FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Miracle in Lourdes

Rant Number 407 17 August 2010

Miracle in Lourdes

Three tremendous questions every person is led to pursue, according to Immanuel Kant:

1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

The first question the philosopher affirmed to have answered once for all. Certain knowledge as to the other two, however, is rationally unattainable, Kant annoyingly believed.

Be that as it may, hope springs eternal. Human beings need it, as they need air, water, food and love. And hope is indeed the heartening message of the most exquisite, engaging movie the priest has seen in a long time, Lourdes. Ostensibly, a story about miracles. In fact, Lourdes is about hope.

A famous place of pilgrimage in France, in 1858 the town of Lourdes witnessed wondrous, supernatural events. 18 times the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in a grotto to Bernadette Soubirous, an adolescent peasant girl. Simultaneously, a spring sprang out of the earth. Miraculous healings followed. Young Bernadette at first suffered scepticism, even downright hostility, but the Virgin commanded a church to be built over the grotto and she was obeyed. Bernadette then entered a convent and later Pope Pius XI proclaimed her a saint. Millions of pilgrims have since flocked to the shrine. A medical commission sits to investigate the cures and the many reported miracles. A huge and controversial literature exists about those claims. Lourdes, I suppose, is what scoffing fellows like atheist, cancer-stricken writer Christopher Hitchens really must hate.

Lourdes’ sweet protagonist might, I suppose, be an older, fatalistic Bernadette. Actress Sylvie Testud’s innocent, meek, luminous face both moves and seduces. She plays Christine, a girl confined to the wheelchair by multiple sclerosis. Her wasted body is so badly crippled, she is like a statue, can’t move an inch – a nurse must spoon-feed her, very, very slowly. Escorting the girl and other patients are nurses from a monastic order, lay volunteers, priests & pilgrims galore. But it transpires Christine is no conventional believer. Actually, she is laid back about faith and hardly seems to pray at all. A bit of a regular to holy sites, she admits to enjoying the cultural experience almost tourist-fashion. Fair enough. For a paraplegic Lourdes must be as good as Marbella or Viareggio - the chance that the Blessed Virgin might deign to work a miracle thrown in as a not insignificant extra.

And, lo and behold, the Virgin does it! Christine starts to get better. Her atrophied limbs move. She gets out of the wheelchair. She is able to stand. She walks! Miracle! It is true! Doctors vouchsafe the non-natural origin of Christine’s extraordinary cure. Heaven truly has come down and touched the earth. The song of Bernadette breaks out again. Alleluia!

Thus far all is kosher. Now just imagine you were one of the people around Christine. Say, a fellow patient. Also severely ill. At first you are stunned. Then you rejoice. Hope realised! Miracles happen! The Virgin has healed that girl. Great! But...slowly your mood changes. Why her, you begin to wonder? Why not you? You have faith, pray hard, make vows. The healed girl seems frivolous, flirts with a handsome young helper, shows no piety, so...why her? You feel envy, downright antipathy, cannot understand a God so partial, so unfair...hope turns sour. You get angry, you spite, you despair.

Or imagine you are one of the helpers. Like the bored girl who has also fallen for the good-looking colleague. You realise the bloke now takes an interest in Christine. No longer a helpless, pitiful cripple but a normal, attractive young woman, she is sexually desirable. The green-eyed monster preys on you. Jealousy. You hate Christine. She has stolen your sweetheart. What’s so good about her, after all? A mere scrap of a woman. Consciously or not, you wish she had not been healed – you wish her ill.

Perhaps you are one of the pilgrims. A normally smug religious person. You judge Christine’s behaviour. What a worthless, banal girl! Does not show any devoutness or gratitude. Really, the Virgin should have known better, you are almost tempted to think.

You may be someone who cared for Christine personally, like the old lady in the film who shares her bedroom. You worry. You are dismayed. Because now Christine is independent. Free. She won’t need you anymore. You know you’ll be lonely. You are sad. You wish the Virgin had cured someone else.

Christine herself of course is over the moon. Not only is she better, she is now in love. During a party she dances with the beloved boy. They kiss, in his arms she is divinely happy when...she wobbles a bit. She feels unsteady. She has to stop dancing and sit down. A relapse! She wasn’t really cured after all. Soon, she is back in the wheelchair. People look on. Commiserate. Poor girl! What a cruel destiny! She thought she was cured but she was not, really. They won’t confess it but, deep down, they are not all that displeased, after all. Such is human nature.

Lourdes is shot in solemn, effective chromatic tones, reflecting its temple of healing setting and the shifting moods of its all too human characters. Aesthetically, it is a beautiful cinematic experience, reminding the film buff of some of Antonioni’s static, mysterious masterpieces like L’Avventura, Red Desert and Blow Up. Morally, it is a bracingly unsentimental story. The pettiness, shabbiness and even malignity lurking in all children of Adam are not glossed over but frankly, realistically portrayed. Nor is the ambiguity, the contradictions of faith idealised. God may well suspend the known laws of nature and effect a miracle in the physical sense but will the person necessarily be spiritually improved? And will the bystanders? Jesus performed many miracles and yet some still refused to recognise his heavenly credentials. His enemies even accused him of consorting with demons. The Son of God knew the darkness that is in man.

Tough stuff. But hope? Where does it come in? Wonderfully, in Christine. As she sits back on her wheelchair, encircled by hypocritical faux-friends, her pale, sad but smiling face radiates hope. She may not be bodily better but she is not crushed. She still hopes. That is the true miracle. The miracle which the Virgin Mary can be said to have operated. Hope. Christine’s hope spring eternal because, pace cynics, it has something of the Eternal about it.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli