An Encounter with the Virgin at Lourdes

 

Such surrender could bring sufferers close to death. Before her cure, Blanche Meurat said that her body was shivering and cracking until she met the Virgin:

‘Good Saint Mary, if I am still useful on earth, cure me, since I am your child, and if I am not useful, take me! I am yours.’ Then turning my eyes towards Our Good Mother of Heaven, I saw her smiling and repeating to me, three times, ‘Leave! My child! Do not hesitate, you are indeed cured,’ and, as I still hesitated, an invincible force that I cannot describe pushed me powerfully out of my stretcher from which I stepped.

It is not clear if she was referring to the statue in the Grotto or to a vision, nor does she say how she interpreted the smile—as forgiveness, reassurance, encouragement or a combination of all these qualities. She none the less emphasized the sense of presence, both close and authoritative, which physically moved her off her stretcher, to the astonishment of those looking on.

Meurat’s account of what she saw, heard and felt shows how she tried to give voice to the relationship between her imaginative encounter with the Virgin and the way it was translated into physical action. It provides a perfect example of the way the ‘self’—a totality of imagination, sensation, posture and bodily motion—was reoriented through an existential process that depended entirely on a belief in the presence of the Virgin and the maternal force associated with her. The encounter was so powerful precisely because it contrasted her finite humanity and its bodily limitations with a sense of the infinite and its supernatural possibility. This conception was not Cartesian; it preferred a vision of human wholeness and rejected the restrictions of mentalist preoccupations—cogito ergo sum—that favored mind over body and thought over being, in favour of a unified conception of the self. The process could not be explained by reference to a precise physiological or psychological mechanism; rather the undefined nature of the transformation within the ‘self’ gave it unimagined strength.

Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (pp. 310-11)