The Way of the Cross . . .

. . . as a sort of baptized feng shui would get to me, too, after a while, I think.

This cruciform decorating mania of Jody’s reminds me somehow of a day I spent in Little Walsingham years ago. This Norfolk village, as you may or may not recall, rejoices in the title of “England’s Nazareth,” owing to an apparition of the Blessed Virgin to a Saxon lady called Richeldis several years before the Norman Conquest. In this apparition, Our Lady invited the Lady Richeldis to join her for a tour of the home in Nazareth wherein Our Lord spent His childhood, and then suggested that she build an earthly replica of the Holy House right there in Walsingham.

Some confusion ensued regarding the situation of the Holy House; they kept trying to build it on what was eventually declared to be the wrong spot, owing to the building’s obdurate determination to fall down, no matter what — I’m reminded of the king in Monty Python and the Holy Grail whose castle kept sinking into the swamp. At last they tried another site, denoted if memory serves me by either the absence of dew on a dewy morn, or the presence of dew on a dry one, and the building more or less built itself, with the help of angels, and stayed standing, with attached priory, through hundreds of years of pilgrimages, until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. The shrine, which also featured a holy well, was the second most-visited pilgrims’ destination in medieval England, after Canterbury.

If I’ve related this legend flippantly, it’s not because I don’t love the story. I do. I also take at least some apparitions seriously, and this by all accounts was one of the serious ones. There is no part of this tale which I am not prepared to believe. Still, my first encounter with the modern pilgrimage site was undertaken more in the tone of Monty Python than anything else.

Perhaps because I was still in my ironic-distance phase with regard to religion; perhaps because going on pilgrimage had been my husband’s idea and I’ve never been that gifted at humoring people; perhaps because we were traveling in company with a 2-year-old who distinguished herself in the pilgrims’ cafeteria at the Anglican shrine by dumping a virulently red gelatin-and-whipped-topping dessert all over herself and the table in front of her, to the polite but evident dismay of a number of cardigan-wearing ladies; perhaps because we were there on the day before the National Pilgrimage and, faced with the choice of either getting out and back to London or sleeping on a park bench with the aforementioned child, proceeded to miss the last bus out of town because we’d waited on the wrong side of the street — anyway, let’s just say that the first time around, I did not fall under the spell of Walsingham.

In fact, it grated on me. All those icon shops. All the Pilgrims’ This and Pilgrims’ That. All those people tiptoeing up and down — I’m sure they weren’t really tiptoeing, but Walsingham felt to me like the kind of place where people did tiptoe and speak in whispers, even in the street. The Anglican shrine left me unmoved; after the quiet of the ruined priory, which I did rather love, the new shrine struck me as garish and —overreaching? I didn’t succumb to its persuasions, at any rate.

Anyway, after missing the bus, we were schlumping around the town, trying to think how to get out of there and back to Norwich, where we could catch the London train. Already the National Pilgrims, many of them barefoot and possibly tiptoeing and whispering, were beginning to stream through the streets. The 2-year-old was dragging at my arm and grousing. We turned into the very street pictured here, and a few paces down, we encountered a strange pair of houses, facing each other across the lane. One of them featured, in a little rounded niche above its door, a head of Charles I in high relief. In the front window of the other, a collection of Buddha figures had been arrayed: big ones, little ones, yellow ones, green ones, blue ones, all of them smiling serenely and paunchily back at the unfortunate monarch.

Now, even as an Episcopalian I was never a Buddhist. Not remotely. But I tell you truly: those Buddhas were the best thing I saw that day. They made me laugh. As I said to my husband, if I’d lived in Walsingham, I think I might have been tempted to put Buddhas in my window, too, because there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.

But why should I think so? Well, in those days, I thought that there was such a thing as too much belief: the far side of a fine line which admitted things like a taste for beautiful music and liturgy, good art, even devotion to Mary and the saints, as long as that devotion didn’t spill over into, say, nightlights or giving up birth control.

The all-inclusive irony which Jody observes is a response to faith in its material manifestations which I’ve not only observed but experienced. What it boils down to, I think, is a smirky withholding of the self from God, or, as Jody points out, an attempt to suggest, simultaneously, the power and powerlessness of the Cross. That is, the Cross as a symbol has the power — “metaphysical and religious” or “historical and political,” as Jody puts it — to evoke visceral responses from all kinds of people. Thus an Episcopal campus chaplain with whom I once spent an hour could react, in a startling epiphany of disgust, to the cross on the front of her own chapel as “a symbol of oppression.” On the other hand, if — despite all its power as an idea — the Cross has no power over you, personally, then clearly you’ve got no problem with a cross-shaped Scando-La-Z-Boy.

I should note that I’ve been back to Walsingham several times since then, in quite different frames of mind. It no longer grates on me as it once did, though I’m still not a fan of the Anglican shrine, and the Buddhas, the last time I saw them, still made me laugh. All I can say is that my relationship with piety has evolved somewhat since that long-ago day. I haven’t yet visited the Catholic shrine; someday I will.

On the other hand, irony dies hard. So decorate my house all you want, but now you see what you may be driving me to. Not Buddhism, but Buddhas. Lots and lots and lots of Buddhas . . .

And while you’re busy picking out cruciform furnishings for me, don’t forget the I&C Church Challenge. I’m not going to forget about it. It’s not going away.

Also, in much the same vein, Spengler is looking for examples of prayer aberrations, as in the substitution of “Heavenly Parent” for “Heavenly Father,” creative names for the Holy Trinity, and the like. If you know of any, send them along to him.

Finally, Sir Walter Ralegh’s “Walsinghame.” The place survived as a “holy land” in the Elizabethan imagination, though only as a point of departure, which seems apt on all kinds of levels . . .