Song of Bernadette

"There was a child named Bernadette
I heard the story long ago
she saw the queen of heaven once
and kept the vision in her soul"


150 years ago in a grotto outside a small village in southern France, the fourteen year old daughter of a miller and a laundress, while out gathering firewood, saw a vision. A vision she described as "a small young lady". The girl's name was Bernadette Soubirous and the lady revealed herself, after 16 visions, to be the Virgin Mary.



"No one believed what she had seen
no one believed what she heard
that there were sorrows to be healed
and mercy, mercy in this world"



Though many people accompanied Bernadette no one else ever saw the vision. The lady told Bernadette to drink from the spring in the grotto and when Bernadette dug with her bare hands, a spring was revealed. During the 16th vision Bernadette was holding a lighted candle which burned down and though it was in direct contact with her hand for over 15 minutes, she showed no evidence of a burn. This was also the vision when the lady, after questioning, claimed to be the Immaculate Conception and since that is a phrase unlikely to have been known by an uneducated peasant girl, it was taken as proof her visions were legitimate.



"So many hearts I find
broke like yours and mine
torn by what we've done
and can't undo"



At Bernadette's request a chapel was built at the grotto which eventually grew into the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the world. Despite Lourdes' tiny population (15,000) in France only Paris has more hotel rooms. Uncomfortable with all the attention, Bernadette joined the Sisters of Charity and Christian Instruction at 22 and spent the rest of her life as a nun. She died in 1879 of tuberculosis.

"I just want to hold you
come on let me hold you
like Bernadette would do"

In the 150 years since Bernadette dug up the spring, 67 cures have been verified by the Lourdes Medical Bureau as "inexplicable" after the Catholic Church's rigorious scientific and medical examinations failed to come up with any other explaination. Because of this and because when her remains were exhumed in 1909, 1919 and 1925 they were found to be intact and incorrupt (still true today as well) she was canonized on December 8, 1933 as the patron saint of the sick, the family and of poverty.

"We've been around-we fall, we fly
we mostly fall, we mostly run
but every now and then we try
to mend the damage that we've done

tonight, tonight I just can't rest
I've got this joy here inside my breast
to think that I did not forget
that child, that song of Bernadette"

Although he now says the Lothario, ladies man image was more persona than truth, it's true poet and singer Leonard Cohen has written many things about love but to my mind none are as pure of heart as his "Song of Bernadette" (featured in the italics). The marriage of the story of the simple peasant girl, with her sweet message of hope, with the song's protaganist's plea is both poignant and striking. The singer is not saying 'love me', lots of songs do that, rather the more selfless, 'let me love you'-let me be your solace-a more starkly naked plea to be sure. The open acknowledgement of sin is pure Cohen and also can't fail to strike a chord with anyone who has behaved badly in love ("we mostly fall, we mostly run") which is really all of us, isn't it? And who among us doesn't long for an incorruptable love or, because that's not possible for the non saint, a love at least suffused with mercy and kindess?


This post goes out, DJ style, to a friend with my most fervant wish that he finds a Bernadette of his own.