HOMILY
So she walked closer and heard a third gust of wind, and in the place where the rose was growing, she saw a lady dressed in white, wearing a white dress, a blue girdle and a yellow rose on each foot, and from the niche there streamed a dazzling bright light…Thus was the first vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Lourdes to Saint Bernadette 157 years ago.
Notice the apparition began with a driving wind, three winds, which blew from heaven to the stone niche where the lady dressed in white would reveal the mystery of her coming.
Wind is a curious thing. We can’t trace where it has comes from and we can’t see exactly where it ends up. It’s most like a flame or a breath exhaled. Indeed, that’s why there is only one word in Hebrew for breath or fire or driving wind. The word is ruah, and we hear it in the reading from Genesis today.
God picks up a handful of dirt (the Hebrew word for dirt is adamah), and into it he breathes the ruah…the spirit, breath, fire, driving wind. And the adamah is changed by the breath of God into Adam, man.
It’s like the Christ, who is born of the Virgin. You see it in a lot of late medieval Italian paintings of the Annunciation, as the Angel appears to Mary and just behind her is a long drape covering an open window, blowing in the wind. It’s as if the spirit, the breath of God, the ruah is overpowering her, incarnating life in her virginal womb, bringing forth Emmanual, the Christ to set us free.
So, this morning, let us ask God to renew the life he first breathed into our flesh.
And let us ask Our Lady to beg him to heal us. To heal whatever is broken, diseased or tired. Our faith. Our love. Our hope. Our hearts. Our minds. Our bodies. Let us beg the Lady dressed in white, to pray to her son, through whom she and we were made, to send forth his Spirit once again, to renew the face of the earth.
MALTA, THE SICK AND GOING TO LOURDES
There were two kinds of people in Lourdes in 1858: the children and the skeptics. By the children I mean not just Saint Bernadette, but all who made the trek with her out into the woods.
By the children I mean all the pilgrims who put aside everything else in order to walk to the grotto and kneel before the Beautiful Lady and listen. By the children I mean the thousands who have come to these waters seeking mercy and healing and been filled with a superabundance of both. By the children, I mean all who look to Mary in a world overwhelmed by confusion and despair. By the children, I mean us.
And then there were the skeptics. France in the 1850’s was a hotbed of skepticism. Scriptural commentaries by Strauss and Bauer, one denying the divinity of Christ and the second denying that Jesus ever existed, were popular among scholars; while villages like Lourdes were rife with superstition about ghosts and spirits of the dead wandering the woods. Indeed, when they first heard of Bernadette’s report of a beautiful lady, many of the townsfolk were convinced that the little girl had literally seen a ghost in the woods, a revenant (just like the movie last year), silently returning from the dead to prowl the stony woods of the grotto.
Even the Priest told Bernadette not to go back to the Grotto. For skepticism is always our first reaction when God reaches unexpectedly into the predictable pattern of our lives and upsets the apple cart. Easier to say its a revenant appearing to a confused child than that God is about to turn my life upside down. And even after the indisputable revelations and cures, skeptics remained and remain.
Four years after the apparition here Darwin published his Origin of the Species, and a mighty struggle for the hearts and minds of humanity set off in earnest. Now Science is good, Darwin was substantially right and sometimes even skepticism is commendable, but the deep down struggle was for those who saw man’s Reason as displacing God; replacing God with the mind of man.
Which was precisely what God was doing in Lourdes. He was speaking to a skeptical world so full of itself, so caught up in its own petty struggles and incomplete answers, so set on stuffing itself with the pleasures and insights of a new age that it failed the most essential test of what it means to be a human being: the ability to so empty myself that God might fill me up, to bow very low before the one who made me in adoration, praise and obedient love.
So skeptics found it hard to believe. Hard to believe that God chose a virgin from an out of the way backwater to be the mother of his Son. Hard to believe that God chose a little girl in a forgotten hamlet in the Pyrenees to bring forth healing waters from beneath the feet of the Mother of his Son. Hard to believe a message of repentance in a world wracked with violence and despair, brought by the Beautiful Lady.
But Bernadette did believe, just as the beautiful Lady, the most Blessed of all women believed even when it was hard. For what makes Mary most blessed among women is that she was obedient to God, that she emptied herself of ego and gain and the search for pleasure. This new Eve was the opposite of the first Eve…not grabbing for the gusto, but letting go and letting God. Like her Son upon the cross, she emptied herself and welcomed the swords that would pierce her heart. She made room for God and God alone.
And that, by the way is what it means for the beautiful Lady of this place to reveal herself as the Immaculate Conception, a title which proclaims that there was holiness about her from the very beginning God began knitting her in her mother’s womb she was freed from sin’s original stain.
For sin is a self-replicating contagion, which drives out light as its all-consuming darkness grows. Selfishness, arrogance and lust take up an awful lot of room in the human heart—until there’s no more room for God. So in this one who was immaculately conceived, where there is no room for sin, there is ample room for God.
And by her example, the Immaculate Conception urges us poor banished children of Eve, to follow her example. So when she proclaims “all generations will called me blessed,” this is not mere act of human hubris. Rather, she foretells that her words of humble obedience will be sung in all our vast assemblies until the end of time!
So, when you arrive in Lourdes, gaze into the eyes of the beautiful woman and see the beauty of a heart so emptied of human ambitions and cares that she can say “Fiat,” ‘Let it be done to me as God wills’ with her whole, being.
And that’s why the Blessed Virgin is usually depicted as kneeling as the Angel announces to her that she will be the Mother of the Christ. So too we, whenever we approach God, we do so like the publican in today’s Gospel, by bowing, genuflecting, submitting to the will of God in respect, humility, reverence and obedience.
Abba Appolo, a desert father of the Church in her first days used to say that "the devil has no knees; he cannot kneel; he cannot adore; he cannot pray; he can only look down his nose in contempt. Being unwilling to bend the knee at the name of Jesus is the essence of evil."
Which was precisely what God was doing in Lourdes. He was speaking to a skeptical world so full of itself, so caught up in its own petty struggles and incomplete answers, so set on stuffing itself with the pleasures and insights of a new age that it failed the most essential test of what it means to be a human being: the ability to so empty myself that God might fill me up, to bow very low before the one who made me in adoration, praise and obedient love.
So skeptics found it hard to believe. Hard to believe that God chose a virgin from an out of the way backwater to be the mother of his Son. Hard to believe that God chose a little girl in a forgotten hamlet in the Pyrenees to bring forth healing waters from beneath the feet of the Mother of his Son. Hard to believe a message of repentance in a world wracked with violence and despair, brought by the Beautiful Lady.
But Bernadette did believe, just as the beautiful Lady, the most Blessed of all women believed even when it was hard. For what makes Mary most blessed among women is that she was obedient to God, that she emptied herself of ego and gain and the search for pleasure. This new Eve was the opposite of the first Eve…not grabbing for the gusto, but letting go and letting God. Like her Son upon the cross, she emptied herself and welcomed the swords that would pierce her heart. She made room for God and God alone.
And that, by the way is what it means for the beautiful Lady of this place to reveal herself as the Immaculate Conception, a title which proclaims that there was holiness about her from the very beginning God began knitting her in her mother’s womb she was freed from sin’s original stain.
For sin is a self-replicating contagion, which drives out light as its all-consuming darkness grows. Selfishness, arrogance and lust take up an awful lot of room in the human heart—until there’s no more room for God. So in this one who was immaculately conceived, where there is no room for sin, there is ample room for God.
And by her example, the Immaculate Conception urges us poor banished children of Eve, to follow her example. So when she proclaims “all generations will called me blessed,” this is not mere act of human hubris. Rather, she foretells that her words of humble obedience will be sung in all our vast assemblies until the end of time!
So, when you arrive in Lourdes, gaze into the eyes of the beautiful woman and see the beauty of a heart so emptied of human ambitions and cares that she can say “Fiat,” ‘Let it be done to me as God wills’ with her whole, being.
And that’s why the Blessed Virgin is usually depicted as kneeling as the Angel announces to her that she will be the Mother of the Christ. So too we, whenever we approach God, we do so like the publican in today’s Gospel, by bowing, genuflecting, submitting to the will of God in respect, humility, reverence and obedience.
Abba Appolo, a desert father of the Church in her first days used to say that "the devil has no knees; he cannot kneel; he cannot adore; he cannot pray; he can only look down his nose in contempt. Being unwilling to bend the knee at the name of Jesus is the essence of evil."
Which is precisely the reason for Jesus’ love for the poor, the sick and those who are in pain. They thirst with him on the Cross. So emptied of the preoccupations of this world that they long only for him to fill them up with his merciful grace.
That is why the malades among us are such a gift. For they teach us by their vulnerability how vulnerable each of us are. They teach us by their pain our desperate need for God. They teach us by the example of their patience, their faith and their joy to make a space within our hearts for a God who is so rich in his healing mercy.
The sick, then, know pain and fear, and even emptiness at times, and Mary did too. That’s why the Angel said to her: “Be not afraid, Mary.” For that fear neither sinful nor wrong, was but an invitation to Christ’s grace to fill her up and make her whole.
And that is the secret of Lourdes, which will soon experience: That we are closest to God in our littleness, our brokenness, our sickness and our pain. For God has called me to follow him, not because I am strong or I am smart or I am so very bright, but because he looks upon me, just like his Blessed Mother, he looks upon me in my littleness and raises me up.
