On the morning of 11 February 1858, Bernadette Soubirous, her sister and Jeanne Abadie went off in search of wood and bones, the wood to be burned and the bones to be turned into fertiliser and sold to the farmers. They made their way to the rock of Massabielle, which overlooked a spit of land that stuck out into the river. It was illegal to pick up wood in the forests; the poor had to scavenge for driftwood carried down by the river from the mountains. They were going to Massabielle because it was common ground belonging to nobody. The town’s waste was dumped there, and the town’s pigs would graze there. It was a marginal place on the frontier of water and dry land, like that place from which the first disciples were called. Bernadette was to make this journey many times over the coming months. She found herself, like Moses, leading an Exodus pilgrimage of the people of Lourdes and beyond to this deserted and dirty place. Just as the people of Israel had to pass through the wilderness to learn how close their God was to them, so the neighbours of Bernadette made a similar journey in search of that same God.
Bernadette’s companions got to the grotto before she did. Out of breath and freezing cold, she sat to take off her wooden shoes and her stockings. She heard a rushing wind making the trees rustle. Looking towards a cleft in the great rock, she saw a dazzlingly bright white figure. When Moses was drawn by the bush that burned but was not consumed, he went to look at it and removed his shoes since the ground on which he stood was holy ground. Elijah was once crouching at the mouth of a cave on the Mountain of Horeb when he was alerted to the coming of the presence of God by the rushing of mighty wind, but God was not in the wind, he was in the sheer silence laden with the sense of holiness that followed the sound of the wind. Bernadette follows the pattern of these great prophetic figures.
Like Moses, Bernadette was going about her everyday business doing what she always does. We do not have to inhabit a special holy world to experience the closeness of God; we must be prepared to listen. For Bernadette, as for Moses: what starts off as just another day turns out to be an entirely new experience. His old life of shepherding ended once and for all. Similarly for Bernadette, her life was never to be the same again. Like Moses and Elijah, her call to the prophetic ministry of speaking God’s word meant her life would take a different turn. She would make a radical break with her past, a break which was brought about by God’s choice of her and for which no previous experience had prepared her. She was called to share in Christ’s own Exodus which was his passion and death.
There were 18 apparitions, all of them taking place over the Lent and Easter of 1858, save the last which took place on 16 July, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The apparition of Thursday, 25 February and the discovery of the spring was the centrepiece of the vision. Thursday was the day of Jesus’s own agony and betrayal. Bernadette was not transfigured by the vision, she was disturbed and agitated. She kept falling to her knees in the mud. Sometimes she prostrated herself on the ground and kissed it. All the time people heard her saying, “Penance, penance, penance.” She ran towards the river Gave de Pau, dug a hole and scooped up a handful of muddy water which she managed to drink at the fourth attempt. Smearing mud and dirt all over her face, she grasped bitter herbs and began to eat them. The people jeered, claiming she was mad. On the way home to the prison where her family still lived, Bernadette was plied with angry questions as to why she had behaved in this way. She answered all of them calmly, saying, “Aquero (that one) told me: go to the fountain and bathe.” Bernadette, like Abraham, was obedient to the word.
The next day was Friday and Bernadette returned to the grotto at the beginning of the afternoon, the hour of the crucifixion. She performed the same gestures of penance as before, but this time the lady did not return. Friday was a day of darkness and abandonment. It was Bernadette’s Good Friday on which she followed in the footsteps of the Saviour. When she stumbled around on her knees, she was expressing the humility of Jesus, the Incarnate Word, who humbled himself to come among us as a man. Smearing her face with mud, she acted out Isaiah’s prophecy of the suffering servant read on Good Friday. “He had no beauty, no majesty to catch our eyes… we despised him, we held him of no account.” (Is. 53: 2-3). She entered deeply into this experience of rejection. When she took up the dirty water, she tried to drink, only succeeding on the fourth attempt; she was like Jesus on the night of his agony when he prayed three times for the cup to be taken from him, on the fourth time he prayed “not as I will, but as you will”. Bernadette comes to resemble her Saviour. She takes up her own cross and follows him.
The transfigured face of Bernadette is the reflection of the heavenly glory that rested on the Mother of God. Those who saw Bernadette did not see the apparition but what we are called to be when we respond to the loving address of God. All of this was preparation for Bernadette. On the feast of the Annunciation, she was given the lady’s name and was told to bring this message to “the priest”.
Bernadette was regarded as useless by many who knew her and her lack of value in their eyes was directed towards undermining her own sense of self-worth. In this encounter the values of the world are turned upside down: “the lowly ware exalted”. Bernadette becomes a person to this mysterious lady. Later on, when she was describing how the lady spoke to her, she said she spoke to me “as one person speaks to another”. God spoke to Moses as a man speaks to his friend, as Abraham was privileged to argue with God. This little girl who could not speak French, could not read, did not know her catechism, whose family were destitute living in a slum, not thought good enough for pigs, whose father had been in prison, was being addressed with tenderness and love as a person. It was this little girl who could do this act of grace, for the Mother of God. Mary had to direct Bernadette to the spring. Bernadette could not find it herself. It must be given to her. The spring does not come from where Mary is but from under the rock. Mary points the way. It is Jesus who says, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.”
This article first appeared in the January 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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