Our Lady of Lourdes

 

O God, 

who in the Blessed Virgin Mary

consecrated a dwelling fit for your Son:
Grant that we, 
celebrating the appearing of Our Lady to Saint Bernadette,
may receive healing both in body and soul;

through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you
in the unity of the Holy Spirit, 
one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.

Click HERE to visit Lourdes in real time 

via the television ministry of the shrine

Anglicans often try to compare Lourdes and Walsingham; but I think that is wrong. Each of Our Lady's shrines has its own particular charism, its own emphasis, and its unique ministry. I do believe that God has graced the shrine at Lourdes in a special way, and, through the intercession of Our Lady, millions who have prayed in that holy place over the last 162 years have experienced the healing power of Jesus and the refreshing of the Holy Spirit ("the rivers of living water"). Hebrews 11:6 says that God rewards those who seek him. To go on prayerful pilgrimage to this place that he has particularly graced (or other places like it) enables us to be open to his love, and as a result we experience a spiritual renewal or receive some other precious gift from him.

If you are ever in France, you MUST visit Lourdes. You can get there on an overnight train from Paris. As well as accommodation for the well-heeled, the town has some very basic and cheap places to stay if you are on a shoestring budget. It's good to book in for for two or three days and join in the pilgrimage devotions. Read, pray, stroll around. You will be blessed.

Scroll down, and after the photographs there is the homily preached by the then Archbishop of Canterbury at the Society of Mary Lourdes Pilgrimage in 2008.

Archbishop Rowan Williams’ Homily 

at the Society of Mary Pilgrimage 

to Lourdes, 2008

(From the archive of his speeches and sermons 
as Archbishop of Canterbury HERE.)

The babe in my womb leaped for joy.’  (Luke 1.44)

Mary comes to visit Elizabeth, carrying Jesus in her womb. The Son of God is still invisible – not yet born, not even known about by Elizabeth; yet Elizabeth recognises Mary as bearing within her the hope and desire of all nations, and life stirs in the deep places of her own body. The one who will prepare the way for Jesus, John the Baptist, moves as if to greet the hope that is coming, even though it cannot yet be seen.

Mary appears to us here as the first missionary, ‘the first messenger of the gospel’ as Bishop Perrier of Lourdes has called her: the first human being to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to another;   and she does it simply by carrying Christ within her. She reminds us that mission begins not in delivering a message in words but in the journey towards another person with Jesus in your heart. She testifies to the primary importance of simply carrying Jesus, even before there are words or deeds to show him and explain him. This story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth is in many ways a very strange one;  it’s not about the communication of rational information from one speaker to another, but a primitive current of spiritual electricity running from the unborn Christ to the unborn Baptist.  But mission it undoubtedly is, because it evokes recognition and joy. Something happens that prepares the way for all the words that will be spoken and the deeds that will be done. The believer comes with Christ dwelling in them by faith, and God makes that current come alive, and a response begins, not yet in words or commitments, but simply in recognising that here is life.

When Mary came to Bernardette, she came at first as an anonymous figure, a beautiful lady, a mysterious ‘thing’, not yet identified as the Lord’s spotless Mother. And Bernardette – uneducated, uninstructed in doctrine – leapt with joy, recognising that here was life, here was healing.  Remember those accounts of her which speak of her graceful, gliding movements at the Lady’s bidding;  as if she, like John in Elizabeth’s womb, begins to dance to the music of the Incarnate Word who is carried by his Mother.  Only bit by bit does Bernardette find the words to let the world know;  only bit by bit, we might say, does she discover how to listen to the Lady and echo what she has to tell us.

So there is good news for all of us who seek to follow Jesus’ summons to mission in his Name; and good news too for all who find their efforts slow and apparently futile, and for all who still can’t find their way to the ‘right’ words and the open commitment. Our first and overarching task is to carry Jesus, gratefully and faithfully, with us in all our doings: like St Teresa of Avila, we might do this quite prosaically by having with us always a little picture or a cross in our pockets, so that we constantly ‘touch base’ with the Lord. We can do it by following the guidance of the Orthodox spiritual tradition and repeating silently the Jesus Prayer, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God have mercy on me, a sinner’. And if we are faithful in thus carrying Christ with us, something will happen, some current will stir and those we are with will feel, perhaps well below the conscious surface, a movement of life and joy which they may not understand at all. And we may never see it or know about it; people may not even connect it with us, yet it will be there – because Jesus speaks always to what is buried in the heart of men and women, the destiny they were made for. Whether they know it or not, there is that within them which is turned towards him. Keep on carrying Jesus and don’t despair: mission will happen, in spite of all, because God in Christ has begun his journey into the heart.

And when we encounter those who say they would ‘like to believe’ but can’t, who wonder how they will ever find their way to a commitment that seems both frightening and hard to understand, we may have something to say to them too:  ‘Don’t give up;  try and hold on to the moments of deep and mysterious joy; wait patiently for something to come to birth in you.’ It certainly isn’t for us as Christians to bully and cajole, and to try and force people into commitments they are not ready to make – but we can and should seek to be there, carrying Jesus, and letting his joy come through, waiting for the leap of recognition in someone’s heart.

Of course, as often as not, we ourselves are the one who need to hear the good news; we need people around us who carry Jesus, because we who call ourselves believers all have our moments of confusion and loss of direction. Others fail us or hurt us;  the Church itself may seem confused or weak or even unloving, and we don’t feel we are being nourished as we need, and directed as we should be. Yet this story of Mary and Elizabeth tells us that the Incarnate Word of God is always already on the way to us, hidden in voices and faces and bodies familiar and unfamiliar. Silently, Jesus is constantly at work, and he is seeking out what is deepest in us, to touch the heart of our joy and hope.

Perhaps when we feel lost and disillusioned, he is gently drawing us away from a joy or a hope that is only human, limited to what we can cope with or what we think on the surface of our minds that we want. Perhaps it’s part of a journey towards his truth, not just ours. We too need to look and listen for the moments of recognition and the leap of joy deep within. It may be when we encounter a person in whom we sense that the words we rather half-heartedly use about God are a living and actual reality. (That’s why the lives of the saints, ancient and modern, matter so much.) It may be when a moment of stillness or wonder suddenly overtakes us in the middle of a familiar liturgy that we think we know backwards, and we have for a second the feeling that this is the clue to everything – if only we could put it into words. It may be when we come to a holy place, soaked in the hopes and prayers of millions, and suddenly see that, whatever we as individuals may be thinking or feeling, some great reality is moving all around and beneath and within us, whether we grasp it or not. These are our ‘Elizabeth’ moments – when life stirs inside, heralding some future with Christ that we can’t yet get our minds around.

It’s very tempting to think of mission as something to be done in the same way we do – or try to do – so much else, with everything depending on planning and assessments of how we’re doing, and whether the results are coming out right. For that matter, it’s tempting to think of the Church’s whole life in these sorts of terms. Of course we need to use our intelligence, we need to be able to tell the difference between good and bad outcomes, we need to marshal all the skill and enthusiasm we can when we respond to God’s call to share his work of transforming the world through Jesus and his Spirit. But Mary’s mission tells us that there is always a deeper dimension, grounded in the Christ who is at work unknown and silent, reaching out to the deeply buried heart of each person and making the connection; living faithfully at the heart of the Church itself, in the middle of its disasters and betrayals and confusions, still giving himself without reserve.  All that we call ‘our’ mission depends on this; and if we are wise, we know that we are always going to be surprised by the echoes and connections that come to life where we are not expecting it. 

True mission is ready to be surprised by God – ‘surprised by joy’, in the lovely phrase of  C. S. Lewis. Elizabeth knew the whole history of Israel and how it was preparing the way for God to come and visit his people – but she was still surprised into newness of life and understanding when the child leapt in her womb. Bernardette’s neighbours and teachers and parish clergy knew all they thought they needed to know about the Mother of God – and they needed to be surprised by this inarticulate, powerless, marginal teenager who had leapt up in the joy of recognition to meet Mary as her mother, her sister, bearer of her Lord and Redeemer. Our prayer here must be that, renewed and surprised in this holy place, we may be given the overshadowing strength of the Spirit to carry Jesus wherever we go, in the hope that joy will leap from heart to heart in all our human encounters;  and that we may also be given courage to look and listen for that joy in our own depths when the clarity of the good news seems far away and the sky is cloudy. 

SEEKING AT WALSINGHAM AND LOURDES

The 11th February in the Church’s calendar is when we honour the Blessed Virgin Mary under her title, ‘Our Lady of Lourdes.’ Recently I spent an evening trying to organise past articles and essays on my computer and came across this piece I wrote in 1991 when I was Rector of S. John’s Horsham in the Diocese of Ballarat. It's about my first visit to Walsingham and then Lourdes. I put the article aside to share with you today.

PILGRIMAGE STILL HAPPENS 

While it is true that in places like Western Europe and Australia churchgoing seems to be a declining habit, the great centres of pilgrimage surprisingly draw larger crowds than ever. And not just the already converted, but people from all walks of life searching for truth and reality. 

The tiny English village of Walsingham, in a remote corner of Norfolk, 190 kilometres from London, with its narrow cobbled streets and centuries old buildings set in the most beautiful countryside imaginable is just such a place.

From April to November each year a stream of pilgrims finds its way to this village. At the end of May the 'National' (as they say) takes place. Not a horse race, but a pilgrimage attracting thousands of people from all over England.

It all began in 1061 when Lady Richeldis of the manor had a vision in which the Blessed Virgin Mary said that she was to set up a shrine honouring the holy house at Nazareth, and the ‘hidden years’ of Our Lord’s life. 

Our Lady went on to say that Walsingham would become a place of special blessing where people from all over would seek God and find him.

WALSINGHAM - GOD’S BLESSING ON OUR ORDINARINESS 

Each of Our Lady’s shrines draws attention to some aspect of the Gospel. Walsingham honours the hidden years of our Lord’s family life at Nazareth. 

Walsingham stresses the truth that through the mystery of the Incarnation God lived an ordinary human life, giving us the confidence that we can seek him, find him and know him in the ordinariness of our lives, and not just in those ‘spiritual mountaintop experiences’ with which the Holy Spirit might bless us from time to time. 

Walsingham helps us to be Gospel people who expect to experience God’s grace, life, power and healing to surge right there in what we sometimes think is the meaningless hum-drum of our unspectacular existence.

 

AN ORDINARY PILGRIMAGE 

My first visit to Walsingham was in 1989. It was my first time in England, and I had tacked myself onto an ordinary parish weekend pilgrimage.

It was a blend of devotion and hilarity, penitence and joy, colourful processions, endless singing, and little children doing their own thing. The crowd, also, was spectacularly multi-racial.

The thing that surprised me most of all was that on this particular pilgrimage about one third of our party were not churchgoers, but had come with their friends for a weekend away. Some came purely as tourists. Some came out of curiosity to see if Walsingham was for real. Others had deliberately set out on a spiritual quest hoping that their deep and ancient longing for God might be satisfied.   

So many ‘ordinary people’ (that is, not just the clergy!) were sharing their experiences of the Gospel and the Faith over meals (and pints at the ‘Lion’ - the pub just across the road from the shrine). As a result of this some of us clergy had the great joy of praying with a number of non-churchgoers in our party who were opening their hearts to the Lord for the very first time.

LOURDES

A couple of weeks later, on a rather roundabout way back to Australia, I was sitting on the railway platform at Lourdes having spent three days at our Lady’s Shrine there. Lourdes is the small town nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south of France where in 1858 Our Lady appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, a forteen year old girl from a poor family.

Our Lady spoke of our need for true conversion of heart to the Lord, and she highlighted the importance of ministry to the poor and the sick. She asked Bernadette to get a church built on the site of the apparition and promised healing blessings to all who would go there on pilgrimage. 

I treasure the memory of that visit to Lourdes, and hope one day to return.

ENCOUNTERING GOD

While I was waiting for the train, dressed in clericals, an American back-packer in his early 20’s came up to me and told how he had stumbled upon Lourdes quite by accident a couple of months before. He had no church background at all, but out of curiosity had followed a trainload of pilgrims to the grotto where our Lady appeared to the young Bernadette.

Through the worship, the joy of the praying community, and the ‘magic’ of the place (or, as we would say, the Holy Spirit’s ‘anointing’), that young man found the Lord (or, rather, the Lord found him!). Then someone told him that he should start reading the Bible. So he got hold of a New Testament at Lourdes and had read through most of it during his two months of backpacking around Europe.

He was due to fly home to the USA from Paris, but came all the way back to Lourdes on the train, just for a couple of hours (literally), to thank God and Our Lady for the turn-around he had experienced in his life at that holy place.

He assured me that upon arriving home in the States he would seek out a priest and be baptised.

That young man is not unique. Despite the secularisation of the west there is a constant trickle of intelligent adults with no religious background responding to the Gospel of Jesus and the Catholic Faith, and coming into the worshipping life of the Church.   

SURROUNDED BY SEEKERS 

We tend to concentrate on negative developments in our ‘post-Christian’ culture to the point that we don’t notice how many genuine seekers there are. 

So, while it is true that in countries like ours people can be extremely cynical about ‘organised religion’ and understandably turned off by the Church’s sins and failures, a survey carried out recently by the Australian National University indicated that only 7 percent of Australians ‘definitely did not believe.’ It also showed that many people prayed, that many people vaguely accepted the Christian creed, leading to the conclusion - in the exact words of the report - that ‘the much-touted drift from religion was greatly exaggerated.’

In other words, there is plenty to build on. God gives us such wonderful opportunities for evangelism. Can you imagine how it would be if all practising Christians took full advantage of the opportunities God gives us to share our faith with others.

So, it ought not surprise us to hear of unlikely friends and neighbours beginning their own spiritual pilgrimage.

It ought not surprise us that they find God, for at the heart of our Faith is the confidence that God can be found, and that he rewards those who diligently seek him. (Hebrews 11:6)

LENT 2021

Catholic Christians take seriously the season of Lent, as we prepare to share the fellowship of Jesus’ sufferings, and then experience afresh the great joy of his resurrection. 

From one point of view Lent is our annual spiritual ‘check-up.’ Remembering the capacity we have for self-deception, the discipline of Lent is meant to help us face realistically our shortcomings and sins, and concentrate on getting right with God. Sometimes that can be hard work!

Lent 2021 is likely to be a real challenge for each one of us - perhaps even the most difficult Lent some of us have known, on account of the emotional, spiritual and even physical exhaustion of the pandemic and its lockdowns. I know I’m not alone in thinking that the trudge of the last eleven months has seemed at times like one long drawn-out wearisome Lent.

‘Why do we need more?’, I hear some of you ask!

That would be a reasonable question, except for one thing - a dimension that we so easily forget - that the Church regards Lent as a special healing time in her year. Like the father in the story Jesus told about the 'prodigal son', the main thing we know about God is his love for us. He wants us to return to him. He want to pour his healing love and blessing upon us. So, penitence is not all there is! If we allow him to do so, Lent is also when God binds up our wounded hearts and his love becomes real to us again.

Of course, there is the personal and individual dimension to this, as the Gospel for Ash Wednesday points out. But the other aspect of Lent - as seen in the Old Testament reading from Joel - is our penitence and openness to the Lord as a community. In other words, real renewal is a matter of our relationship with God and our relationship with one another. This 2 minute video makes the point very well:

The blessing we are using at the end of our Ash Wednesday Mass says it all:

May God the Father, in his mercy,
grant all of you,
like the prodigal son,
the joy of returning home.
Amen.

May Christ, our model of prayer and life,
guide you through this Lent
to true conversion of heart.
Amen.

May the Spirit of wisdom and strength
sustain you in your struggle against evil,
and enable you to celebrate with Christ
the victory of Easter.
Amen.

And may almighty God bless you,
the Father,
the Son,
and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

An invitation to make the most of Lent

Traditionally, Christians have regarded the season of Lent as the ‘healing time’ of the Church’s year ...

# the time when we look at our lives and work out where we really are in our walk with God.

# the time when we realise afresh that ‘the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt ...’ (Jeremiah 17:9) and that our capacity for self-deception is limitless.

# the time when we allow holy Mother Church to care lovingly for us and to help us face reality as the necessary prelude to a new and wonderful healing encounter with Jesus.

OUR NEED FOR RENEWAL

Sometimes we can be psychologically, emotionally and spiritually worn down by life’s challenges, not to mention the pressure of the battle against evil (within us, within our communities, and the spiritual warfare we wage with the cosmic powers of evil) in which we were enlisted in our Baptism. 

If we are worn down right now, then this Lent can be a time of spiritual refreshing, as we respond to Jesus’ invitation to ‘come apart and rest awhile’ (Mark 6:31). 

There are also mysterious stretches of spiritual dryness followers of Jesus sometimes go through, seemingly unconnected to any particular fault or sin on our part. Memories of our long past ‘springtime of faith’ torment us, and we find ourselves banging on heaven’s door, asking for the grace to re-live those old days. God seems a million miles away.

All the great saints down through the ages struggled at times just to hang on to God in naked faith, trusting in his promises. Some of the saints - like Mother Teresa of Calcutta - endured literally decades of this, even while selflessly drawing so many others into God’s love. 

If that is where we seem to be at the moment, we, too, must hang on to God in naked faith, supported by the love and prayers of our Christian brothers and sisters, and strengthened by the grace of God in the sacraments of his presence. The main thing is not to give up. Remember the saying, ‘When the train goes into the tunnel, the safest thing is to stay on the train!’ Maybe for you this Lent will be a time when your trust in the promises God is strengthened.

SO OFTEN OUR OWN FAULT

Having recognised that we can be simply worn out, or going through one of these inexplicable periods of spiritual dryness, we need to be honest enough to admit that often our spiritual, emotional and psychological problems are connected with our relationship with God becoming dysfunctional.

In our relationships with other people, the causes of dysfunctionality are complex, and both parties are very often at fault. We need wise counsellors and psychologists to help us work out why things are as they are. 

But the one thing we know about dysfunctionality in our relationship with God is that God is never at fault. He has loved us with an everlasting love. He sacrificed everything to redeem us in Christ. He could not have done more. He made us his people and gave the Holy Spirit to dwell within us. He speaks to us through the Scriptures, and he comes to us in the miracle of Holy Communion.

He gives himself completely to us. Any dysfunctionality in our relationship with him is OUR fault.

There are at least two ways in which our relationship with God becomes dysfunctional: 

The first is when we deliberately ignore what God says in the Scriptures and try to run our own lives. Each one of us has a huge struggle to bring the various aspects of our lives into conformity with the will of God, even with the Holy Spirit within us, and the encouragement of our Christian brothers and sisters. 

But we cannot deliberately shut God out of this or that area of our life and expect our overall relationship with him to survive - any more than we could do that in our relationships with people. And we DO shut him out when we ignore his will as we find it in Scripture. The end result is that instead of the ‘life more abundant’ he wants us to have (John 10:10), we end up in a loveless hell of our own making.

The second way our relationship with God becomes dysfunctional also reflects what can happen in ordinary relationships. It’s when we become so self-absorbed, so preoccupied with what we are doing, so busy fulfilling our ambitions and goals, that we just drift from God without meaning to, and probably without realising what is happening. This seems fairly innocuous, but the end result is the same.

SPIRITUAL PARALYSIS

In Orthodox Churches, the Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent is the account of Jesus healing the paralysed man (Mark 2:1-12). You remember this paralysed man . . . his friends got him to Jesus by pulling the roof apart and lowering him, sleeping mat and all, into the house.

The man’s physical paralysis is used in the liturgy as a picture of our spiritual paralysis, the end result of allowing our relationship with God to remain dysfunctional. 

It is also used to convey two other truths: First, that the paralysis caused by sin can only be healed by Jesus. So, it is to him we return this Lent, in order to know his forgiveness, his love and his healing power. Second, that those wonderful friends who helped the paralysed man remind us that this Lent we need to help each other as brothers and sisters in our local Church community get to Jesus in spite of the obstacles that might be in the way.

WHAT MATTERS MOST 

Lent takes us back to the basic question of our priorities. Saint Paul tells us what mattered most of all to him in these powerful words:

‘I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. 

‘For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith; that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. 

‘Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.’  

(Philippians 3:8-12)

‘Faith’ for Saint Paul certainly includes believing the right things about Jesus. But it is far more than that. It means to RELY on what Jesus has done for us, and to TRUST him with the details of our daily lives. It means to abandon ourselves to his love.

The self denial, fasting and penitence that the Church urges during Lent are not ends in themselves. They are meant to help us examine our hearts so as to see clearly the areas in which we have gone astray, and to then re-focus our lives on Jesus. 

Let us draw closer to him this Lent. Let us slow down a little. Let us allow the suffering love of Jesus to impact on our hearts and minds. Let us open ourselves afresh to the Holy Spirit and experience the mending of our relationship with God and our relationships with one another.

BACK TO THE WATERS

The sign of the cross made on our foreheads with ashes on the first day of Lent -  Ash Wednesday - is a gritty reminder of our mortality and sinfulness. It is also a reminder of the price of our redemption. This little ceremony launches us on a journey through the wastelands of our lives, hungering and thirsting for the living God. We face the inner wilderness of our dangers and temptations. This is, in fact, a journey back to the baptismal waters. We make it, not primarily as individuals, but as a community of disciples growing together in our Saviour’s love.

Lent as a season evolved early in the Church’s history from the annual fasting and repentance of Christians as they prepared to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus at Easter. It was a springtime in which new converts completed their preparation for Baptism, which would take place at the great Easter Mass. It was also a time when those Christians who had been separated from Holy Communion because of serious sin received forgiveness, and were restored . 

The whole Church came to see the value of an annual season of self-examination and repentance, acknowledging that although we have been Baptised, we all betray the gift of new life we received in the waters. And so, now, as Father Alexander Schmemann writes:

‘Easter is our return every year to our own Baptism, whereas Lent is our preparation for that return - the slow and sustained effort to perform, at the end, our own “passage” or “pascha” into the new life in Christ. If, as we shall see, Lenten worship preserves even today its catechetical and baptismal character, it is not as “archaeological” remains of the past, but as something valid and essential for us. For each year Lent and Easter are, once again, the rediscovery and the recovery by us of what we were made through our own baptismal death and resurrection.’

BIBLE READINGS AT SUNDAY MASS 

THE FIRST READING:  

The First Sunday of Lent  

Genesis 2:7-9,3:1-7
We go right back to the beginning, to the Genesis account of our rebellion against God’s love. 

The Second Sunday of Lent 

Genesis 12:1-4

We hear about God’s blessing of Abraham our ‘father in faith.’ 

The Third Sunday of Lent
Exodus 17:3-7 

We hear of the Israelites, set free from slavery in Egypt, journeying through the desert, sustained by God himself. 

The Fourth Sunday of Lent

1 Samuel 16:1,6-7,10-13
We hear of the anointing of David as king, foreshadowing the kingship of his descendant, Jesus. 

The Fifth Sunday of Lent

Ezekiel 37:12-14
We hear from the prophet Ezekiel who shows how for centuries God was working in human history towards the redemption that Jesus would bring.

THE SECOND READING: 

This Lent we dip into St Paul’s letters to the Romans, Timothy, Ephesians and Philippians, and hear of the love and compassion of God who is reaching out to us in Jesus.

THE GOSPEL READING: 

The First Sunday of Lent 

Matthew 4:1-11 
We hear how Jesus battled the tempter in the desert.

The Second Sunday of Lent
Matthew 17:1-9

We hear of Jesus’ Transfiguration on the mountain where his glory was revealed to the disciples. 

The Third Sunday of Lent

John 4:5-42

We hear of the Samaritan woman at the well

The Fourth Sunday of Lent

John 9:1-41
We hear of the healing of the man born blind 

The Fifth Sunday of Lent 

John 11:1-45
We hear of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead. 

(Notice that for the Third, Fourth and Fifth Sundays of Lent, we switch to John’s Gospel and hear these powerful passages about who Jesus is, the same passages that were popular in the ancient Church for teaching new converts who were preparing for their Baptism.)

THE SACRAMENT OF RECONCILIATION

Special times have been set aside for Confessions on Shrove Tuesday, and also in Holy Week. If none of our usual times or the special times advertised will work for you, please get in touch for  an appointment.

FINALLY . . .

‘For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition of love, embracing both trial and joy; finally, it is something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.’  (St Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), in Manuscrits autobiographiques) 

‘At heart, prayer is a process of self-giving and of being set free from isolation. To pray is to enter into a relationship with God and to be transformed by him.’ (Kenneth Leech in True Prayer, p.10)

Lourdes and healing love

O God, 

who in the Blessed Virgin Mary

consecrated a dwelling fit for your Son:
Grant that we, 
celebrating the appearing of Our Lady to Saint Bernadette,
may receive healing both in body and soul;

through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you
in the unity of the Holy Spirit, 
one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.

Click HERE to visit Lourdes in real time 

via the television ministry of the shrine

Anglicans often try to compare Lourdes and Walsingham; but I think that is wrong. Each of Our Lady's shrines has its own particular charism, its own emphasis, and its unique ministry. I do believe that God has graced the shrine at Lourdes in a special way, and, through the intercession of Our Lady, millions who have prayed in that holy place over the last 162 years have experienced the healing power of Jesus and the refreshing of the Holy Spirit ("the rivers of living water"). Hebrews 11:6 says that God rewards those who seek him. To go on prayerful pilgrimage to this place that he has particularly graced (or other places like it) enables us to be open to his love, and as a result we experience a spiritual renewal or receive some other precious gift from him.

If you are ever in France, you MUST visit Lourdes. You can get there on an overnight train from Paris. As well as accommodation for the well-heeled, the town has some very basic and cheap places to stay if you are on a shoestring budget. It's good to book in for for two or three days and join in the pilgrimage devotions. Read, pray, stroll around. You will be blessed.

Scroll down, and after the photographs there is the homily preached by the then Archbishop of Canterbury at the Society of Mary Lourdes Pilgrimage in 2008.

Archbishop Rowan Williams’ Homily 

at the Society of Mary Pilgrimage 

to Lourdes, 2008

(From the archive of his speeches and sermons 
as Archbishop of Canterbury HERE.)

The babe in my womb leaped for joy.’  (Luke 1.44)

Mary comes to visit Elizabeth, carrying Jesus in her womb. The Son of God is still invisible – not yet born, not even known about by Elizabeth; yet Elizabeth recognises Mary as bearing within her the hope and desire of all nations, and life stirs in the deep places of her own body. The one who will prepare the way for Jesus, John the Baptist, moves as if to greet the hope that is coming, even though it cannot yet be seen.

Mary appears to us here as the first missionary, ‘the first messenger of the gospel’ as Bishop Perrier of Lourdes has called her: the first human being to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to another;   and she does it simply by carrying Christ within her. She reminds us that mission begins not in delivering a message in words but in the journey towards another person with Jesus in your heart. She testifies to the primary importance of simply carrying Jesus, even before there are words or deeds to show him and explain him. This story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth is in many ways a very strange one;  it’s not about the communication of rational information from one speaker to another, but a primitive current of spiritual electricity running from the unborn Christ to the unborn Baptist.  But mission it undoubtedly is, because it evokes recognition and joy. Something happens that prepares the way for all the words that will be spoken and the deeds that will be done. The believer comes with Christ dwelling in them by faith, and God makes that current come alive, and a response begins, not yet in words or commitments, but simply in recognising that here is life.

When Mary came to Bernardette, she came at first as an anonymous figure, a beautiful lady, a mysterious ‘thing’, not yet identified as the Lord’s spotless Mother. And Bernardette – uneducated, uninstructed in doctrine – leapt with joy, recognising that here was life, here was healing.  Remember those accounts of her which speak of her graceful, gliding movements at the Lady’s bidding;  as if she, like John in Elizabeth’s womb, begins to dance to the music of the Incarnate Word who is carried by his Mother.  Only bit by bit does Bernardette find the words to let the world know;  only bit by bit, we might say, does she discover how to listen to the Lady and echo what she has to tell us.

So there is good news for all of us who seek to follow Jesus’ summons to mission in his Name; and good news too for all who find their efforts slow and apparently futile, and for all who still can’t find their way to the ‘right’ words and the open commitment. Our first and overarching task is to carry Jesus, gratefully and faithfully, with us in all our doings: like St Teresa of Avila, we might do this quite prosaically by having with us always a little picture or a cross in our pockets, so that we constantly ‘touch base’ with the Lord. We can do it by following the guidance of the Orthodox spiritual tradition and repeating silently the Jesus Prayer, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God have mercy on me, a sinner’. And if we are faithful in thus carrying Christ with us, something will happen, some current will stir and those we are with will feel, perhaps well below the conscious surface, a movement of life and joy which they may not understand at all. And we may never see it or know about it; people may not even connect it with us, yet it will be there – because Jesus speaks always to what is buried in the heart of men and women, the destiny they were made for. Whether they know it or not, there is that within them which is turned towards him. Keep on carrying Jesus and don’t despair: mission will happen, in spite of all, because God in Christ has begun his journey into the heart.

And when we encounter those who say they would ‘like to believe’ but can’t, who wonder how they will ever find their way to a commitment that seems both frightening and hard to understand, we may have something to say to them too:  ‘Don’t give up;  try and hold on to the moments of deep and mysterious joy; wait patiently for something to come to birth in you.’ It certainly isn’t for us as Christians to bully and cajole, and to try and force people into commitments they are not ready to make – but we can and should seek to be there, carrying Jesus, and letting his joy come through, waiting for the leap of recognition in someone’s heart.

Of course, as often as not, we ourselves are the one who need to hear the good news; we need people around us who carry Jesus, because we who call ourselves believers all have our moments of confusion and loss of direction. Others fail us or hurt us;  the Church itself may seem confused or weak or even unloving, and we don’t feel we are being nourished as we need, and directed as we should be. Yet this story of Mary and Elizabeth tells us that the Incarnate Word of God is always already on the way to us, hidden in voices and faces and bodies familiar and unfamiliar. Silently, Jesus is constantly at work, and he is seeking out what is deepest in us, to touch the heart of our joy and hope.

Perhaps when we feel lost and disillusioned, he is gently drawing us away from a joy or a hope that is only human, limited to what we can cope with or what we think on the surface of our minds that we want. Perhaps it’s part of a journey towards his truth, not just ours. We too need to look and listen for the moments of recognition and the leap of joy deep within. It may be when we encounter a person in whom we sense that the words we rather half-heartedly use about God are a living and actual reality. (That’s why the lives of the saints, ancient and modern, matter so much.) It may be when a moment of stillness or wonder suddenly overtakes us in the middle of a familiar liturgy that we think we know backwards, and we have for a second the feeling that this is the clue to everything – if only we could put it into words. It may be when we come to a holy place, soaked in the hopes and prayers of millions, and suddenly see that, whatever we as individuals may be thinking or feeling, some great reality is moving all around and beneath and within us, whether we grasp it or not. These are our ‘Elizabeth’ moments – when life stirs inside, heralding some future with Christ that we can’t yet get our minds around.

It’s very tempting to think of mission as something to be done in the same way we do – or try to do – so much else, with everything depending on planning and assessments of how we’re doing, and whether the results are coming out right. For that matter, it’s tempting to think of the Church’s whole life in these sorts of terms. Of course we need to use our intelligence, we need to be able to tell the difference between good and bad outcomes, we need to marshal all the skill and enthusiasm we can when we respond to God’s call to share his work of transforming the world through Jesus and his Spirit. But Mary’s mission tells us that there is always a deeper dimension, grounded in the Christ who is at work unknown and silent, reaching out to the deeply buried heart of each person and making the connection; living faithfully at the heart of the Church itself, in the middle of its disasters and betrayals and confusions, still giving himself without reserve.  All that we call ‘our’ mission depends on this; and if we are wise, we know that we are always going to be surprised by the echoes and connections that come to life where we are not expecting it. 

True mission is ready to be surprised by God – ‘surprised by joy’, in the lovely phrase of  C. S. Lewis. Elizabeth knew the whole history of Israel and how it was preparing the way for God to come and visit his people – but she was still surprised into newness of life and understanding when the child leapt in her womb. Bernardette’s neighbours and teachers and parish clergy knew all they thought they needed to know about the Mother of God – and they needed to be surprised by this inarticulate, powerless, marginal teenager who had leapt up in the joy of recognition to meet Mary as her mother, her sister, bearer of her Lord and Redeemer. Our prayer here must be that, renewed and surprised in this holy place, we may be given the overshadowing strength of the Spirit to carry Jesus wherever we go, in the hope that joy will leap from heart to heart in all our human encounters;  and that we may also be given courage to look and listen for that joy in our own depths when the clarity of the good news seems far away and the sky is cloudy.