Lourdes, Lourdes

I’ve avoided writing about the current health scare for the same reason that I’ve avoided talking about it at length. There are too many sources of disparate, conflicting information, almost none of whom I trust, and I lack both the intellectual rigor and the sort of personality that delights in wading through all this dismal stuff.

I suppose my stance on this situation is akin to my grandmother’s. I remember one day in the Seventies when a young plumber tried to engage her in a conversation about diet and heart disease. He presented all sorts of facts and figures in an evangelist’s voice, his eyes shining in his earnest face. When he was done with his monologue, he looked at my grandmother with a smile, anticipating her reaction.

“Well,” she said, her eyes steely behind the lenses of her sensible glasses, “You might be right. But I’ve been eating bacon every day since I came off the baby-bottle. If you don’t try to take away my bacon, I’ll not try to take away your hippie food [she thought of any cuisine that didn’t include meat, two vegetables, and bread as “hippie food”].” The young plumber’s subsequent cowed silence gave me an immediate and lasting appreciation for my grandmother’s simple life philosophy. She was untroubled by things she saw as beyond her control.

But one thing about this health scare does trouble me. Not far into the timeline, I read that the famous waters at Lourdes, France, have been closed to pilgrims. The news hit me like a fist in the stomach. The waters purported to possess divine healing properties have been closed to the public because...someone might get sick?

My reaction was so dramatic because I saw with clarity what I have suspected about most religious groups all my life.

The people in charge do not believe what they say they believe.

If the leaders in the Roman Catholic Church truly believed that the waters at one of the most important shrines in the Christian world are efficacious in the healing of the sick, they would have gone to war on this issue, declaring that the shrine at Lourdes would remain open, that pilgrims are welcome, and that the leadership would indeed die on this particular hill if need be.

But they didn’t do that. Instead, they aped what every other group, religious and secular, has done in response to this mysterious virus. The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church does not believe what they claim to believe. Actions speak louder than words.

This is all very personal to me and has been for years now. When I was a Protestant, I used to inwardly gripe that many of my fellow churchmen didn’t truly believe what they claimed to believe. I could see it by how they lived, how they interacted with other people, how they conducted business, how they treated the people from the poor part of town. I see this same pattern writ large in my life today. Every person with whom I work is a professing Christian, some belonging to what I could call severe sects. All of them are losing their minds, worried about everything from sudden death to interstate highway shutdowns to bread lines to the mark of the Beast. When they catch me just staring at them, they tag on a “But God’s in control of all this,” or even worse, a “This is God’s wake-up call to America.” waving the holiness pennant from the pews or the office chairs.

Over the course of my life, I eventually came to see the Catholic faith as the surest and most consistent expression of the Christian message, and I came to this understanding by way of an arduous, jagged path. I am not a real Catholic, not an official Catholic. I see myself as a Catholic of the heart, living in exile. So I cannot even be comforted by the things that most Catholics can draw on. In fact, those folks do not see me as one of them. I say my prayers and attend to my devotions and cling to my lectio divina and correspond with a lively collection of monks and other Catholic clerics, and I say the rosary and observe the holy days, all to maintain a sense of the holy in my life, a taste of the mystery of the spirit, a sense of connection with the God Whom I’ve been chasing after all my life.

And then I see the leaders of the Church which holds my affection pull a stunt like this. It’s disheartening, in the literal sense of that word.

This health scare – it’s an odd situation. The entire world is odd to me right now. I’m nowhere near the intellectual league of the folks who have analyzed this most recent world crisis. I can’t icily pick apart the data and the arguments and present a formidable conclusion. Honestly, I don’t understand most of what I’m reading and hearing, and I’m harshly limiting what I allow into my ears or before my eyes, so my perspective is even more limited.

But it seems to me that most people want this to be a crisis. They seem to want it to be the apocalypse. Even more sobering, they want to be told what to do, and they are quite eager to follow orders. Are peoples’ lives so boring, so meaningless, so rootless that the current situation gives them purpose? I’m not pontificating when I ask this question. I’m truly dumbfounded. The question echos through the center of me when I’m around other people these days, watching them and listening to them.

Even in the mellowest of times, I have for most of my life felt somewhat square-peggy around the majority. In these days, I don’t even feel like a peg. I’m not sure what I am, but I know what I’m not. And I know who I trust, and I know what I hope for. For right now, in this my exile, this has to suffice.

~ S.K. Orr