Lourdes

     I went to Lourdes when our daughter was ill with leukemia. I know someday I will write about it, but this isn't the day. Lourdes was very special and I don't want to use a lot of words, bury it under words. I'd rather create snapshots, so you can look through my experience like looking through an album, at your own pace, with time to reflect and enjoy. So I'll mull it over and see what I can find, an image to begin with, an entry, a starting place...

The Candles

     Candles are a big sign at Lourdes. By day there are thousands of them, in big stands near the entrances of the Domain. For a few francs they make a short journey, gripped in the hands of faith, to other stands, surrounded by guard rails to keep the faithful from overcrowding. Inside these small "corrals", attendents cycle back and forth between the crowd and the candle-stands, finding places to put the slender tapers, lighting them with stubs of other candles where they stand for perhaps half an hour before the combined heat and sometimes spreading flame consumes them, melts them down. The dripping wax is caught in large, flat trays, several inches deep. The trays are constantly removed and these large slabs of melted wax are recycled into new candles.
     Later in the evening the attendants take candles which had no time or room to burn and fill all of the stands to capacity. Even so, there are thousands of candles which never even get lit. These are expediently stacked and returned to the sales stands for the morning crowd. It seems a bit commercial, but like so much of faith, there is merit in the intent. The money spent goes to maintenance of the shrines.
     But then, much later, after the crowds have left for the night, the attendants sweep up and take down the barriers. Then you can go back, walking through the tree-lined avenues, down past the Basillica, along the river, under the rising cliff, past the Grotto to where the candle stands form a glowing line in the gloom. You can walk right up to them with the candle you saved all day for this. Reaching out with the long, slender taper, you catch the light from somewhere in the blaze. It is warm here, even on a chilly night. You are surrounded by light and like any true prayer, you just want to stay there, standing, not thinking so much as feeling, basking in the light and warmth and fragrance and the deep, whispering sound of the river.
     That's when you first understand it. This place belongs to God.

(Note:)

Now that I've begun talking about it, I can see that my story of Lourdes is too much for one page. So I will begin a new blog just for the topic and I'll put a link here to help you find it.

This is how the Kingdom works: Someone puts out their hand, and you go together to the next place where God is waiting...

Thomas