A Question of Faith

Lourdes is the place where young Bernadette Soubirous said that our Blessed Mother appeared to her on 18 separate occasions.  Did Mary really appear to her – and did the Virgin of Guadalupe appear to Juan Diego centuries earlier?  Or is there some other explanation?  Ultimately, it's a question of faith.

After spending a week in Lourdes and praying each day at the Grotto, my mother and I traveled to Nevers, France, where Bernadette spent the rest of her life as a Sister of Charity.  Partway on our three-leg journey though, as my mother was exiting a train outside the city of Tours, she fell and smashed her head on the pavement, causing a bleeding bump on her head the size of a golf ball and pain along her face.

In addition to our concern of a serious injury, neither of us knew the area and we had great difficulty communicating with the emergency responders and with the staff of the hospital where she was taken for examination because neither of us speak French and they didn’t speak our own language.  We were strangers in a strange land.  And we spent the next several hours anxiously wondering if she might have a brain bleed and have to stay at the hospital (or worse), where or even how I could find a hotel to spend the night, or how we were going to get back to the train station either to continue our trip or head straight to the airport and go home.   It was all very scary.

Thankfully in the end, my mother was not seriously hurt and, with the help of a French phrase book, we were able to get a taxi in time to catch the last train to Nevers.  We spent the next few days on retreat at the beautiful convent Espace Bernadette, where the saint lived and died and where her incorrupt body now lies in repose.

Were my mother and I just lucky?  Or was it something else?

The incident recalled my first time in Rome, when an older man in my tour group collapsed near the Vatican after a morning of walking up and down hills by the Forum and Colosseum.  They started working on him, but his color was really, really bad – his face was a mixture of deathly green and orange and purple.  The ambulance came and took him to the hospital, where he went into intensive care and the prognosis was poor.  With great concern in our hearts, but realizing there wasn’t anything the rest of us could do, we continued on.

As the group went to St. Peter’s Basilica, I left to go on a special tour of the scavi (excavations underneath the Basilica), which contain not only early Christian tombs from 2,000 years ago, but what is believed to be the grave of the fisherman Apostle himself directly beneath the main altar.  When we arrived at that place where some bone fragments of Peter are displayed, it was astounding. We were there in the very presence of the Apostle upon whom Jesus said He would build His Church, the Apostle to whom Jesus gave “the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

Our seminarian guide led us in a quick prayer, and then asked if there was anyone to say a prayer for.  I mentioned the gentleman in my tour group, whose name I did not know and for all I knew was dead, given the condition in which I had last seen him. We said a prayer, asking Peter to intercede for him, and that was the end of the tour.

At the end of the week, as we were all gathered in the hotel courtyard and grimly wondered how the man was doing, suddenly he walked in – and he looked fantastic, the picture of health.  He was smiling and beaming with vibrant color, not the picture of death we had seen earlier.

Maybe the gentleman’s condition was never really all that critical. Perhaps my mother was never really in much danger and we just received a scare.  Those are perfectly reasonable explanations.

Or, maybe, just maybe, my mother’s situation was really very serious.  And maybe the man was, in fact, near death and probably should have died.  Maybe, just maybe, St. Bernadette and the Holy Virgin came to my mother’s side, and maybe the most Holy Peter interceded for the older man. And God, hearing their prayers, healed my mother and him.

The working of God is often explained away.  Maybe it was all just a coincidence.  Or maybe they were each touched by the hand of God.

I know what my mother and this man restored to health believe, and I know what I believe.  What do you believe?

It’s a question of faith.