As Brother Hugo rather passionately suggested on his Twitter, May is a good time to find your nearest shrine and go on a pilgrimage. Now he happens to take care of a shrine himself, the shrine of Our Lady of the Garden Enclosed, and that is where I will be pilgrimaging to tomorrw. Well, me and several dozen others, for two kilometers, following Mass in the parish church of nearby Wehe-den Hoorn. The photo above is an impression from last year’s pilgrimage and as you can tell, there is a lovely traditional element to it in the banners, crosses and, since last year, a shrine with relics of St. Gerlac. In the fairly short space of a few years, this annual pilgrimage has developed into a fixture of the tiny village and surrounding countryside, and an oasis of, there we go again, affirmative orthodoxy. It is all thoroughly Catholic, but with a veneer of northern groundedness and humour – an essentially Catholic attitude to life, although people in these parts are usually not in for such exuberance. But if it’s there, it’s there: no use in denying nothing happens.
In Caelo et in Terra 