MY PRIVATE PILGRIMAGE

Today, February 11, is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. So I just went back to my travel journal to refresh my memory of my visit to the sacred shrine in late January 1995. Here are just a couple of the things I wrote down:

I checked into my hotel room, a simple, clean one on the fourth floor and immediately headed for the

The Basilica at Lourdes

grotto and the Basilica. It was perhaps a 15 minute stroll. The town on this Friday night in January send sort of drowsy as I walked toward the center of things. Then as I turned up the Boulevard de la Grotte towards the shrine area the neighborhood became a ghost town. The street is lined with hotels, souvenir shops, and restaurants, but not one of them was open. Everything is closed for the winter. I walked in this solitude right onto the grounds of the Basilica from the time I walked through the gates, until I got almost to the grotto behind the Basilica more than five minutes, and all I saw not a soul. I was in a private pilgrimage! I got to the grotto, navigating by the glow of a great many candles that were flickering on the stand in front of it.

A cliff may be 40 feet high. And its bottom is an undercut in the shape of a rainbow that extends back into the stone phase for several yards with its front may be 20 feet high at the Apex and then getting progressively lower toward the back. As you face the grotto, you see about 15 or 20 feet up and to the right, just outside the shallow where undercut to park  a niche in the rock may be 5’ x 3’. It was in this niche that the Virgin Mary appeared to young Bernadette Subirous. today there is a statue there, illuminated at night.

There were four other people there with me. The only sound was the rush of water gushing from the famous spring end a stream of “Lourdes water.” it was as quiet as a church. No, better than that since the famous churches in Europe aren’t always quiet. It was as quiet as on the day when the lady in White first start a little Bernadette.

I prayed there in the cold a while. The churches were all locked up, so I strolled back to my hotel through to the deserted streets past roll down steel doors, and black, vacant windows of shops.

My journal entry for the following day contains a description of the basilica and its decorations, but my most lasting memory of Lourdes will always be of a wet Friday night, sitting on a wooden bench, and feeling privileged to be on a private pilgrimage to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes.

I wrote this little summary paragraph: 

I liked Lourdes. I was almost alone in that silent grotto, and walked the Basilica grounds in the dark silence. I was spared having to “look past” all the commercialism and crass hype, because in January, it’s not there. Just the grotto, the basilicas, and a few wet pilgrims like myself.

Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us!