By a look of love….
Note: Members of our mission team in Robin Hood’s Bay, England, travel to Lourdes each year to help disabled pilgrims from the diocese.
During the Pilgrimage to Lourdes for the Diocese of Middlesbrough this year, I had a chance to visit the St. Bernadette Museum.
There were many interesting things to see concerning this humble peasant girl who, in 1858, was favoured by apparitions of Our Lady. The thing that penetrated my heart the most was a handwritten account of Bernadette’s third encounter with “the Young Lady” and the first in which Our Lady spoke to her. She wrote: She looked at me as a person who speaks to another person.
Bernadette was 14 years old, extremely poor, illiterate, and suffering from chronic asthma. Yet, Our Lady looked at and spoke to her “as a person.” She used the formal form of “you” in French when she addressed her, a mark of respect that Bernadette was not accustomed to hearing because of her lowly status.
Our Lady entrusted Bernadette with a special message for the world, asking for prayer and penance. She identified herself to Bernadette as the Immaculate Conception, which convinced her parish priest of the authenticity of the apparitions. God (and Our Lady) chooses the humble by preference.
We live in a world that defines us by so many criteria: nationality, social status, wealth, intelligence, looks, talents, etc. Yet we are all created with equal dignity.
At Madonna House in Combermere (Canada) we receive many live-in guests. During the 1960’s and 70’s, Catherine Doherty, our foundress, noticed that many of the young people who came suffered from poor self images. So, one day she took her bright red lipstick and wrote on a mirror in one of our guest dormitories: “God’s Image”, so that when people looked at themselves, they would recognize who they truly were. The words on the mirror are still there.
Our eyes can be mirrors, too, reflecting to others that they are made in God’s image. By a look of love, kindness, acceptance, and trust, we can restore or affirm someone’s dignity.
I witnessed this in Lourdes. The loving attention that our Handmaids, Brancardiers (stretcher-bearers), and medical staff gave to our Supported Pilgrims was a beautiful sign of this person-to-person gift of self. Seeing the fruits of joy and peace this produced during the pilgrimage was a highlight of that trip. Nothing can replace personal encounters of this kind.
No new technology, no matter how amazing and useful, can replace the human person. In Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), he speaks of the limits of AI:
Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean (Paragraph 99).
Let us, like Our Lady, look at each person as “a person who speaks to another person.” Then people will come to know their dignity, and we shall together become the “Magnificent Humanity” we were created to be.
