Lourdes -- "the real cure"

"Lourdes, she thought...  But quite suddenly she was riding again in the hospital train that made the annual pilgrimage, the only lay student nurse from the training school chosen by Sister William to help escort the convoy of bedridden patients from Belgium. The faith of the prostrate pilgrims that they would survive the journey, and, moreover, return from there cured, frightened her. Her pulse-readings, her diagnostic eyes, even her nostrils that knew the smell of death told her that some could not possibly live until Lourdes and she ran to Sister William crying, Fevers, blood-spitting, cancers advanced to screaming stage and not a sound out of any of them except crazy hopes; I've got three in the car who should be receiving last rites this very instant, Sister. And Sister William had stopped her with a look. No one will die en route, my child, they never do, she said. I've taught you many things, Gabrielle, but what you are soon to see is beyond my competence to describe or prepare you for. Now say a Pater for having called faith a crazy hope and go back to your duties.

"Lourdes was a bonfire in her memory. It was made up of thousands of candles and burning cries and a week of rising suns over an esplanade where stretcher cases lay side by side, end to end, waiting for a priest to come with a monstrance that gathered sun to its gold and blazed in the sign of the cross above the stretchers. With each individual benediction a new voice, hoarse, hysterical, screaming or murmuring, joined the storm of sound which carried the glittering processional forward like a wave that never crested or broke until the last twisted body had been blessed. O Jesus, Son of David, cure me…

"And there were cures, she remembered, which she could see in the archives of X-rays that had been made before and after baths in St. Bernadette's water, changes in tissue textures or even occasionally in the bone structures which she could read like print on a page.

"On the journey back to Belgium, taking care of the same number of cases she had escorted out, she remembered how she had looked at the faces she bathed, still worn and emaciated with disease. Inexplicably they seemed to have retained some of the glow that had played upon them when the stretchers had been carried into the candlelit Grotto at the foot of the Pyrenees.

"Their happiness! she exclaimed to Sister William on her rounds.

"Naturally, my child. That is the real cure. Not those debatable X-rays I saw you poring over with the doctors who consider only what films show. But this (Sister William inclined her head to the quiet wagon-lit as if the name of Jesus had been spoken), this is the visible grace given to all who go with faith."

~from The Nun's Story by Kathryn Hulme