With Open Doors

We prayed the stations at Lourdes. It was not a walk in the park, but up a challenging hill. Get over it, right? Jesus’ way of the cross was no walk in the park. Always I am anxious to see how any set of Stations portrays #5: Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus to carry his cross. That is what we are call to do: pick up their cross, put it on our back and help them carry it. I never see or pray the 5th station without thinking of my friends – our friends – in Beit Jala (Bethlehem) who are at station #12: the Crucifixion.

While filling bottoms with Lourdes water, I thought of letting the water of Lourdes to flow over the rosary of my mother.

When I was preparing to leave Lourdes I lit a candle for all of you and for all of your intentions. The candle itself does not pray; it cannot pray. But it is a sign that prayer for you and your intentions continues. May we continue to pray for each other, and for the needs of all, especially those most in need and for those who have no one to pray for them.

Among the prayers prayed and left at Lourdes was this one from Lucas for his grandfather.

It was here in the grotto of Lourdes I placed all the notes and prayer intentions that I carried to Lourdes for others. It was an odd sensation: I didn’t want to give them up.

Sitting at the grotto at Lourdes, with mom’s twenty decade rosary in my hands, having untangled it out of mom’s embroidered little purse, working my way seat by seat to the first seat in the front row of the benches before the grotto, I fingered all 200 beads one by one, through all four sets of mysteries, in a steady and reflecting way, as I paused before, on and after each bead with just one word or phrase of the Hail Mary:

1. Hail Mary
2. full of grace
3. the Lord is with you
4. blessed are you among women
5. and blessed is the fruit of your womb
6. Jesus
7. holy Mary, Mother of God
8. pray for us sinners
9. now
10. and at the hour of our death

No, this is not a Mass taking place in “the grotto” at Notre Dame University, but at the Grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes.

On display in the “cachot” are the cape, shoes and rosary of (Saint) Bernadette. I have become fascinated with this young girl-saint. Nice photo, huh?

Bernadette was not very bright, to say the least. She was uneducated about the things of God and found learning very difficult. In a movie about her, the parish priest who was preparing her for first communion said, in a striking line with striking insight, “You know nothing but you understand everything.” Poor, uneducated, a little girl who was nothing in the sight of all in her world! Why was she chosen to be the one to whom “The Lady” would appear? How does that cause us to think about why God gives us what he gives to us?

Following bankruptcy the Soubirous family little by little fell into misery: unemployment, insecurity, expulsion from their home. They lived in a one room “foul and dirty hovel” that used to be a prison, six people in a small room. It was from this place that Bernadette, age 14, went forth on 11 February 1858, having no idea that on that day she would see the Blessed Mother.