Archbishop Kevin's Homily during the Mass

Sunday, 10th September, 2006

I welcome you all to Walsingham today for this the Dowry of Mary Pilgrimage. We have come from many different places but we have come to be together here in this holy place, this English shrine of Our Lady, this English place of presence and of blessing; we come to holy ground.

Last month, on our diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes, I had for the first time the privilege of presiding at Mass at the Grotto. I’ve been there many times and concelebrated there but this was the first occasion on which I presided and preached. And I had, as I always have there, the sense of being on holy ground. And so it is here, too.

I think there are two dimensions to this pilgrimage to Walsingham, an individual, personal dimension, and a public, national one. First of all, the personal and individual. Everyone who goes on pilgrimage goes in some kind of need. All of us here are in great need, be it of healing, of forgiveness, of some kind of blessing – and we may bring in our hearts and in our prayers other people and their needs, maybe people very close to us, members of our family and maybe others. We come with confidence, confidence in the power and the activity of God in our lives.

A holy place is a place of God’s action. When I first began thinking about this pilgrimage, the readings in the Office of Readings were from the prophet Hosea, which I always find very compelling. God promises to lure us back to him and enable us to love him again with our first, fresh love of God. He promises to draw us away from idols, from infidelity, by taking us to holy ground in the desert where he will bestow his love upon us afresh. He assures us that he has always loved us, always been drawing us, throughout our lives, by leading strings of love. What is asked of us is to recognise that activity of God, to allow God to strengthen us, to allow him to loosen our attachments and addictions and so to allow him to occupy his rightful place in our hearts. So today is a day of openness and receptivity to God’s love and to the power of God’s action in our lives. The Gospel we heard illustrates and focuses this very exactly in the person of Our Lady. She was promised that the Holy Spirit would come upon her and the power of the Most High would cover her with its shadow. She did not know what the future would bring but she was prepared to put it in God’s hands and entrust everything to him. That is what we are invited to do today and to go home more confident that whatever trouble or whatever issues we have brought here are in God’s hands and the object of God’s interest and God’s action.

But this is also the National Pilgrimage and so we look beyond ourselves and think and pray for the country to which we belong. England, Mary’s Dowry. We have so many questions about the future of the country. We live in a very secularised society, we have fewer priests and in some places decline. But the picture is a complex one. In south London, as in some other parts of the country, we have very busy parishes with people from Africa, South America, Asia, Eastern Europe. Some people seem to take delight in saying how bad things are when in fact there are all sorts of positive and hopeful signs. Nonetheless, it would be fatal and complacent not to acknowledge the evil in our society to which we have grown accustomed. The sea of faith is receding and has been for a long time: the loss of a sense of sin, the insistence on personal choice and personal rights, and the resistance and difficulty with regard to any idea of being called to go out of ourselves, to submit ourselves to God’s will and, like the first apostles, to leave our nets and fishing boats and follow Christ wherever he will take us and lead us; the loss of a sense of God and therefore of vocation. And in this, again, Mary is our model and guide – living not out of her own choice but in response to God’s will. Just as we entrust ourselves to God’s blessing and God’s action, let us entrust our country – Mary’s Dowry – to his blessing and action as well.

We have come here in freedom: the freedom to worship God, which is our most precious freedom and one of which some people in the world are deprived. When Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt into the desert, their goal was not simply freedom from slavery: much more importantly it was the freedom to offer fitting worship to God.

And, finally, we entrust to God not just our country but our world so scarred by violence and warfare that has affected even the very place of the Annunciation – Nazareth – holy ground. We must be those who are capable of looking beyond our present trouble and the trouble of our country and our world in hope and confidence in God’s action, entrusting all to Him and saying with Mary: “Let it be done unto me according to your Word.”

Amen.