The mile he isn’t sure he can walk again

Phil walked the Holy Mile barefoot once and decided at the end of it: “Never again.” Last Saturday he did it for the fifth or sixth time, as part of the annual diocesan pilgrimage to Walsingham. The track between Walsingham’s two shrines is loose stone, and this year it came with real heat, and Phil is honest about what it costs him. “Very painful,” he said. “I’m wondering if this might be my last year.”

He never set out to be a pilgrim. A Polish friend invited him to Walsingham years ago and he went along without much expectation. His own mother had walked this same mile long before him, but Phil only came after she had died. Something about it stayed with him, and he kept coming back, year after year, each time learning a little more about this ancient pilgrim track.

What he carries now is other people. Pilgrims bring intentions, the names and needs of people they hold in prayer as they walk this Holy Mile. Phil’s list is heavy this year: a man he knows has just been told he has stage four prostate cancer, and a friend in Glasgow who has lost his wife to sepsis. “So I bring their intentions,” he said, and for a moment he could not say much more. He walks for people who are suffering, and for people who, as he put it, “don’t understand their faith.” As he goes, he thinks “of our Lord in his passion, what he suffered,” and of Simon of Cyrene, pulled out of the crowd to help Jesus carry his cross. Set against that, he says, his own sore feet are “nothing.”

The strange thing is how he prays while he does it. “I don’t actually pray,” he said, then explained that he prays without any words at all. The rosary beads move through his fingers while people around him pray out loud; he says nothing. “He knows you,” Phil said. He reached for a half-remembered line about sitting before Christ: “I gaze at him, and he gazes at me.” His relationship with Christ, he said, is like a long marriage, the kind where words are not necessary, where “you can just sit and be in each other’s company.”

That afternoon, Bishop Patrick McKinney told the pilgrims that real joy “is not the absence of difficulty.” He spoke of a God who counts the hairs of your head and forgets no one: “You are of more value than many sparrows.” The renewal the diocese longs for, he said, will come not from strategies but from ordinary people who have met the Lord “and have been filled with his joy, especially in difficult times.” Phil, offering up a mile of stones for an acquaintance’s cancer, was that homily in practice.

Walsingham has drawn pilgrims for nearly a thousand years. It is England’s ancient place of devotion to Mary, and the Holy Mile has been walked for centuries. When the diocesan group reached the Catholic shrine, footsore and glad of the shade, they sang the Salve Regina, a chant to Our Lady, before scattering to benches and trees. Some stayed on for Adoration, silent prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament, which Catholics believe is the real presence of Christ. Phil knows his own offering is small but says “He does wonderful things when we do little things.”

He may not walk the full mile next year. He talked about doing half of it and seeing how he gets on. Either way he will be back: carrying whoever needs carrying in prayer and gazing at the one he no longer needs words for.

Has something in Phil’s walk resonated with you? You’d be welcome at Walsingham yourself this summer, whether you come to pray or simply to see the place. No need to walk it barefoot; the shrine and the welcome are the same either way.

For more information about visiting Walsingham: https://www.walsingham.org.uk/

To find out what’s coming up across the diocese check out: www.dioceseofnottingham.uk/events