrine in England. It’s roots go back to the year 1061 and so it’s been a place of pilgrimage, in one form or another, for almost 1,000 years. Over those years, Walsingham has changed a great deal and many times. The Shrine began as a simple wooden house which was later incorporated into a larger stone building that was built to protect the original wooden house from the elements. Over the years the stone building was enlarged and eventually became a great Abbey that flourished until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII when it was closed and eventually, demolished. After that Walsingham fell into relative obscurity until pilgrimage there was revived by the vicar of Walsingham in 1922. The present Shrine Church was consecrated in 1938 but there have been many changes in Walsingham since then. I first went to Walsingham in 1993 and whilst the Shrine Church itself hasn’t changed since then, the grounds that surround it and the village of Little Walsingham itself certainly have, and those changes have affected pilgrimage to Walsingham.
During the past week, I spent a few days in the East of England and, as I was in that part of the country, I visited Walsingham for a few hours. During my time there I chatted to a few of the villagers and one of the things we spoke about was the way things have changed in Walsingham over the years. We spoke about the fact that there’s no longer a Post Office in the village; about the number of shops and pubs that have closed; the number of tea shops and restaurants that have closed, and about the number of places offering accommodation that have closed. And there’s no doubt that some of these changes have had an adverse effect on pilgrimage to the Shrine.
One of the biggest events of the pilgrimage season in Walsingham is the National Pilgrimage that takes place in May each year. This year, because of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, the National Pilgrimage took place on the first Monday in May rather than the last, as it traditionally does. Amongst the people I spoke to in Walsingham about this year’s National Pilgrimage, was the landlord of one of the only two remaining pubs in the village.
He told me how much he’d been looking forward to this year’s National Pilgrimage. He thought that, after two years of Covid restrictions, there would be a big turnout this year. But, in the event, he said it was very quiet and very disappointing. The information he was given by the Shrine, was that only about 500 people came to Walsingham for the National Pilgrimage this year. You might think that 500 people for a church service is good; but when I tell you that for the first National Pilgrimage I went to in 1994, the congregation was about 5,000, I think you’ll understand how things have changed, and not for the better. One of the main reasons for this seems to be that because of the loss of guest accommodation in the village. A lot of people have stopped going to the National Pilgrimage because, for a lot of people, Walsingham is too far to go for just a few hours, and for those who are willing to make the National Pilgrimage a day trip, staying around for a few drinks is out of the question, which for a pub landlord is very disappointing indeed.
One of the things that pilgrims to Walsingham have often said to me over the years is that going to Walsingham is like stepping back in time to a much quieter and slower way of life. In many ways that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that Walsingham has never changed. It has changed, many times over the years, and it continues to change as the years go by. It’s changed for the better over the years, and it’s changed for the worse over the years. But then, we can’t really expect anything else can we because life itself is like that isn’t it?
Change is part and parcel of human life. We all change as we go through life, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. As we grow up, we tend to improve in terms of our physical and mental abilities, we can do more and do things better than we once could and, hopefully at least, we become more mature in our attitudes and wiser in our words and actions. But as we grow older, some of the changes we go through are not so good. Our physical abilities decline, what we could do in our teens and twenties, even our thirties, we probably can’t do in or past our forties or fifties. And as we grow older we tend to lose some of our mental sharpness too. Even if we’re spared such a terrible disease as dementia, we probably find it harder to learn new things as we get older than we did in our younger days.
And we don’t just change physically, the circumstances of our lives change too. Most of us live with our families when we’re young. Then, as we get older, we move away from home; we go to university, we get our own home, we get married, have children of our own who, in their turn, also move on and go their own way in life. And we change from being in education to being in employment. Most of us change jobs during our working life too.
Then we change from working to being retired. And the world we live in changes and when it does, that affects and changes our lives too.
So we live in a constant state of change throughout our lives. And then there’s that final change that we all have to go through at the end of our earthly lives, that change from life to death. But I say that this is the final change of our earthly lives, and not simply the final change, quite deliberately, because as Christians we believe that this change from life to death isn’t the final change we have to go through. We believe that after our earthly lives have come to an end, we still haven’t come to the end of change. There’s still one more change that we have to go through before we can come to the end of change and that’s the change from death to eternal life.
Quite what that change will be like, we don’t know. The Scriptures do give us some clues but perhaps one of the reasons we find it so hard to imagine what eternal life will be like is because it will be a life without change. It will be a life that is unimaginably better than the life we have and know during our time on earth, even in the best of times we’ve ever known. As St Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”
But we have a saying don’t we, that ‘All good things must come to an end’? But eternal life with God will be better than any good thing we’ve ever known or can even imagine, and it won’t come to an end, ever.
It will be a life in which we live in the love that Jesus commanded his disciples to have for one another. I hope we all know what it is to love and be loved; I hope we all know how good that is and how good it feels. One of the problems with earthly love though is that, sometimes, it isn’t returned; the one we love doesn’t love us. Sometimes too, earthly love comes to an end. And we know how these things feel; they hurt, very deeply. But the kind of love that Jesus spoke about is always mutual, it’s always given and returned, and it never comes to an end.
One of the most painful changes we can go through in life is to lose someone we love, whether that’s because our love and relationship with them has come to an end, or when we’re parted by death. Again, that’s a pain I’m sure we all know and it’s one of the worst pains and changes we can go through in life. But once we’ve changed from death to eternal life with God, this is a pain and a change that we’ll never have to go through again. As this morning’s reading from the Book of Revelation tells us:
“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”
The life that God promises to those who have faith in him is a life beyond our imagination. It’s a life better than the best times we’ve ever known on earth and a life in which those good times never come to an end because nothing ever changes, so there can never be any bad times, or even less good times. But of course, a promise is only as trustworthy as the one who makes it. So a very big part of our faith in God is that God himself is faithful, that God himself is unchanging and will keep his promise. I think this is something that’s summed up very well in the words of a hymn that we very often sing at funerals, during what is a time of great change during our earthly lives:
Change and decay in all around I see.
O Thou who changest not,
Abide with me.
God promises to abide with us, always, but in return he asks us to abide with him. God promises to accept us if we can accept the way of life he showed us through his Son, Jesus Christ. One of the things that can make it so difficult for us to do that though is the changeability of human life; it can be difficult to abide with God, to be faithful to him and his Son, in the face of the bad things and through the bad times of human life. But we have God’s promise that he will abide with us through those bad times and if we can just bear with the bad things in life and abide with him through those times, he promises us a life in which there are no bad times, ever. A life good beyond our wildest dreams and a life in which nothing will ever change to take those good things away from us.
Amen.
The Propers for the 5th Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 