Lourdes

Someone emailed my website to ask about Lourdes, the Catholic shrine in France. For background on how it became a focal point of prayer and pilgrimage, check out the following website - http://www.catholic.org/clife/mary/lourdes1.php
For me, Lourdes was somewhere I’d heard about but had no desire to go. It sounded tacky to me, with its miracles and its desperately ill pilgrims and the grot-shops selling plastic Virgin Marys with screw-cap heads so people could take a bottle of holy water home. My mother and my sister encouraged me to see past the tackiness and go there.
I became very sick and a lady from church invited me to join her group going to Lourdes, but I refused. I believed I would be healed, but that God was telling me I’d be healed at home. I could go to Lourdes afterwards, as a thanksgiving.
Against the odds, I got well. (A detailed account is in my book, ‘Don’t Ask Me To Believe’). I thanked God, got on with life, and became drawn to praying with people for healing. After a couple of years, and some lifechanging experiences of how God works, I became really weak. It wasn’t a recognisable physical illness, and in many ways was a gift, but was very restricting.
When it reached the stage that a phone call or a walk to the end of garden left me shaking with exhaustion, I prayed for some specific direction from God, and that’s when it came to mind that I hadn’t made the thanksgiving for my healing. I needed to go to Lourdes.
A friend believed I could get there, and came with me. There were delays on the journey, it was February and freezing cold, and we arrived late and worn out and in desperate need of rest. But I suddenly felt that, if I was going to feel this tired for the rest of the week we’d booked to be there, I wanted at least one glimpse of the grotto (where Mary had appeared to Bernadette), so I might as well go straight away.
We walked through the town to the grotto, and I’ve never felt so disappointed. The grotto I’d heard so much about consisted of a battered statue perched on a bit of rock. People wandered about in the rain, looking as aimless as I felt.
I noticed a woman praying, on her knees, in a puddle, her face rapt. She was obviously experiencing something I wasn’t.
For the sake of doing something, I prayed. And something happened. I was filled with rage. I felt robbed. I got enraged, not with Lourdes but with Mary, mother of Jesus, mother of God. In my heart I found myself yelling at her, ‘Call yourself a mother? Given to all of us by Jesus, at the foot of the cross? And you handed me over to the care of a mother who clearly was in no state to take care of herself, let alone a newborn baby?’
And quickly and very clearly I heard a voice, ‘I didn’t hand you over. I was there all the time. Don’t you remember me?’
And I did remember her. She had stood beside my mother every time I was put into my cot and left. She would stay there after my mother went out of the room, until I slept. When I was about four, I realised I hadn’t seen her for a while. I asked my mother where ‘my other mother’ had gone, but she didn’t know what I was talking about.
I stood in front of the rock, in the pouring rain, and wept. I felt cared for, mothered and loved. For the rest of the week, my energy never ran out. I went to Masses in every language, prayed the rosary, walked the Stations of the Cross, had confession, and was immersed in the waters three times as a symbol of dying to sin and death and rising in Christ. Since then I’ve seen God as mother as well as Father, and understood that both men and women are made in his likeness, because he contains the image of both.