By Sam Troy
When I first visited the College in Littlemore, the teapot moved me deeply (admittedly, I was sleep-deprived at the end of a stressful term). As my addled brain imagined it, this was the pot with which John Henry Newman sat down to tea for one in his rooms in Oriel, the very pot that was later taken to Littlemore, where he drank from it as he wondered whether to desert the church of his birth. Realising that the Saint’s famous conversion would have taken place amidst cups of tea suddenly made him feel close. It’s not even chipped, and has a surprisingly modern-looking Celtic knot pattern.
This shrine in an Oxford suburb, the site of Newman’s conversion, is full of such things, and a visit is unexpectedly intimate. Here’s a book he inscribed for his Godson; here’s his Alb; here’s his Rosary. The chapel houses a lock of Newman’s hair, and, just round the corner, there’s a metal strut from Bl. Dominic Barberi’s coffin together with some knuckle-bones.
The contrast between the density of relics and the nondescript surroundings is remarkable. Around it, ordinary people are going shopping. The church next door is locked. The Newman Centre itself is a converted stable. It seems a shock that holiness can be so nondescript, so ordinary: we don’t expect sanctity to arrive in converted stables at Littlemore.
The journey there feels more like a wandering, a stumbling over a destination, than a ‘pilgrimage’. Visitors tend to come from Oxford, often by bike, stopping at turnings to check their phones to make sure they’re not lost. There’s no moment where you suddenly have a view of the College from the top of a hill, or where the streets open out and bells welcome you in. It’s only falling on your knees in the chapel that you realise that you have, after all, completed a pilgrimage, and that you are in a shrine.
This is very different from the elaborate pereginationes of pre-Reformation England. The Sarum Rite service to begin a pilgrimage treats the wayfarers almost as monks or nuns committing their lives to God. They prostrate themselves before the altar while three psalms are sung and the priest blesses them. They stand. There then follows the blessing of the pilgrims’ wallet, the staff, the cross, and the clothes, after which the pilgrim is dressed and the ‘Mass of Wayfarers’ (missa pro iter agentibus) is said. These motifs – of lying before the altar, being clothed and, often, being given a cross – are also the main elements of the ritual of ‘clothing’ a new monk or nun, a symbol of radical conversion (conversatio morum), giving oneself totally to Christ. In both services, there is an emphasis on the vota, the oaths, that are undertaken, whether to live as a Religious, or to complete the journey to the holy site. Far from the Oxford-style ‘hop on a bike to Littlemore’, going on a pilgrimage is represented as a commitment to conversion comparable to monastic vows.
But for all the ceremony beginning it, the journey would often have been much more a wander than a pilgrimage. Fr Felix Schmid (Latinised, Fabri) (c.1435-1502), a Swiss Dominican, constantly draws attention to this in his Evagatorium, a description of his journey to the Holy Land. On the way there, his group of pilgrims is unruly, and we hear of them getting drunk and almost burning down villages as they try to cook dinner. He refuses even to let his account be called a ‘pilgrimage’, preferring the title ‘evagatorium’ – a wandering (related to our word ‘vagrant’) – and vilifies ‘evagatio’ as against the proper religious life. But once they arrive, the holiness of the place overwhelms them. ‘The joy wherewith we rejoiced was deep and great, beyond what any outward words could express … We began in our joy to run to and fro throughout the church [of the Holy Sepulchre], seeking the Holy Places without any order.’ They fall on their knees and weep, kissing the ground.
The tension is familiar to us as Christians. We are the people of God, the Sons and Daughters of the Most High – and still we have to live our ordinary lives. The path where we follow Jesus doesn’t always feel ‘holy’; the process of re-commitment and re-conversion to Christ is often prosaic, and the destination isn’t always clear to us. Whether we begin with a great ceremony, or wander onto the way by chance, much of the journey feels ordinary, full of small irritations and confusions. Even for Newman, the time spent at Littlemore wondering whether to become Catholic would often have felt as though he was straying – as he himself wrote, ‘Lead kindly light … the night is dark, and I am far from home.’
There’s a touching episode in Schmid’s book: upon arriving in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he wanders towards the centre of the building, gazing upwards. Suddenly, a middle-aged German lady rushes up to kiss the ground underneath his feet, and he realises that the stone he’s standing on is the spot where the body of Christ had been prepared for burial. Too busy looking up, he had missed the mark of God’s presence below. ‘When I heard this I trembled, and, drawing back my feet with horror, I fell on the earth before the stone. Now I scarce dared to touch with my mouth that which before I had not feared to tread irreverently upon with my shod feet.’ The full title of his book is Evagatorium in Terræ Sanctæ, Arabiæ et Egypti peregrinationem – ‘the wandering into … a pilgrimage’; Schmid finds his way to holiness almost by accident.
Newman too was familiar with this sensation – in a sermon, he writes, ‘The world seems to go on as usual. There is nothing of heaven in the face of society; in the news of the day there is nothing of heaven; in the faces of the many, or of the great, or of the rich, or of the busy, there is nothing of heaven … And yet the Ever-blessed Spirit of God is here; the Presence of the Eternal Son, ten times more glorious, more powerful than when He trod the earth in our flesh, is with us. … We come, like Jacob, in the dark, and lie down with a stone for our pillow; but when we rise again, and call to mind what has passed, we recollect we have seen a vision of angels, and the Lord manifested through them, and we are led to cry out, “How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”’
Pilgrimage, no matter how mundane, is a matter of renewed conversion to Christ, a decision to commit oneself to the Lord in the places He sets before us. Though the road may be unknown, there will be moments when His goodness becomes overwhelmingly clear, and we recognise the process of conversion that has been taking place within. The God who redeemed the world was born as a baby in a manger, and welcomed Newman to His Church in a former stable: can we be surprised if He brings to a renewed love of Him through an unremarkable bike-ride to that same place? God is with us; holiness is not far away. It can touch us in the ground beneath our feet, in the journeys we make – and even, in its own modest way, in a Saint’s teapot.