Our
Lady of Lourdes: 11th
February
For
three years, until last August, William, Shadow, and I lived in a
hamlet in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was beautiful, but
remote: eagles soared overhead, the forest, with its deer and
sanglier (wild boar), encroached on our little bit of land; in winter
we were snowed in; in summer we took refuge from the sun in our cool
stone house. It was a place of extremes: extreme weather, landscape,
experiences,
people.
View
from the Sentier Cathar of The Hearth, February 2015
Not
very far away to the west is what was once another small village –
but not so small now: Lourdes. In 1858 a local girl, Bernadette
Soubirous, claimed to have experienced visions of Mary, mother of
Jesus, and Lourdes soon became one of the world's major sites of
pilgrimage and religious tourism. I went there myself in 1983, as a
nurse-assistant with the charity Across.
Shrine
at Lourdes
Pilgrimage
– journeying to a sacred place as an act of devotion – is common
to various religions, but it's the Christian routes and sites that
I'm most familiar with. As a kibbutz volunteer back in the late 1970s
I was able to visit Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee, Capernaum,
Jericho, the Sinai, Masada... I have visited St Peter's in Rome (and
Delphi in Greece, albeit not Christian!)... When I lived in Kent, I
walked parts of the 'Pilgrim's Way' that Chaucer's pilgrims took on
their way to Canterbury; in the south of France, we walked parts of
the Sentier Cathar which ran past our house, The Hearth; and here in
Brittany we hope to walk parts of the Tro Breizh. We like walking –
and we have a dog!
The
Pilgrim Way, Hampshire/Kent
But
there are other ways of making a pilgrimage too, of taking an inner
journey. You might choose to walk a labyrinth, such as the one at the
George Square Gardens in Edinburgh, or you might find an installation
like the one I helped create some years ago at St. Michael's Church –
The Pilgrim Path - exploring through sounds and silence, actions and
reflections, our relationship with our selves and with God; or you
might make meditation or mindfulness parts of your everyday practice.
Labyrinth,
St. George's Square Gardens, Edinburgh
Some
people, like those who I accompanied to Lourdes on that long coach
journey, go on pilgrimage for healing, hoping for miracles. I
wouldn't venture to deny the possibility of miracles, and we all need
healing. But I was aghast when I
subsequently
undertook some training and work with the National Federation of
Spiritual Healers to be told by our trainer/mentor 'You're healers
now!'. No: people, places, experiences, may be the means by which
healing is accessed (if that's the right word) but the healing itself
comes from the being within, the re-aligning of our selves more
nearly to the person we are meant to be, the turning around of our
lives, to head not for 'away' but for home.
The
following ancient prayer is used at the end of the Pilgrim Mass, said
along the Camino de Santiago (an albergue is a hostel or
way-station):
O
God, who brought your servant Abraham
out
of the land of the Chaldeans,
protecting
him in his wanderings,
who
guided the Hebrew people across the desert,
sustaining
them on their journey:
we
ask that you watch over us, your servants,
as
we walk in the love of your name.
Be
for us our companion on the path,
our
guide at the crossroads, our breath in our weariness,
our
protection in danger, our albergue on the Way,
our
shade in the heat, our light in the darkness,
our
consolation in our discouragements,
and
our strength in our intentions,
so
that with your guidance we may arrive safe and sound
at
the end of the road, enriched with grace and virtue,
and
return safely to our home filled with joy.
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