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!

TWO FACES OF FAITH

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The mass readings for this past Wednesday gave us an interesting contrast between two people of faith.

In the Gospel reading (Mt 15:21-28) a Canaanite woman (i.e. a non-Jew) presents herself to Jesus, crying, "Lord, Son of David, have pity on me. My daughter is terribly troubled by a demon." Our Lord doesn't reply at first. I suppose that's because he has said that his mission is "to the lost sheep of the house of Israel," and this gentile woman doesn't qualify. It's only after her insistence and persistence and her clever pointing out that even the dogs survive on the crumbs dropped from the table, that Jesus finally relents and tells her, "Woman, you have great faith! Your wish will come to pass."

Jesus tells us that she has "great faith." We could call it "praying faith," that shows itself in the intensity and insistence of her prayer. That kind of prayer is a real gift of the Spirit, and I wish I had a bigger share of it myself.

The other character appears in the first reading (Numbers 13 passim). "The Lord said to Moses, 'Send men to reconnoiter the land of Canaan, which I am giving the Israelites." Moses chooses one leader from each of the twelve tribes and sends them off to spy on the land and its inhabitants. When the party returns after forty days, they report that while the land is indeed fertile, "We cannot attack these people; they are too strong for us." Some described the inhabitants as giants, descendents of the Anakim. At his frightening report, the Israelites lost their nerve and "broke out with loud cries, and even in the night the people wailed."

One lone voice was lost in all this negative noise -- the voice of Caleb, one of the party that had goe into Canaan. He stood up against the naysayers, saying "We ought to go up and seize the land, for we can certainly do so." His voice, was, ofcourse, drowned out by the general pandemonium that had broken out among the fearful Israelites.

Caleb seems to have little hard evidence that might persuade the Israelites that they could in fact conquer the Promised Land -- except the fact that it had been promised them! I've always admired Caleb for standing up so courageously and speaking against the prevailing opinion. Often (usually?) God's revelation runs counter to what most people judge to be the right thing. He, like the Canaanite woman, is a person of faith. His faith we might call "practical faith," the kind that, for instance, moves a person to take action (such as standing up and speaking the truth in a difficult situation). I certainly envy his courageous, practical faith.

What do these two people of faith have in common? She with her "praying faith" and he with his "practical faith?" One answer is that they both believed that God can do what God promised. The mother believed with all her heart that Jesus could heal her daughter if he wished, and so she kept insisting that he do so. Caleb believed with all his heart that the Lord would go into battle with them and would easily conquer the Canaanites -- because God had promised to do so. Caleb believed, he trusted.

These to people of faith offer us a formidable challenge to us lukewarm believers whose prayer is so often anemic and whose actions too often show a lack of trust in God's power and goodness.Let's pray for one anther that we might grow stronger in our faith - both "pryng faith" and "practical faith."

THE FIELD, THE TREASURE, AND ME

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One of the side-effects of living a monastery in the middle of a city is that I have to constantly rethink and re-discover the meaning of the “peace” that St. Benedict wants his monks to pursue. I had occasion last week to think once again about peace, when I spent a few days at St. Vincent Archabbey in rural Pennsylvania.

St. Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, PA

I sat on a bench in front of the abbey church, high on a hill. In the valley below, the early morning mist was lifting from the farm fields; on the far side of the valley, a long, dark, green-blue ridge stretched against the eastern horizon like a great ocean swell that was frozen in place a million years ago. From behind it, the gray sunrise was starting to paint bright pink edges on the clouds, as the birds in the pine trees filled the gentle breeze with their quiet morning songs. The scene could not have been more peaceful.

But I knew from long experience that this wasn't the important kind of peace. Think about it. When Jesus said, “My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you,” he could not have been promising them serene, tranquil and stress-free lives, since he knew that they would have to live out his gift of “peace” in the midst of constant difficulties, struggles and persecution. So, whatever Jesus and Benedict meant by peace, he must have meant some interior state that can exist alongside of stress and in spite of conflict.  

Then I happened to notice one of the farm fields in the valley, and remembered the parable that begins “The Kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field.” A man was walking through that field when he came up the treasure, and out of joy he went and sold everything he had to buy that field. The man had only one concern: to possess that treasure; single mindedly, he gave over everything to concentrate on possessing the treasure. So he had peace, because his life had only one “center.”

There was the secret to inner peace that I can find even in the middle of a crowded city: to have only one single center of my life.  When my life revolves something other than Christ, or even around multiple centers, each one demanding attention, then my inner life becomes hopelessly disordered -- the very opposite of peaceful -- and the confusion in my heart and mind make inner peace impossible. The noisy competition of rival centers in my heart and mind can crowd out the gift of peace that the Lord is offering me.

St. Gregory described this situation with tongue in cheek: “The mind which is disordered by a rabble riot of thoughts suffers, as it were, from overpopulation.” That surely sounds like my situation, at least at times: my mind and my heart get overpopulated by the insistent demands of my false self or my inner two-year old. I lose sight of the fact that there’s really only one thing necessary.  

So, I brought back from Pennsylvania the image of a field, in which are a treasure and a man whose life is about to change completely when he finds the treasure. I practice putting myself in his place, and responding with joy and self-abandon the way he did.

Now I have an image of “peace” that I can bring with me on Monday when I start teaching my Logic course in our Summer Term.   

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