Today Pope Benedict XVI is visiting Lourdes, to mark the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous. An academic who initially felt uncomfortable about visiting the shrine here writes about its extraordinary power
The Observer recently carried a front-page photograph of Ingrid Betancourt in Lourdes. After six years of captivity in Colombia, she had gone to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for her release, and to pray for the release of other hostages. The image must have bemused the newspaper's largely secular, liberal readership, this juxtaposition of a hero of modern democracy and a religious observance many would brand as superstitious ignorance.
The shrine at Lourdes can undoubtedly be a place of religious credulity, and during the last 150 years it has often served as a bastion of Catholic resistance to the modernisation of European politics and culture. But, in an era when the forces of rationalisation and competitive individualism increasingly dominate our Western societies, Lourdes also represents a different order of things. For the millions who go there, it is a place of hope where suffering takes on new meanings - not as an enemy to be conquered but as part of the mystery of life.
Lourdes is a place where the sick and the suffering take centre stage, and the rest of us are there as helpers and bystanders, or as pilgrims who know that a healthy body can still suffer psychological torments that cry out for healing and peace. The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2020 depression will be the leading cause of ill health in the Western world. As our bodies benefit from ever more care and attention, it seems our spirits are withering from neglect.
Yet to romanticise Lourdes as a place of holiness and healing would be as simplistic as to write it off as a place of superstition and mumbo-jumbo, for it can be both and neither. The Catholic anthropologist Victor Turner developed the concept of "liminality" to describe rituals and life-changing experiences that have a transformative effect on us. These are times when the rules that structure our daily lives are suspended, so that we are able to enter into states of consciousness, relationships and ways of expressing ourselves which are outside our expectations. I think the phenomenon of Lourdes can be at least partly explained by the fact that it is a place where there is a profound sense of liminality, a breaching of many of the boundaries that define us, so that the imagination is kindled into new ways of seeing and understanding.
I had to overcome considerable resistance to make my first visit to Lourdes. Despite having spent much of my academic life studying Marian theology, as a convert from Presbyterianism I was wary of what I used to see as the tackier, wackier side of Catholic devotion to Mary. However, in 2007 we decided at Roehampton University where I work to join the annual Pilgrimage Trust (HCPT) pilgrimage to Lourdes, and I agreed to go in the guise of a lecturer taking students on a field trip. This allowed me to take refuge in a certain critical objectivity if I needed to. After a couple of days, I began to experience that sense of liminality. As social boundaries between students and teachers dissolved (helped by the cocktails we shared in the evenings), I came to know some of their personal stories - each with its own narrative of struggle and hope. There had been no selection process, although one might have thought we'd hand-picked our group to ensure the widest possible representation of religion, age, ethnicity and lifestyle. The evangelicals were disturbed by the candlelit procession with Mary carried on an illuminated float, but from a Hindu perspective it was a familiar ritual.
The sense of liminality begins perhaps with Bernadette herself, a romantic myth even before she was dead. But the story of Bernadette Soubirous is one of almost unbearable poignancy. She was a sickly child from a desperately poor family - at the time of the apparitions, she was living with her parents and four surviving siblings in a disused prison cell. In February 1858, the 14-year-old girl went to gather firewood with her sisters at the grotto of Massabielle, where she had the first of 18 encounters with an apparition she referred to as "l'Aquero", roughly translated as "that thing", which she described as a small and beautiful young lady. During the sixteenth apparition, on the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March), the lady identified herself, saying in the local dialect, "Que soy era immaculada concepciou". Although the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had been promulgated four years earlier by Pope Pius IX, it was unlikely that an uneducated peasant girl would have known about it, so this was widely interpreted as affirmation of the doctrine. The story of Bernadette is a story of the forsaken and the outcast, a reminder that, even as Europe surged into the modern world, children starved and scavenged for firewood.
The sense of liminality also derives from the geographical positioning of Lourdes. It is a place of intense human activity - apart from Paris, it has the highest number of hotel rooms of any town in France, and it is notorious for its souvenir shops selling every kind of kitsch and tat. Yet it is cupped among the Pyrenees, washed around by a towering landscape of snow-covered peaks where all our human bustle is dwarfed by the majesty of creation. The liminal, then, also refers to that experience of standing among mountains and feeling one's humanity displaced or called into question by the mystery of the cosmos.
But perhaps liminality refers most directly to the spirituality of Lourdes, for that is the most enigmatic and compelling aspect of the shrine. According to Bernadette, the apparition asked for a church to be built, and today a vast basilica rises above the shrine, visible testimony to the wealth and power of the institutional Church. Yet the spiritual life of Lourdes is focused on the grotto and its surroundings beneath the basilica, and this topography acts as a metaphor for the relationship between the religious institution and the powerful undercurrent of faith that it can never fully control. The rocks around the grotto have been worn smooth by the touch of millions of hands, and there is a sense of something visceral, pagan even, about the way in which Catholic devotions and prayers melt and mingle with the noumenal mystery of a God both veiled and revealed in earth, wind and fire, in rocky wildernesses and the untameable persistence of nature in the face of all our civilising and controlling impulses. Surely, an incarnational faith is one which situates itself in such a space of encounter between the sublime and the ridiculous - between the inscrutable majesty of God, and the often foolish muddle of our human devotions.
The water that gurgles up from the spring is distributed through rows of standpipes where pilgrims fill plastic bottles emblazoned with blue Madonnas. Beyond the grotto, candles burn and drip through the night until, in the small hours, men come to clean out the stalls, like figures from Blake's dark satanic mills. All night, there are pilgrims at the grotto, their murmured prayers dissolving in the wax-scented air. And then there are the baths.
It was a stormy afternoon when I joined the queue for the baths on the women's side with some of my students. For two hours, I felt a growing sense of apprehension as we shuffled down the benches towards the front. Sitting beneath a concrete vault, with plastic curtains concealing what went on on the other side, a student put into words what I'd been afraid to articulate, even to myself: "This feels like a concentration camp," she said. The rain came down in a torrent, and I asked myself, if I was so keen to plunge into holy water, why not just run out and turn my face to the sky?
Eventually, our turn came. A woman held a blue cape around me as I undressed. I was led into the small cubicle with its sunken bath and supported between two women who wrapped a cold, wet sheet around me and guided me down the steps into the biting cold water to kiss the statue of Mary at the end. They murmured prayers and held my arms as I immersed myself in the water. Still wet, I wriggled back into my clothes, and it was over. I felt clean, new, tearful and grateful. What I had found behind the curtain was gentleness, a sense of an immense motherly presence. I find it hard to express why the comment about the concentration camp is so significant to that experience - it has something to do with the humanity we encounter when we step into the unknown and put ourselves at the mercy of others, and about the knowledge that that can be an experience of the most devastating betrayal, or of the most profound compassion.
This year, I worked as a volunteer for an afternoon at the baths. It felt like taking part in a carefully choreographed ballet, as we coordinated our movements to ensure that the woman going through the water was held and comforted, that her dignity was assured and her prayers were assisted. I had a sense of the world's women flowing through my hands, so much vulnerability, so much diversity, so much trust. I heard no prayers for miraculous healings. I just heard wave upon wave of prayers for support, for courage, for understanding, for loved ones, for children, for husbands, for hope. Again, I had that sense of an immense maternal presence, holding, consoling, being there for all of us.
Afterwards, as we were putting on our outdoor clothes, I spoke to the woman I'd been on duty with. I asked her what parish she came from in the UK. She smiled. "I don't have a parish. I'm a Muslim," she said. She had visited Lourdes when her son was ill, and she had been going back ever since. She explained that Mary is honoured by Muslims, and she had no difficulty taking part in the ritual of the baths. Liminality can create spaces of human encounter and recognition by which we see beyond the confines of our daily lives, and discover different ways of being together across the boundaries.
There is something miraculous about Lourdes, attributable not to the suspension of the laws of nature, but to something more intangible - the suspension of the laws of division, cynicism, expediency and exclusion which structure our modern world. To say this is not to say that Lourdes is perfect. It's not. It's human. Maybe that's what the advocates of ruthless scientific rationalism hate most of all - not the God bit, but the unruly muddle of the human condition with all its hopeful, prayerful affirmations of abundant, foolish, uncontrollable life.
