13 Pilgrimage into Poverty words: Daughter, your faith has made you whole; go in peace.” There’s no place in the world like Lourdes. To go there in faith is to make a pilgrimage into poverty. Muggeridge would understand, because he had seen through the vanity of what the world calls great. Mother Teresa would understand. Muslims go to Mecca, to adore the power of God. Hindus go to the mighty Ganges River to immerse themselves in the waters of an ancient mythology. But Lourdes? It’s a mustard seed by comparison. It’s a bit of leaven that an ordinary woman kneaded into some dough. It is a pearl hidden in a field. It is a stone that the builders tossed aside. The girl was small To whom should the Virgin Mother appear? To such as Bernadette Soubirous. Her family lived in terrible poverty. At the time the visions came, their rented home was an old jail cell, twelve feet square, with a stinking privy in the back. Bernadette was only beginning, at age fourteen, to learn to read. Lourdes was a forgotten village in the foothills of the Pyrenees. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” asked Nathanael, but that was before he met Jesus. On a cold and rainy day, February 11, 1858, Bernadette, her sister, and a friend went out gathering sticks for firewood. Think of Elijah and the
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