Notre Dame de Lourdes et l'Ange de la Ville Rose

Bernadette age 14
Driving south from Toulouse for our day trip to Lourdes, we gradually climbed into the foothills of the Pyrénées whose snow -capped peaks rose majestically above the green valleys. This area was backwoods at its best, far from highways or communication systems, late to get the newest trends in the other world of Paris or even Toulouse, until a 14 year old country girl saw a lady in the grotto above her, a lady who appeared 18 times to Bernadette but not to others with her. The testimony of the child and the children with her eventually led to a skeptical world believing that she had indeed truthfully narrated the apparitions that spoke to her. One of the convincing details was her report that the lady identified herself as the immaculate conception, a term coined by the Vatican and discussed at that time among the church fathers, but not in popular circulation, certainly not known to a poor country girl.

One of the telling events in this chronicle was the request of the lady that Bernadette drink the water from the spring at the foot of the rock, where Bernadette found mud but no spring. She dug with her hands and drank from the bit of water, but the crowd gathered was disappointed in their expectation of a miraculous sign. The next morning, however, a gushing stream rushed from the spot, water that was cool and clear and bracing. Since that day many recount healing and comfort from that spring, so water from Lourdes is a much sought for curative therapy.



We saw in the crowds the ill, the injured, the disabled, the grieving, the weary, and we heard more languages at once than even in Paris. The site of the apparitions and the spring are now in the shadow of a towering cathedral, and a second larger cathedral, the largest underground church in the world, undergirds the plaza guarded by a pair of angels.











If you are interested in the story of Bernadette, there are several good websites with her story, and the old movie of her life, The Song of Bernadette, is still worth watching. Bernadette was told that she would not find happiness in this life, and indeed, a weak child suffering from asthma, she died at 35 in the convent of a long and painful bout of tuberculosis of the knee (can that be right??).

We had a lovely few hours of down time before dinner, which I used to pop into the hair salon that so skillfully worked on Harriet yesterday. The owner, Fabienne, cut my hair and framed it up in a very attractive style that sent me off on the stroll back across the city with a new lightness to my step. (photo tomorrow!) I told her that she was angelic, and she just smiled and pointed mutely to a tiny angel hanging above her work station.

Our encounters with kindred spirits often seem coincidental and random, but there is a touch of the miraculous to this day, to this journey, that has blessed us all.