Sister Mary Phillida

from Walsingham Review No 88 Easter 1986

You will be receiving this edition of the Review at Eastertide and Christmas will be far from your mind. For us at Walsingham, though, Christmas and Easter have a very special link this year with the death of SISTER MARY PHILLIDA on December 26th 1985. Most of you probably never knew of Sister’s existence, which was as she would have wished. For her vocation was to reclusion and silence. For over fifty years she lived a simple life of mortification and prayer, and Father Hope Patten said of her “if God has achieved anything in this place it is because Sister Mary Phillida has been and is a silent centre of the on-going miracle.” Just before Christmas, Sister consented to leave her Cell to be nursed by the Sisters in the Priory: as everyone was getting ready for the Midnight Mass she received the Sacraments, and on Christmas Day she passed into unconsciousness and passed very peacefully to God the next morning. Canon Michael McLean has written an obituary for her, in the form of a letter — I am grateful that he, who knew her better than most, should be the one to record her passing. May Sister now know the glory of the Resurrection.

In speaking of Sister Mary Phillida’s role at the Shrine, someone recently spoke of her as ‘blotting paper’! That doesn’t sound very complimentary, but it does hit the nail on the head. The other side of the coin of a holy place as Walsingham is the amount of disturbance and evil which it attracts — because people come here for healing and forgiveness, they often leave something of their pain behind and it is part of the vocation of those who live and work around the Shrine to absorb it. Sister Mary Phillida’s years of contemplation gave her a highly developed sensitivity to evil, and I am sure that she deflected much of its power from the rest of us. Does that mean we are left vulnerable by her dying? I do not think so. Her work closer to God will be to intercede for the Shrine and that she will do with her characteristic thoroughness and good humour! Please pray regularly for those of us who live and work in Walsingham - it is a joy to be here, but there is a cost attached.

Christopher Colven (Administrator)

Sermon given by Father Colven at the FUNERAL MASS for SISTER MARY PHILLIDA
on the 31st December 1985

As I try to speak God's Word to you this morning, I find myself faced with a complete paradox. How does one speak about someone who was essentially hidden. To attempt to speak about Sister Mary Phillida in any way seems almost an affront to the life which she voluntarily accepted over fifty years ago. Seclusion, silence, aloneness, are at the core of a solitary way which leads to the heart of God but of its very nature it is a way which can only be comprehended by the person who walks that unique path. Part of me wants very much to shout from the housetops about the saintly life which has been lived out in our midst for so many years - but another part of me knows that this would not be right for there are things here which can only make sense within the mystery of God.

I would like to say a word to Sister Mary Phillida's Family and that is a word of thank you. It has been a tremendous privilege to have Sister living here for all these years. She may have not allowed you close to her very often, but she loved her family very deeply and to be a Shirley was a source of great pride to her. She once told me that the members of the family turned out either to be great saints or great sinners - I think there is no doubt which describes her. You provided the context for her early growth into God and for that the rest of us are profoundly grateful.

And gratitude is a theme I want to dwell on for a few moments. When Sister Mary Phillida came here in 1933 the Holy House had only just been restored and Walsingham was very much an object of suspicion in respectable Anglican circles. In the years that have passed since then, a new Shrine church has been added and there have been a whole series of developments which have enabled the devotion here to enter the mainstream of English religion. What was once thought eccentric has come to be accepted as authentic. If Father Patten was the one with the ideas, it was, I believe, Sister Hary Phillida who rooted it all in God. Somehow her givenness to God, her life of mortification, her vigils, her quality of prayer, has rooted this place. The fruits that we enjoy today are in great measure the result of the seeds sown in that simple cell close by.

A priest who knew both Sister Mary Phillida and Father Patten has written to me quoting Father Patten as saying “If God has achieved anything in this place it is because Siater Mary Phillida has been and is a silent centre of the ongoing miracle”.

In the Gospel just read, Jesus talking about the Kingdom he has come to establish - rightly Peter realised how hard it is for men and women to be part of that Kingdom. In a rather frustrated way, he reminds Jesus of how much he and the other disciples have given up to follow the Lord. "We have left everything and followed you" he declares - and Jesus’ response is that anyone who has surrendered themselvess will be repaid a hundred times over "now in this present time and, in the world to come, eternal life". Here again we have a contradiction in terms - renunciation leading to fullness of life, having nothing yet possessing everything. And yet for those of us who had the joy of being near Sister in her last days and hours there was no contradiction, as she received the sacraments, and as she prayed her way into unconsciousness, there was a serenity, a completeness, that peace which passes human understanding.

Year after year she has hungered and thirsted for communion with the living God - we are confident that her prayers are now being fulfilled and this Eucharist is a valediction, a final commendation as she nears the end of her pilgrim path. About Sister Mary Phillida I think we can have no worry - for her we cannot mourn - but her dying should provide a challenge for the rest of us. Her faithfulness to the Lord, her constant search for him in prayer, her example, should make us realise how shallow our own lives are and should provide the stimulus for radical re-assessment. Sister Mary Phillida’s vocation on earth was contemplation and we all benefited - her vocation now closer to God will, I believe, be changed, it will now be intercession, and we shall benefit even more.

from Walsingham Review No 88 Easter 1986

AN OPEN LETTER TO SISTER MARY PHILLIDA OF THE SON OF GOD

Bom Lady Phillida Shirley 1897: Professed as Recluse 1943: Died December 26 1985.

“I found him whom my heart loves. I held him fast nor would I let him go.”

My dear Sister,

I have been asked to write about you for the Review. But what? An obituary? That would be to mourn the dead, and we know you are even more vibrantly alive than when you moved among us. A biography? The bare account of your noble birth, your work at the Foreign Office, your prowess as a pianist - even playing at the Wigmore Hall - would obscure rather than reveal your life; for over half your life was spent in the obscurity of a pilgrimage known to God alone. A panegyric? How you would laugh at that - and how you could laugh; for despite our estimate of your sanctity you knew how far you were from the unutterable holiness of God, and to praise you would be to betray your very meaning.

Of course we mourn your passing; but that is the measure of how far we failed to catch your faith. Yet if we weep a little now, our tears are somehow nearer joy than sorrow.

So will you allow one final letter? You were generous enough to receive them on earth, though we tried not to intrude upon your solitude too often. Perhaps you knew - or maybe not - the joy your answers gave.

Yet words, for one whose life was silence, seem somehow violent. And to speak of one whose life was hid with Christ in God, seems somehow impertinent. But maybe now you will forgive me if I write the words we could not say.

We were in awe of you. Not because you made us feel inferior - indeed always the very opposite. But the totality of your oblation revealed the shabby hollowness of our lives. And for that we thank you.

We marvelled at you. We could only dimly discern your vocation. How should those who lagged so far behind you begin to comprehend the mystery of that loving and terrible responsibility God offered you, and to which you so long and faithfully responded? We yearned to talk with you, to discover more, to penetrate that mystery. But we accepted in faith, though sadly, that such was no part of your vocation. We understood grudgingly, that you must not even write of what you had seen.

We delighted in you. To know you were there, hidden among your trees, your cell like the neck of an hour-glass through which the pain of the world (and especially the suffering which comes to Mary’s Shrine) poured into the depths of God, and through which, somehow, His grace was released upon us all, was comfort and assurance.

We were grateful to you. Heaven knows what agonies and dereliction were sometimes your service in that little room. But for us, who sometimes contributed to them I’m afraid, but who certainly received their merits, it was sheer wonder. Forty, fifty years, alone yet not alone, your four walls contained the universe.

Above all we loved you. We love you still. You had a shining beauty — maybe not your own — which lit up our lives. You had a true elegance, observable in the way you moved, your turn of mind, your handwriting, which sprang in part from your patrician background (and how grateful we are to that Family who formed you under God), but in the main, I think, from your respect of every part of God’s creation.

Dear, very dear, Sister, I think you knew Eliot’s words: "to apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time, is an occupation for a saint — no occupation either, but something given and taken, in a lifetime's death in love, ardour and selflessness and self-surrender". For your death-in-love we thank you, and we thank God.

Dom Gregory Dix once wrote, you’ll remember, of a fourth century epitaph in Asia Minor: "Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much". Despite my selfish sadness at your passing I am happy that this must surely be true for you.

We do not need to ask your prayers. You will always have ours, with thankfulness; until, please God, we meet merrily on high.

With love in the Lord who alone will bring us there.

Michael [McLean]