“You all seem worried that you might die of thirst in the middle of the city. Don’t you know we have water?” I was on a brief training trip in Madrid when our guide made this incisive observation, delivered with his characteristic good humor. We were all Americans; he was a Spaniard. Looking around our group, I grasped his meaning immediately. Every one of us was carrying an oversized water bottle on our walk through the city, as if we were traversing the Sahara. Apparently it was an American thing. Our guide carried no bottle, yet he did not die of thirst. It turns out they have water in Madrid.
I recalled our guide’s comment when recently I led a pilgrimage across France, from Paris to Chartres to Lisieux to Le Mans to Tours to Lourdes. I did not carry a water bottle — and because of that, I was constantly thirsty. I found myself miffed at my erstwhile guide, whose comment had weakened my American resolve to carry water with me on this trip through Europe. Yes, of course, there is water available all across France, but unless you step into a shop and purchase some, it is really hard to find water to slake your thirst. At least it was until we arrived in Lourdes; there, the water flows freely and it is available to all.
The spring at Lourdes
Lourdes is a pilgrimage unto itself. Getting there is one thing, being there is another. For those who have stayed in the hotels in the area above the sanctuaries (as we did), you know that to enter the sacred places, you have to pass through shops and cafes galore. Depending on the time of day, there may be as much drinking and merrymaking in these places — not to mention consumerism — as you might find on a tamer day in New Orleans. But once you pass through the gate and descend, you find yourself crossing over from the world as world to some place that is in the world but not of it.
The great plaza where the nightly candlelight procession concludes is ahead of you, and if you turn your face, you will find not one but two basilicas right in front of you, with a chapel sandwiched in between; another basilica is hidden underground behind you and to your left. People move around forward and backward, side to side, going into and out of different sacred spaces or merely gazing around. And a steady stream of people move to the right of the plaza, toward the river, day and night. None of these people need to return thirsty because the water that flows there is for everyone. And yet the water is not from the river; it is from the spring.
The river you can see, but the source of the spring you cannot. Moving from an invisible source to become available to all, it is water for drinking as well as for bathing. It is the water that Our Lady promised to St. Bernadette, when she told her during one of the apparitions to drink and wash.
Bernadette’s thirst
The grotto where Our Lady appeared to Bernadette is a small, rocky shelter on the hillside, atop which now stand a hidden chapel and a towering basilica. On Feb. 25, 1858, Our Lady directed 14-year-old Bernadette to dig in the mud, on the promise of good water. None was to be seen.
Bernadette dug and dug, smearing the mud on her face as if to wash and putting it in her mouth as if to drink. This grotto was not previously a holy site; it was more like a trash dump. Pigs were kept there. It was filthy. But out of obedience, Bernadette plunged in. To everyone else, this looked like madness. There was no clear water. The mud remained mud. Bernadette became filthy. They had to carry her home.
Why did she do this? As Bernadette says in Franz Werfel’s spectacular novel “The Song of Bernadette“: “The lady told me to go to the spring and drink and wash. She pointed to that far corner. But there was no spring. So I had to dig, and I did find a little water. But I couldn’t swallow that without swallowing the sand too.”
To receive what the Lady intended for her, Bernadette had to endure that which she didn’t want: the sand, the filth, the unsavory mud. She dug like one mad with thirst.
Her digging opened a way to the unseen water within. A very little of it began to well up and pool into a tiny puddle. Some who were desperate, having no other recourse, began to put that water upon their infirmities.
Louis Bouriette, who was blind in one eye from a quarry accident, sent his young daughter down to the grotto to soak a cloth in the tiny bit of water at the back of the cave. Receiving this wet rag at the end of her errand, he pressed it against his eye and let the water run down his face. He did this in the dark, and when he stepped back out into the light, he was nearly blinded again by all the light he could now see.
Following Louis
The people go toward the grotto even today, go toward not only the place of the apparitions, but also the source of the water that flows freely. The water still bubbles up in the cave, wetting the rocks and the ground, but it also pools up into baths that the sick and others can enter. It flows through the pipes that have been added in the decades since to allow so many to drink and wash in an orderly fashion on both sides of the grotto. These are the people who can go there whenever they like, for the water is always on.
If you go there, having passed through the commerce and bustle, through the gate or across the bridge, by the plaza and beyond the basilicas, you can slake your thirst at any time. You can fill bottles, but only if they’re empty. If you carry your own water to this place, you may not feel the need to drink. But this is a pilgrimage for the thirsty: thirsty for water, thirsty for healing, thirsty for peace, thirsty for grace.
Bernadette uncovered the spring, but the water didn’t start flowing freely until the prayers of others were wedded to her obedience. Louis Bouriette, whose sight was healed by those waters, witnessed the waters beginning to flow from that initial source. Werfel recounts the tale like this:
Around three o’clock Louis Bouriette went to Massabielle for a fresh bag of earth. Arrived at the grotto, he met a small group of women bending over a thin trickle or rill of water that, starting at the moist patch of earth in the grotto, was making a tiny channel for itself through the sand to the Savy brook. This rill was not much more than a narrow thread of water that a swift summer rain might cause to purl along a garden path. Yet it had a lively and purposeful way of running that seemed to point to a plenteous source.
“Well, what’s that?” Bouriette asked in amazement.
“We were telling our beads,” one of the women explained, “when suddenly the water began to run. We didn’t notice it before.”
Bernadette dug with her hands; these women dug with their beads. They likely didn’t even know they were uncovering anything. They just did what they usually did: They told their beads and prayed their prayers. They did so where they had seen Bernadette tell her beads, where they had seen Bernadette get filthy, where they had seen Bernadette transfigured even if they could not see for themselves the Lady whom Bernadette saw. They saw the effects on Bernadette, and they went there to pray as she had prayed. They went toward the wet earth. That was their own pilgrimage: They did not bring their own resources; they went in search of what they did not yet know.
You cannot bring your own water on a true pilgrimage to Lourdes. The point of the journey is to wait for, to long for, and to receive the water Our Lady intends.
I spent a week without water-on-demand because of what my Spanish guide had said about us Americans a year earlier. I spent a week annoyed at myself for having taken his lighthearted critique to heart. I spent a week wishing I hadn’t cared what he said. But at the end of the week, when I approached the grotto, I understood why I had spent the whole week a little bit uncomfortable. The spring’s water was in front of me and I was thirsty, thank God.
