A Pilgrimage to Lourdes, Our Lady and Bernadette

The French town of Lourdes in the Pyrenees near the border with Spain is one of the most popular destinations in the world. Each year, six million visitors come from all corners of the world. Some come as tourists for a day or two to see what all the excitement is about. Others come in hopes of a physical cure of some illness or disability – there have been 69 cases that have been recognized as miraculous cures and thousands more cases of claimed miraculous physical healings. Then there are those, like me this month, who come merely as pilgrims seeking to spend some time being close to the mystery of holiness and, perhaps, find some measure of spiritual healing and peace.

Much of what draws me to Lourdes, of course, is the Grotto at that part of Lourdes known as Massabielle, where in 1858 the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to the young peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous, just as the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego. What also attracts me is Bernadette herself. In fact, it might be said – all honor rightly given to Mary, the Mother of our Lord – that the real Message of Lourdes is Bernadette Soubirous herself, or more specifically, the simple faith and love of Bernadette.

Growing up, Bernadette was often sickly and physically weak due to severe asthma and other maladies, not to mention undernourishment due to poverty. Yet, one could say that the words of the Beatitudes rightly apply to her – “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God” (Mt. 5:8). Meanwhile, as she would write in her later years, “How blind man is when he refuses to open his heart to the light of faith!”

Bernadette lived in a time of ideological hostility to religion, including the constricted prejudices of intellectual elites who rejected religious faith as superstition and believed instead that “seeing is believing,” that if something could not be subjected to scientific measurement and testing, it did not exist. Bernadette, though, was no intellectual elite. Rather, for her, believing was seeing.

Because of her faith, her simple modest faith of the heart, an innocent and humble love for the Lord, the lowly Bernadette was able to see what others could not: She who is “our life, our sweetness, and our hope” – our Blessed Mother Mary. Innocence tends to allow one to see a higher truth. At Massabielle, Bernadette was able to see what others could not see. She was able to see what some others refused to see.

One problem that we have in this fallen world is that we have become infected with a disease – a disease that leads us to see ourselves and others with the world’s eyes – eyes that are false. We see superficial appearances, and not the truth of a person or thing. When we see with our eyes, our human and worldly eyes, we see a false reality, a false world, a false beauty. Our human eyes deceive us. We are often blind to true beauty, and other times we think that what is truly beautiful is abhorrent. In the resulting darkness, those who see in worldly ways are unable to perceive either truth or love – they struggle to find their way and are oblivious to the needs of others, especially those who are most vulnerable.

The fallen world consistently seeks to have you disbelieve and have doubts. The world whispers in your ear, imitating the voice of your subconscious, “God doesn’t exist. And if He does, He has abandoned you. He cannot be trusted. You can only trust yourself.”

However, not everyone is blind, not everyone is unable to see. The Virgin Mary was and is able to see, and Bernadette was able to see her. That is because Bernadette did not seek to see merely with the eyes of the head, that is, merely with worldly eyes. Because of her simple humble faith, she also saw with the heart, which in turn allowed her to see the truest beauty God has ever made.

That is why the lowly Bernadette, ignorant in the eyes of the learned, was much more wise than the intellectual elite of her time who were, for all their learning, ignorant. By their arrogant pride and hubris, by promoting extreme secular ideologies that have no need or want of God, these intellectuals had learned to be stupid.

If we too want to see truly, we must seek to emulate the lowly Bernadette, rather than the prideful. We must believe, we must want to believe, in truth. We must have faith in God, rather than faith in ourselves as “gods,” so that we might see with our hearts.

When we see with our hearts with eyes of faith, with our souls illuminated by the true Light, we are able to see reality as it truly is. We are able to truly see, and see God’s presence in the world and in the lives of others.