I spent a week this past June in Lourdes, with a group of 150 students who had finished their first year in different Catholic schools in our diocese. It is the second time that I have accompanied a few students from ITEC Philippine Duschene, the school where I work as a math teacher.
The purpose of the trip is to offer the young people a strong experience of service and help to the sick. It is already very beautiful to see them give of themselves to persons whom they have never seen before. But this year, I was also struck by another phenomenon that was happening in this special place: offering to the young people to set even just one foot in the sanctuary, to find themselves physically in the grotto, is like punching a hole in their horizon, which, for the kids of today, is so often closed to the other and to the beyond.
Right here, in fact, something happened, an event that came from elsewhere, unexpected and strange. The students listened several times to the story of Our Lady’s apparitions to Bernadette, touched the rock of the grotto, looked at the spring and drank its water, and saw the candles burning continuously since Bernadette went with a candle to her appointment with “the Lady.” They may have thought, of course, that this is a beautiful story that happened in 1858 and of which they will never know if it is true. But as this objection arises in them, here they see passing before their eyes the crowds converging on Lourdes driven by so many different motives. They see the most varied human types, in appearance and culture, making the same gestures, praying and getting down on their knees. And they also see us, the companions, making those same gestures: not only the nun but even the math teacher washes her face with water from the spring!
A place where it seems possible to “dwindle” the gap between Heaven and earth
The final evening, before the return trip through the night on a bus toward Grenoble, we said our last goodbye to the Virgin Mary and lit a great candle that had been decorated by the students. Seeing them pass beneath the grotto, knowing that for some of them faith is still something so far off, I thought that they lived not only a week of serving the sick but also a great exercise in waking up their sleeping spiritual senses. And I understood then why, from the first day, the students had not ceased asking questions before everything that they were seeing: but why is this? But what is that person doing? What does it mean? Is it all true?
In the story of the apparitions of Laurentin, he describes Lourdes as “a very subtle place.” A place, that is, where it seems possible to “dwindle” the gap between Heaven and earth, the confine between concrete and invisible reality. It is so true that it created a new opening in our horizon.
