The Divine Mother
Throughout my life, I have been sustained by devotion to the compassionate Holy Mother. Her presence has become a deep source of inspiration for my work: a presence of tenderness, wisdom, courage and unconditional love. This image reflects the diversity of sentient life embraced by the Holy Mother who loves us all. I understand the Mother as being close to every human being, but especially present with those who are suffering, excluded, forgotten or without a voice. This understanding lies close to the heart of my work and to the spirit of this website: creating spaces of compassion, presence, healing and hope.
As a young man, I made pilgrimages to the holy place of Walsingham in Norfolk. There I encountered something of divine compassion and unconditional love that has remained with me ever since. Many years later, I now live in Walsingham, and its landscape, history and spirituality continue to shape my life and work.
Around ten years ago, I encountered the pioneering work of the Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas (1921 to 1994), whose research explored the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of what she called Old Europe. She proposed that many of these early cultures possessed a deeply earth centred and life affirming spirituality in which feminine images of the sacred held an important place.
For Gimbutas, the feminine divine was intimately connected with the great cycles of existence: birth and nourishment, death and renewal, fertility, nature and regeneration. Her interpretation of these ancient cultures has been debated, but her work opened for me a profound way of contemplating the ancient human intuition of the Mother: the sacred presence that gives birth, nourishes, shelters, accompanies and renews life.
Across cultures and throughout history, this Mother has appeared in many forms. In Tibetan Buddhism, Tara embodies compassionate presence and liberating wisdom. In Christianity, Mary is encountered as Mother of Jesus, Mother of God and compassionate companion of humanity. Other cultures have found their own images and names for the sacred feminine.
For me, the Mother ultimately belongs to no single religion or tradition. She points towards something universal: a maternal dimension of the Divine, present throughout creation and within the depths of the human heart.
Our Lady of Walsingham
Our Lady of Walsingham is a particularly English expression of this mystery. She carries the maternal tenderness of Mary of Nazareth, the young woman who courageously opened herself to the invitation of the Angel Gabriel and consented to bear Jesus within her body. Within the Christian mystical tradition, Christ is more than an historical figure to be admired from a distance. Christ reveals the divine life that seeks to awaken within humanity. The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart spoke of a divine or uncreated light at the deepest centre of the human person. The Gospel of Thomas expresses a similar intuition:
“There is light within a person of light, and it lights up the whole world.”
“For you have come from it, the Living Light, and to it you will return.”
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says:
“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.”
Mary carried Jesus within her womb. She nourished him, protected him and brought him into the world. This becomes for me a profound spiritual image. We too are invited to become places in which divine life can be conceived, nourished and brought forth. Meister Eckhart famously taught that what happened physically in Mary can happen spiritually within us. We are invited to become bearers of divinity shining love, compassion and healing into the world. This understanding lies at the heart of my own work.
I do not see spiritual accompaniment as providing people with answers from outside themselves. Rather, it is about helping to create the conditions in which people can become attentive to the deeper presence already within them, uncreated light, the place of stillness from which a more authentic life can emerge.
The Walsingham Story
The traditional story of Our Lady of Walsingham reaches back to 1061, when Mary is said to have appeared in a vision to an English noblewoman, Richeldis de Faverches. In the vision, Richeldis was shown the home of the Holy Family at Nazareth, the ordinary house in which Mary received the Annunciation and in which Jesus was nurtured. Our Lady asked Richeldis to build a replica of this Holy House at Walsingham as a place of prayer, refuge and remembrance. Tradition attributes these words to Mary:
“All who are in any way distressed, or in need, let them seek me there in that little house you have made at Walsingham. To all that seek me there shall be given succour.”
This promise lies at the heart of the Walsingham tradition. It speaks of a place to which people may come precisely as they are: distressed, uncertain, grieving, searching, wounded or simply longing for something deeper. For centuries, Walsingham has been such a place of pilgrimage. It remains a sanctuary where people come seeking healing, reconciliation, meaning, peace and an encounter with the Divine. Yet for me, the deeper meaning of the story extends beyond Walsingham itself. The Holy House reminds us that the sacred dwells within ordinary life. It is found in the home and the heart, in the body and the Earth, in human relationships, in suffering and healing, and in the quiet moments of everyday existence. The maternal presence of Our Lady offers an image of a Divine Love that does not dominate or coerce, but accompanies. She waits. She listens. She shelters. She encourages. She remains close to those who suffer. And she gently points us towards the light of Christ, the divine light within us that seeks to awaken within every human being.
This is also the spirit I hope to bring to my work and to this website: a space of compassion, presence and hope, where people may feel accompanied in their own spiritual journey and become more attentive to the sacred presence within themselves, within others and within the living world. In this sense, I place my work under the maternal presence of Our Lady of Walsingham. May it be a work of welcome rather than exclusion, compassion rather than judgement, healing rather than division, and awakening rather than fear. And may all who come to this site find, in some small way, the succour promised at Walsingham: the experience of being held, accompanied and gently reminded of the divine light that already lives within them.