That this is again about a religious pilgrimage is more of a coincidence than a pattern, or theme for the blog. Although I do want to say that one of the surprising things I've grown to love about France is the ubiquitous presence of The Church.
I know that there are horrific things that have been done in the name of The Church, but luckily I have never personally been the recipient of pain inflicted by mean nuns or predator clergy.
I especially appreciate the role of Mother Mary, who embodies the compassion and unconditional love I've longed for since my mothers tragic death when I was just 26 years old. I am not a catholic, but as my young friend, Ashley (who is in Thailand studying to be a Buddhist monk), once said to me after I told him I wanted to adopt him, "I can use all the mothers I can get."
This was our second trip to Lourdes, the first visit being two years ago, abet for a brief time. There was a problem with the timing of our arrival in Lourdes: it was lunch time. And since food is the religion of my husband's family, and there was a family member traveling with us who believed that there couldn't possible be any suitable place to eat in "such a place", there existed a conflict of interest.
Considering we had just spent a week praying to the god of eating and drinking, (which, it turned out, was the very source of my problems) I didn't think it would be asking too much to let me do this one small thing. So I dug my feet in and refused to leave before I got to do what I came there for. We stayed and I prayed, and my husband and I have since paid dearly for my small act of rebellion.
But, had all this not happened, I would never have been healed. Yes, I did get healed, but that is another story. Was my subsequent healing worth the fallout from that fateful day? If only we had arrived in Lourdes an hour earlier, before lunch time. Maybe it was all inevitable. Who knows? But this I do know: since that first visit to Lourdes when I really 'got' that the Mother Mary is a symbol of unconditional love, each time I see a statue of the Mother Mary ( and they are everywhere in France ) I am reminded of the ongoing unconditional love from my husband. And for that, I am eternally grateful.
It was time to return to Lourdes, to put a book end on the past two years, give thanks for my subsequent healing and to pray for another kind of healing.
A brief background on Lourdes:
On 11 February 1858, a 14-year-old local girl named Bernadette, claimed a beautiful lady appeared to her in the remote Grotto of Massabielle. The lady eventually identified herself as "the Immaculate Conception", the Blessed Virgin Mary.
As news of her visions spread thousands of people came to witness her conversations. During one conversation with the Virgin, (The lady appeared a total of 18 times) Bernadette was told to eat the grass and dig below the grotto to drink from a spring of healing waters. When Bernadette ate the grass and drank some muddy water, people laughed and ridiculed her. The next day a spring began to flow. By 1859 thousands of pilgrims were visiting Lourdes to drink the healing waters.
A statue of Our Lady of Lourdes was erected at the site in 1864.
Lourdes is one of the world's leading Catholic Marian Shrines. Yearly, from March to October, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes is a place of mass pilgrimage.
During one of the Virgin Mary’s apparitions to St. Bernadette, she asked that people come in procession to the Grotto. There are two daily processions. Miraculously we arrived and walked to the grotto as the first procession was beginning.
In the early days care for sick pilgrims was provided by local nuns and charitable workers. There still exists in Lourdes a "ministry of welcome", receiving and caring for all the pilgrims, no matter what their faith, especially the sick and the poor
With between 5 and 7 million people visiting Lourdes annually, it has the second highest number of hotels in France, second only to Paris.
The Roman Catholic Church has officially recognized 67 miraculous healings, which are stringently examined for authenticity and authentic miracle healing with no physical or psychological basis other than the healing power of the water.
Bernadette paid a heavy price for her personal conversations with the Virgin Mary. In fact the Mother told her, "I promise you happiness, but not in this life time."
Hounded by people until she left Lourdes and went into seclusion, she lived the rest of her short life in a Convent where the mother superiors told her story when she arrived, but forbid her to discuss her visions ever again. They made her do the most menial and humiliating of tasks to keep her meek and humble.
After taking her vows she worked in hospitals aiding the sick. Bernadette herself was in ill health most of her life, eventually developing TB. She suffered physically from her ailments, as well as mentally from the burden of her visions, and died at the age of 35. She was recognized thirty years later as a saint. Her body, which never decomposed, was exhumed three times. The last time it was exhumed in 1925 a cast was made of her face and hands and a wax replica was created. Her body is on display at the convent where she spent the last twenty years of her life.
From here we went on to Lourdes, which I cover in the previous blog. 
