Given at Cité St Pierre, Lourdes’ open-air ‘Cathedral in the Trees', for the Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes on 22nd July 2024.
What’s your favourite place in Lourdes? It’s a nice question to ask yourself. I’m struck by how many people tell me it’s this place, the City of the Trees. It’s certainly one of mine – not least because it’s so easy to meditate here on the beauty of God’s Creation but also because it was here I spent my first ever night in Lourdes.
I was backpacking with my brother; and we stayed just down there in what was then known as the Cite Secours. I remember discovering a chapel in the form of a shepherd’s hut. It impressed on me, in a way that has never left me, that Bernadette was first and foremost a shepherd, a shepherdess. Now, shepherds, when you get to know them, are most contemplative people. Of course they are: they have all the time in the world to contemplate God’s world – and the mystery of our existence. That was surely how God prepared young Bernadette’s heart – through contemplation of these very hills and woods – to meet the mother of the One through whom all of this was made.
It’s wonderful to think how intimately she knew all the slopes which surround Lourdes – as well as Lourdes itself. She had all sorts of ways of getting to Massabielle, the grotto – especially when she had to avoid people. Her favourite way of getting there was down that steep path to the right-hand side as you look at the grotto – the zig-zag path which leads you from the road straight down to the cave. The cave must have as familiar to her as children’s favourite playground. All her childhood she’d gathered wood there and played.
How extraordinary then it must have been for her to see something moving in the niche she knew so well! The words given to us today from the prophet Isaiah remind us that it was light – that what she saw was light. How Our Lady must have felt for Bernadette as she prepared to appear! The way Bernadette described it was that she saw there something white – something white in the shape of a woman. Mary herself had known, some two thousand years previously, what it was like to receive such a visitation – and the fear! Luke confirms for us how deeply disturbed she was.
What people observed, in fact, in Bernadette at times of apparition was a deep emotion come across her face – emotions both of fear and joy, almost at the same time. They said it was strange because she looked both happy and frightened – in an instant. Fr Desiré came one day, unannounced, to observe her; and said, “What struck me was the joy and sadness in her face … it happened with the speed of lightning.”
So many people wanted to know what she’d seen. Sculptors and painters tried to reproduce in stone and wood, oil and charcoal, the image Bernadette described. But, time and again, she would see it and say, “The Lady looked nothing like that!” It was a Religious priest who had the idea of showing Bernadette a book full of pictures of Our Lady from all over the world; and asked her which image came closest to what she’d seen. And she knew immediately - when she sets eyes on the icon of Our Lady of Grace. “That’s what she looked like – just like that” she said. That’s why this icon is preserved in the Cote Bernadette where we shall celebrate Mass tomorrow.
I find it interesting that Bernadette used to say that, when she beheld Our Lady, Mary seemed “very much a child”. Our Lady’s voice, which she heard for the first time when asked to return for the next fifteen days, she described as “sweet and delicate”. The image portrayed in Our Lady of Grace captures that sweetness; and Our Lady’s youth. It also communicates something deeply tender – in the way Mary holds Jesus’s cheek to her own.
It reminds me of something Bernadette said about praying after Communion. By the way, for those of us who find prayer difficult, it’s consoling to know that Bernadette used to say, “I can’t meditate at all!” But a childhood friend came to visit Bernadette one day in the convent at Nevers. She asked Bernadette, “Bernadette, how do you manage to spend so much time in thanksgiving after Holy Communion?” “I imagine Our Lady herself giving me the Child Jesus,” Bernadette replied. “I imagine Our Lady herself giving me the Child Jesus. I receive Him … I speak to Him and He speaks to me.”
Might I suggest you might like to try and do the same? After you’ve received Holy Communion; and you return to your place, close your eyes; and imagine Mary giving you the Child Jesus to hold. As you hold Him, speak to Him and tell Him everything you want to say to Him about yourself, all the graces you need and hope to receive from this pilgrimage – and you may be surprised how easy it is to do. And, if you find it’s not so very easy, then ask Bernadette, the shepherdess of these woods, to help you – as she most surely will.