‘A Priest along the Way of a Pilgrim’
Patrick Comerford
Ecumenical Pilgrimage to Walsingham
Thursday 12 March 2026,
5:15 pm, The Orangery, Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham
Introduction
Thank you to Father Mark for inviting me to speak this evening. I had visited his cathedral in London last year without him knowing, without me ever expecting this invitation, and without knowing we have shared Comerford family links to catch up on.
Thank you too to Cyril Wood for his generosity and kindly going out of his way to get me here this week. It’s a long way from Stony Stratford to Walsingham for someone like me who does not drive. It’s even longer than you imagine, because this time last week I was somewhere in the air between Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and Oman in the Gulf, not knowing if I was going to get back to England in time to be here.
Although I have been a member of the Society of Catholic Priests, this week is proving to be somewhat outside my experiences; this is my first-ever visit to Walsingham, and first impressions are always both striking and formative.
I am Irish, but I have only once been to the Knock Shrine in Co Mayo, and that was out of interest in the architecture of the basilica rather than out of interest in the Marian Shrine. Yes, I have been to Armagh, Downpatrick and Kildare. But I have never been to any of the Marian pilgrim sites or ‘moving statues’ in Ireland.
If you are a football fan like me, and you are about the same age as me, you will be able to answer immediately where you were 60 years ago. I remember the summer of 1966 quite clearly.
I watched the 1966 World Cup Final in July 1966 in a convent in Ballinskelligs at the western end of a remote peninsula in Co Kerry, in one of the furthest corners of south-west Ireland, looking out onto the wild Atlantic waters.
During that month in Coláiste Mhichíl, I also remember learning Irish dancing, boring evenings listening to an old seanachaí, rising to the challenge to go ‘skinny dipping’, my first kiss and my first smoke, reading Anne Frank’s Diaries and being introduced to JD Salinger’s writings, Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey.
As a 14-year-old, little did I realise then of the significance of Franny and Zooey. It introduced many in the west to The Way of a Pilgrim. That book, as many of you know, began as a collection of essays first published as four short stories in Russia in 1884. It is now a beloved spiritual guide to many, introducing them to the Jesus Prayer and the riches of Orthodox spirituality.
My old copies, translated by RM French and introduced by Bishop Walter Frere, are torn and worn or were given away long ago. I later acquired a more recent edition, published in 2017, translated by Anna Zaranko and edited and introduced by Father Andrew Louth. But that too has been lent, borrowed or passed on with the passage of time.
I remember quite clearly how I was obsessed that summer 60 years ago with football, with little or no interest in prayer, spirituality or any pilgrim’s way. But perhaps the seeds were being sown for a very real experience five years later in my teens.
A pilgrim’s experience of the ‘uncreated light’
As a 19-year-old, I walked in one summer evening, by accident rather than design, into the Chapel of Saint John’s Hospital in Lichfield. I say by accident, because I was attracted by the Tudor architecture of this almshouse rather than its religious significance.
And to this day, it is a lived and living experience, as I remember the sound of lifting the latch, stepping down into the chapel, and being filled with what I still describe 55 years later as the light and love of God.
Physically, it was impossible: sunlight does not stream through the east window of any church or chapel on a summer evening, and that chapel has no west window.
Psychologically, there may be alternative explanations. But, in time, the experience and the sensations would have faded, and not remain so real, so explicit, so alive after 55 years. You could say it was – still is – a living experience of the ‘uncreated light’, of being filled with the light and the love of God.
How was a 19-year-old to respond to such an unexpected experience? I immediately went down Saint John Street, up Bird Street and into Lichfield Cathedral and for the first time sat in the choir stalls for Choral Evensong. Silent. Receptive. Enfolded by the love of God.
On the way out, one of the residentiary canons shook my hand and said something like, ‘I suppose a young man like you is coming back to church because you’re thinking of ordination.’
All in one summer afternoon or evening.
It was too much to take in. It still is. I am still coming to terms, 55 years later, with its meaning and its implications. I have described it to one interviewer as my ‘self-defining existentialist moment.’ It is too limiting, too reductionist, too partisan, too trite, to describe it as a conversion experience, still less as being ‘born-again’.
And, if it could happen to me, I realised, then it was not unique or individual, it could happen to anyone and everyone. God’s love for me had to be God’s love for everyone. It was, is, an experience with immeasurable and unfathomable dimensions and universal implications: if God loves me, then why, of course God loves you, and you, and you …
Or, as the Revd Dr Kenneth Leech (1939-2015), the Anglican ‘slum priest’ in the East End, once said: ‘Transfiguration can and does occur “just around the corner,” occurs in the midst of perplexity, imperfection, and disastrous misunderstanding.’
And yet, in a way, without feeling at all uncomfortable, I can feel like saying I was born in Lichfield that day. And so, I go back on pilgrimage, not to relive that experience – because it remains a living experience; not, like Peter, James and John wanting to stay on the mountaintop and build their booths of piety; but as a pilgrim, to give thanks, to pray, to reflect, to be silent, to – as it were – cover my head and bare my feet, for I stand on holy ground.
I go back at least two or three times a year to Lichfield, to this spiritual home or birthplace, to pray in that chapel, sometimes silently without words, when God speaks to me too without words; to follow the cycle of daily prayer and the liturgy in the cathedral; to be comfortable in the presence of Christ in word, in sacrament, and in the body of Christ, the people who are the Church.
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
(TS Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’)
And I hope I’m not being too pious, too po-faced about it. I meet friends, I eat rather than fasting, I go for walks through fields and farmland that I know, some that bear my family name from generations ago. And I enjoy a drink at the end of the day – ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good’ (Psalm 34: 8). (Aside: if I had ever end up in a Benedictine monastery, I want to be the cellarer).
A pilgrim’s pilgrimages
In my life in the 55 mature years since, I have been a pilgrim or on pilgrimage to many places:
Jerusalem, which was a graduation present after receiving one of my degrees, along with a ‘bling’ certificate signed by Avraham Sharir and Teddy Kolleck that says I have ‘ascended to Jerusalem, the Holy City’ and am ‘henceforth authorized to bear the title of Jerusalem Pilgrim’.
Mount Athos: (aside: how many of you have been there?) as a priest, I had to receive a particular invitation and permit. As I left, the monks reminded me that when I returned I was to remember that Vatopedi is now my monastery.
Patmos: where Saint John experienced the light in the cave as ‘seven golden lampstands’ and ‘a flame of fire’ (Revelation 1: 12-13) and, incidentally, the monastery of Metropolitan Kallistos.
Mount Sinai: where Moses covered his face with a veil after speaking with God because his face was radiating intense light (Exodus 34: 29-35), and Elijah heard the still small voice in the crag of the rock (I Kings 19).
The Western Desert: the beginnings of monasticism and the home of many of the Patristic writers.
Arkadi and the monasteries of Crete: especially Aghia Irini, where the nuns have brought the place to new life, and welcome tourists on tour buses from throughout the world, bringing the light of Christ back out into the resorts.
Vlatadon: the monastery that is the balcony above Thessaloniki, and where I had a moving moment recalling my grandfather’s own war-time sufferings and eventual death.
Tolleshunt Knights in Essex, which was a regular one-day pilgrimage from Cambridge during the courses organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies. There Saint Sophrony, the disciple and biographer of Saint Silouan, made the monastery a major centre for the practice of the Jesus Prayer and the community follows the hesychast tradition. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’. Even as a child, Saint Sophrony would say, he experienced the Uncreated Light.
The Jesus Prayer and the Uncreated Light seem to be constant, recurring and repetitive tropes in each of these places for this pilgrim priest.
And there are others too: the churches of Cappadocia … Santiago (without doing the Camino) … Bethlehem … Notre Dame … Rome … the Julian Shrine in Norwich … Coventry Cathedral … Whitby … Glenstal … Rostrevor … Mount Melleray … Saint Mary’s Church, Johannesburg …
I have been strongly influenced by Jewish spirituality over the years, so there is a feeling of pilgrimage too when I visit the Jewish quarters in Kraków, Prague, Berlin and Venice, Le Marais in Paris, or the grave of the Chatham Sofer in Bratislava. I may be too broadminded for some of you when I talk about the efforts I made to organise my own one-day visit to the tomb and shrine of Rumi in Konya:
A mouse and a frog meet every morning on the riverbank.
They sit in a nook of the ground and talk.
Each morning, the second they see each other,
they open easily, telling stories and dreams and secrets,
empty of any fear or suspicious holding back.
To watch, and listen to those two
is to understand how, as it’s written,
sometimes when two beings come together,
Christ becomes visible.
(Rumi)
And I always return to Lichfield, constantly, as that first place where I become me, realised who I was made to be, that I am loved by God, made in God’s image and likeness, the God who loves each and every one of us.
A pilgrim or a tourist?
We do that sort of thing in secular life and family life too.
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Sachsenhausen … they can never be reduced to being places of tourist curiosity, they are sacred and secular, secular and sacred.
In our own family lives, we go back to the houses we were born in or where our parents or grandparents were born or lived. If we can’t get inside those houses, those houses get inside us and we walk around them in our minds’ eyes.
We go back to where our parents brought us on holidays, walk the beaches, remember the childhood experiences, try to explain them to our children and grandchildren. I do … I even went back some years ago to that beach in Ballinskelligs I so happily remember from 60 years ago – for that World Cup final seen in a convent parlour, and for Franny and Zooey’s introduction to The Way of a Pilgrim and the Jesus Prayer.
We go back to our old schools, no matter what we thought of them then or think of them today.
We go back to see where we were brought to our first football matches, the pubs where we had our first drink, we long wistfully for the cinemas we knew as children, the shops whose windows we once gazed at, smile inwardly as we remember where we stole that first kiss. My visits to Venice or Portmeirion are less tourism and more like architectural pilgrims.
Those of you are married or still married probably go back occasionally to or remember with fondness where you first met, where you were married, where you went on honeymoon, where you had your first home. Yet they also become visits marked by pain and sorrow, or regret and penitence, for those who are widowed or divorced.
Not all pilgrimages are filled with joyful, promise and sweet memory. You may know of the painful stories of the ‘Mother and Baby’ homes and ‘Magdalene Laundries’ in Ireland. Whenever I have written about places such as the former Good Shepherd Convent in Limerick or Dunboyne Castle, I become aware of how many of those women, their children and their grandchildren want to visit and revisit them, because, with all the pain and inhumanity, this is where they were born or formed and made who they are today.
These family and social visits are not just secular pilgrimages, they are spiritual too. They break down the barriers between the profane and the sacred, for these are the places where we were made, and we are made in the image and likeness of God. These pilgrimages have their sacred value too. They are, as we should affirm, incarnational. For in the incarnation, Christ tears down the barriers we set up between the sacred and secular.
In that story of darkness and light in the Gospel reading the Sunday before last (John 3: 1-17, Lent III, 1 March 2026), we were told of our birth and reminded that ‘God so loved the cosmos’ – not the world, not merely humanity, still less ‘man’ – ‘God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only Son, so that everyone (aside: let’s emphasise everyone) … may have eternal life’ (verse 16).
That Pythagorean concept of the cosmos implies that we are created, nurtured, brought into existence within the womb of God. And God then turns that around in the incarnation when God becomes flesh in the human womb. We are made in the image and likeness of God, then God is made in our image and likeness. We could say, in a deep and very true sense, humanity is God’s own pilgrimage.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(TS Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’)
‘We are pilgrims on a journey’
I have spent the last two weeks in Malaysia, travelling there and back through Oman in the Gulf. I was aware in both places how Ramadan and Lent overlap significantly this year. For Muslims, Pilgrimage, like Ramadan, is one of the five pillars of Islam. But as Christians, do we give pilgrimage the same value, imperative, significance it has for Muslims?
It is wonderful to be here. But we should not make pilgrimage too difficult for people in their everyday, sacred secular lives. We are all pilgrims in this life, not just in our own lives but sharing in God’s pilgrimage in humanity.
I am reminded of Richard Gillard’s lyrics in ‘The Servant Song’:
Will you let me be your servant,
let me be as Christ to you;
pray that I may have the grace
to let you be my servant too.
We are pilgrims on a journey,
we are trav’lers on the road;
we are here to help each other
walk the mile and bear the load.
I will weep when you are weeping;
when you laugh, I’ll laugh with you.
I will share your joy and sorrow
’til we’ve seen this journey through.
We make – or we are invited to make – that pilgrimage every Sunday to the holy mountain, to Mount Tabor, when we meet Christ present for us in Word, in Sacrament, and in the Body of Christ, the living and holy members of the Church.
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱὲ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλό
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner
Possible asides or added conversation points:
One pilgrimage I am not making this year – the World Cup in the US
JD Salinger and Anne Frank, a conjoint introduction to Jewish spirituality as well as connection to Jesus Prayer
These notes were prepared for the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust, 10-13 March 2026, with the support of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius and the Society of St John Chrysostom
