six years ago

In 2004, I saw the Pope and met Mary.


I've always wondered if other girls struggle quite as much with Mary as a Mother as I did for so many years.  That sinless creature, thrust in my face so many times when I'd failed myself, seemed more like a rosary-demanding older sister I was somehow competing with.  Competing with in a race where I was running on crutches and she had already reached the finish line and gotten her prize.


Then six years ago, I stepped into San Pietro for my first papal Mass in Rome.  


It was the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes, as it is today. 


Rows of ambulances and transportation vehicles filled the piazza, turning its cobble-stoned triangles into a most unusual parking lot.  


We had came through clenching candles, flimsy cardboard circles and the glossy-booklets they dole out for every papal event.   Shifting ourselves into the hard plastic gray chairs, and we waited in quiet murmur with the sick who lined the front of the basilica.

The pope emerged with a flash of cameras from the back, coming through the milky-gray curtain that always gives you a flash of the Pieta in the back.  It was normal enough.


But at the end of the Mass, the basilica went from brilliance to complete darkness.

Nothing was illuminated but the white statue of Mary with the blue veil at the front of San Pietro, and the soft glimmer of the candles that slowly washed over the crowd from front to back.

A hushed silence filled the dark vast space, and all waited.

Four notes played from the organ.

And then the sound of Ave, Ave, Ave Maria began to well from the stillness.

It was the start of seeing Mary - that creature whose representation was but a small speck at the front of the church - in a new light.

Four months later I slid into the first pew of a white church in France, and looked at the testimonies of fulfilled trust that stacked the side chapels from marble floor to vaulted ceiling.

The journal came out.  Thoughts and petitions, earnest and heavy, poured out with the tears that came with them.  And the heaviness of heart of twenty years lifted as I finally saw for the first time how the darkest moments of my life had their purpose and point.  From the hushed and closed shadows of hurt and despair, she brought her light.

I came from Lourdes and said that it is there that you truly feel the presence of Mary as a Mother.  The healing there, as the woman at the baths told us in broken English, is not for the body but - with a thump to her heart - for the soul.  

That is the beauty of a Mother who never forgets us in our mire.  She waits with her hand extended through our dark, ready to reflect Christ's light onto our broken, aching selves.  She reminds us that no ugliness is too unbearable, if we but have the courage to bring it to the light.  She loves us in healing, and makes love a tangible thing of comfort and hope in our lives.

I went to Lourdes six years ago keeping four people in my heart in a special way.  Three I know the outcome of; one I do not, and perhaps may never know.  Please keep my friend in your intentions today.