The nightly candlelight rosary procession
has aspects both moving and amusing.
The baths are back.
Last year I was privileged to be part of a pilgrimage to Lourdes, which I had not visited since 1989, long before I was a priest or associated with a parish dedicated to Saint Bernadette. Much had been reworked and improved in the more than three decades that had passed since my previous brief visits. Staying there for three days to explore and to participate in the devotions gave me a better sense of the place and the amazing things that happen there. I also had a chance while visiting the places of her young life to become better acquainted with, and more in awe of, our patron saint, Bernadette Soubirous.
One of the things that was different from before was that the baths were closed, the pools for full immersion of pilgrims in the cold spring water that was revealed to Bernadette by Our Lady and is known to be a fount of healing. New spigots along the base of the rock wall beyond the grotto have been installed to offer the pilgrims access to the same water for a less immersive ‘water gesture’, which honestly was not only acceptable for me but I think also preferable.
The baths had been shut down during the pandemic restrictions of 2020, and that closure along with the change in expectations was subsequently utilized to renovate and refurbish the baths and the associated facilities. The work is now completed, and the baths were reopened in time for the French national pilgrimage, which happens every year around the Solemnity of the Assumption of Our Lady. It is one of the times when the largest multitudes come to the site, right up there with the anniversary of the first apparition and Feast Day of Our Lady of Lourdes on 11 February. Perhaps this year everybody who just enjoyed the Olympic Games in Paris will simply take the train down to Lourdes. Perhaps.
The timing is providential as well as practical. The Assumption of Our Lady is a feast that reveals and reminds us of the importance of our bodies, to us and to God. This may seem like a commonplace, but a time when bifurcation between body and person is manifesting in gross and grievous ways in our society, it is helpful for us to grab one of the several lifelines that the Church offers to pull us, if not everybody, to sanity.
The womb that gave flesh and blood to God the Son, our Redeemer, is a precious body indeed. That flesh was raised from the tomb alive and glorified and is now and forever in the intimacy of the communion of the Holy Trinity. The flesh from which came that flesh is not, cannot be, left behind, much less discarded or even disregarded, and so of course Our Lord gathered to Himself His Mother, body and soul, at the time of her passing from this life.
Every third year, including this year, the Church turns for five succeeding Sundays to the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel known as the Eucharistic Discourse. Juxtaposed with precursor passages from the Old Testament, -- the manna in the desert, the hearth cake and water jug for Elijah – the words of Our Lord leave no room for doubt that our Creator God has always wanted and still now wants to feed us in our earthly bodies to nurture and preserve our life, and the Divine Redeemer insists that the only way to receive His glorified and eternal life is by eating and drinking in our mortal flesh His holy Body and Blood.
We are enfleshed spirits; our bodies are who we are, now and forever. They require and deserve our respect and care unto everlasting life. Every physical healing that Christ worked to reveal His divine identity reveals also the indispensability of our flesh to our human identity. His recurring insistence on feeding emphasizes our regular and recurring need for Him as nourishment on our journey. God feeds us in our mortal flesh, insisting on our cooperation with His instruction to take and eat, lest the journey be too long for us.
There comes a time in the life of every adolescent boy when he needs to be instructed and reminded to bathe himself, a time that does not last long as he recognizes and responds on his own to the recurring necessity. God’s repeated indication of bathing as a basic both in His interest and in ours has both spiritual and physical significance, revealing the inseparability to the dual aspects of our single human nature. God purifies us in our mortal flesh, and offers us healing in our bodies and our spirits.
God’s desire for our weal and not our woe was revealed again by the Mother of His Son in the salutary water that rises at the grotto in Lourdes. Not a moment too soon for a population disappointed and disoriented in its own flesh, the baths are back.
Monsignor Smith
