Bernadette's Corridor

Lourdes. I had heard of it before, a provincial and unassuming village where the apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared to a poor young girl tending sheep. She had roses at her feet and stars at her head, a beautiful lady attired in azure who told the shepherdess to dig a hole in the earth, from which a spring sprouted. The waters of that spring were said to heal all kinds of ailments and even contact with it was thought to strengthen the soul.

I have been Catholic all my life, and I confess I never quite understood the "Mary thing." Certainly, she was a holy woman, a saint even, but did that mean she should be exalted as goddess? Nonetheless, I have discovered that holy places are holy because there is an intense spiritual energy there. Regardless of whether you believe, there is something that touches you in an extraordinary way, reminds you of your limitless potential, that you will always be more than what you physically are in the moment. I have been moved by Buddhist temples in Ayuthaya, the Acropolis, Egyptian ruins at Karnak. My heart tingles whenever I walk into a church or a monastery or even a mosque.

Being in the grotto was a profoundly affecting experience, like looking on the dark side of the moon. However crowded the shrine was, the sense of being there was deeply solitary as if you were the only one on earth praying. Perhaps you don't notice the hopeful, tearing, mournful, or respectable prayers of others when pouring out the private greivances of your own heart.

I remember there was a myriad of candles, each symbolizing an intention or a dear and impossible wish, or a hope that refused to be dashed. Burning fervently in the dusk, the wax dripped into idiosyncratic shapes, an assortment of figures that seemed to pray together. There were candles intermingled like lovers, or twisted and high and lofty as if reaching for a goal. There were some that burned below the surface; having spent out the liquified wax, they gleamed from the proximity of some nether world. Yet they all must end, quenched and resoundingly similar, after the flames engulfed them. Perhaps we all had been burned by the fires of Hell, whether or not we realize it.

Then I walked down the quaint rues that Bernadette herself would have passed and realized the poor saint would turn in her grave at this modern entrepeneurial site. Souvenirs, candles, and plastic replicas of the saint and the Blessed mother were up for sale by the thousands. Above all, by swarthy-looking vendors who did not seem to have any religious affinity to anything besides cold, hard cash. They hawked and solicited and haggled like any seller of overpriced trinkets at any tourist location. Here it was again, the good old profit motive.

Nothing remained of the simplicity and the unfettered mind, the very reason Bernadette was chosen to receive a divine message.

Perhaps some good had been done in the world. And perhaps the world has not changed as much as we hoped. Holiness and commercialization. How do we manage to co-exist.