Homily given on 25 July 2024 for the Lourdes Leaving Mass
So, we come to take our leave of Lourdes. Bernadette said leaving Lourdes was the greatest sacrifice of her life. But she knew she must leave.
We hear in today’s Gospel how Jesus was followed by crowds. Well, the same was happening to Bernadette. She’d begun to be followed everywhere she went. On one occasion, she heard two women walking behind her, and one say to the other, ‘If only I could cut off a bit of her dress.’
To which she issued a direct rebuke: ‘What imbeciles you are,’ she told them.
People were forever asking her to touch holy objects. They would drop rosaries in the hope that she would pick them up. But, stubborn to the last, she would say, ‘I’m not the one who dropped that rosary!’
People were offering her money too. ‘It burns me,’ she said, when someone tried to slip a gold coin into her hand. She was offered not only money but fame and fortune. A journalist offered to bring her to Paris and make her rich: ‘Oh, no, no,’ she told him, ‘I want to remain poor!’
So, she hid herself at first in the hospice school. It was there she decided she must now leave Lourdes. One can hear her distress in the announcement of it when she told the people of Lourdes, ‘You show me off like some freak … you parade me like a prize ox!’ She chose to be a nun, far away from Lourdes, in the middle of France, at Nevers. She told the sisters she was coming to hide.
The wrench of her departure is almost too painful to imagine. We’re told that all the family cried, except Bernadette. But the pain she felt once separated is captured in a letter she writes early on from Nevers: ‘I was very upset at the start. When I got a letter from home, I would wait until I was alone to open it because I felt I couldn’t read it without crying out all my tears.’
Her life in Nevers remained hard. She only heard about her mother’s illness after she’d died. The family never came to see her. The jealousy of the sisters never diminished. She’d been warned by the Lady, ‘You will not be happy in this life, though you shall be happy in the next.’
She said she longed to see the Lady again. People would often ask her, towards the end of her life, what she felt when she thought about Lourdes; whether she wouldn’t like to return.
‘Perhaps if I could go back there in a hot-air balloon, just to see the grotto without being seen, that would give me great joy.’
There are words here, I think, for us to hold onto. If we find the leaving of Lourdes painful, we should remind ourselves of the journey Bernadette had to make from this place. Ask her to hold us in our pain. And, in our prayer, imagine ourselves being borne back here in a hot-air balloon to look down upon the grotto from on high.
The leaving of Lourdes is a time for deep thanksgiving. Thanks for all the graces we’ve received; the insights; the new perspectives, new relationships; the kindness of strangers; the courage of the sick.
And to pray; to pray that we might return home a better person, filled with the love we’ve felt from Our Lord and his blessed Mother, from our fellow human-beings.
What resolutions shall we make as we take our leave of this place? These are private and personal, to be made in the silence of our hearts. But let’s make them resolutions of which the Lady would be proud. And resolve to pray more fervently to Bernadette herself, to Our Lady and her Blessed Son for help to keep them.
I’m lucky enough to return to Lourdes every November, when there’s nobody here. I come to be with the French Bishops. Imagine how wonderful it is to be alone at the grotto, or mostly alone.
Occasionally, you see lone pilgrims make their way into cave. I remember once seeing a young man wheeling his father to the back of the grotto. The boy touched the wet wall; and rubbed the moisture gently onto his father’s balding head. The father crossed himself. The son crossed himself too. They hadn’t seen me. They thought they were alone. But I wondered what was their prayer; and asked Bernadette to hold them close to her.
And when I’m there alone I think of one other pilgrim, Tim, Tim Martin, who
loved Lourdes more than any. He’d fallen off a climbing frame at school and been paralysed ever since. Lourdes was the place he felt the deepest consolation. The last night of his last ever pilgrimage, they brought him back to the grotto. They asked him, ‘Tim, how long would you like to stay?’ Tim could barely speak but he summoned up the energy to say, ‘Quite long, I think.’
And so, he sat there a good long time, until at one point they saw him force himself out of the chair, he couldn’t walk, and onto his knees. His face was rapt as he looked up into the niche; and prayed his heart out.
He was kneeling at just the place that Bernadette must have knelt to behold the Lady all those years ago. When I’m there alone, I like to do the same; kneel just where Bernadette must have knelt; look up into the niche; and imagine.
You might like to do it too before you take you leave of Lourdes.
And tell yourself, ‘I’m going to stay here “quite long, I think”.’