A sign – not a miracle in Lourdes.

There is a difference between signs and miracles although one can be the other.  I recount here what happened to me twelve years ago when my life was terribly confused.  I had no job, no place to live and my marriage of 25 years was breaking up.

At the end of the summer I had driven to Spain to see if I could find a cheap place to live.  I wasn’t looking with any focus, nor was I happy to be on my own.  I looked around some places I had known in my student days and found everything too costly, so I headed back up north.  At Bayonne, I stopped by the beach because I love the big waves there and fancied a swim but, even before I had got out of the car, I thought, “Why not go to Lourdes?”  I had not been in Lourdes for decades and I was surprised by the idea.  I drove there directly, arriving at nightfall.

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As a child our family had visited Lourdes on several occasions and I recall saying the rosary in the car.  My parents regarded the summer holiday as half-pilgrimage half-holiday and my memories of Lourdes were happy ones of processions, holy shops, crowds and lots of walking.

The evening I arrived I walked down to the Basilica and headed for the grotto.  Just before I reached the arches which separate the grotto area from the esplanade, I was filled with a crippling sadness. It was difficult to breath and I was crying.  I managed to go to the taps which deliver water fom the spring and drink a little.  I was beginning to remember an afternoon when I was standing beside my mother at the very spot where my sadness had overcome me.  It was 1957 and I was 8 years old.  She was crying.

I remember holding her hand and looking up and asking, “Why are you crying?”  “It’s seeing all these little children, “she said, “Just like the wee baby.”  The “wee baby” was a brother who had been born the previous year and who had died in her arms just four days old. I had only been allowed to look at him once because, “something was wrong with him.”

Lourdes, blessing of the sick.

This terrible sadness in me which was surging up from the depths of my being came from the little boy I was in 1957 who had captured all  the distress of a mother who has lost her son.  The incident happened on a hot afternoon during the blessing of the sick.  We were standing under the plane trees just behind all the sick children in their three-wheeled chairs who were lined up for the blessing.  Most of them were Downs’s syndrome.  This sadness must have been locked away in my subconscious for all those years.

I walked into the town and bought a postcard with a picture of St. Christopher from one of the brightly lit shops and wrote on it, “Mum, I have returned to the very spot in Lourdes where I saw you crying because of the wee baby.  I have been carrying in me your sadness all these years: it is yours. I return it to you.”  At the time my mum had Altheimer’s in an advanced stage so there was not much point in sending it to her so I left it beside the statue of Mary where people often leave prayer requests and which is only a few steps from the spot where we had been standing so many years before.

The statue of Mary in Lourdes, in front of the Basilica.

At once the sadness left me and has not ever returned.  This, though, was only the beginning of a very important lesson about Love which I am still learning.

Perhaps I would not have been aware of the importance of this moment for me had it not been for an extraordinary meeting I had the following day.  Before leaving Lourdes, I wanted to go back to that spot under the trees again.  There is now a bench there and I sat down, peacefully on this bench.  A young woman came along with a child in a push chair and sat down alongside me. “God, it’s hot,” she said.  Her accent was broad Glaswegian.  The child wasn’t hers, she explained and as the little boy wriggled to escape from his push chair I realised he was down’s syndrome. “Aw, Michael, will ye sit doon!”.  Michael had been my little brother’s name.  Like me, he was born in Glasgow.

Lourdes, candle lit procession.

As I walked out of the sanctuary a little later I reflected on how strange it was that there were so many coincidences in this meeting:  the same spot exactly; a little boy from Glasgow; a down’s syndrome child with the same name as my brother; and where, the night before, I had been struck so forcefully with a sadness relating to his early death.

When I next saw my mother, in her nursing home in Stirling, I told her this story.  She was, as always, very confused, circling her room anxiously saying, “We have to stop them before they do it.” But on this occasion she listened and then said, very fondly, “Ah yes, the wee baby. Michael.” Maybe this was all she heard but it evoked in her a memory not of sadness but of love. My own sadness needed to be transformed into love but at that point I could see nothing of this.

The event in Lourdes in2002, started a process of growth in me which has given my life a new direction.

Throughout my adult life I have always had an uncomfortable reaction when a woman close to me has been sad or upset.  Being sad is quite normal.  I don’t react badly when I meet a man who is in distress.  But if it is a woman, I think I have always been frighted by her sadness.   Looking back, I can see that my response has led to many complications in my relationships with women at home or at work since I will do anything to escape or change such a situation.  This is a type of co-dependency on my mother. My main escape was alcohol and after I stopped drinking it was to withdraw, to flee.  After this experience in Lourdes, I have slowly, over the past ten years, come to see that sadness in another person is just that: they are sad.  How simple!  With patient help from others I have been learning to meet that sadness with compassion, not fear. I can be ok even if the other person is not.  Arriving at this point has taken many years. In effect I had been very limited use as a companion for women: as soon as they showed a negative emotion I was filled with my own suffering.  Together we asphyxiated with pain.  My blog on the Caminos to Santiago is about the spiritual processes in living a life being transformed by Grace. (“Grace” is a word I have not used before, but it is the word I need here.)  The great miracle, which I will write about in a future blog, was my encounter with Compassion.

Lourdes in 2002 was a special moment, a sign which I recognised.  A sign is a pointer and an encouragement to choose a path.  It can lead to miracles, for me the miracle of Compassion ………which always leads to Love.

I will post on Compassion at a later date.  Please subscribe if you want to be informed of future posts.