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Reflection for April 09, 2006

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The Song of Bernadette

Easter Sunday and the feast of St. Bernadette of Lourdes share the same date of April 16th this year. Often saints' days get lost amid the feast days of Christ and his mother Mary, who remain our biggest manifestations of God's love and compassion in this world. But even as the sun and moon always rise against a background of many stars, so also the Church supplies us with many saints to bring us in a variety of ways the same love and compassion Christ and Mary do. For instance saints like Bernadette Soubirous whose whole being was made radiant by the Lady she saw in the grotto of Massabielle and who can now share her radiance with us; help us experience the consolation and love we often desperately need, if we but turn to her.

Which is what Jennifer Warnes once did. Jennifer, who is a recording vocalist, was named Bernadette at her birth but later her mother changed her name to Jennifer. Again later, after all the ups and downs of the hippie era and concert circuit, she felt she had lost touch with her essential self and remembering her childhood (when she was Bernadette) she turned to her patron saint to find consolation, to recover her soul. And so her friend Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet, wrote some lyrics to help her along - which she put to music on a CD named Famous Blue Raincoat. This is what she sang:

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

Obviously Jennifer herself had known sadness in her life and also the remorse we all feel over mistakes we've made - as she continues:

so many hearts I find / broke like yours and mine / torn by what we've done and can't undo . . . // we've been around, we fall, we fly / we mostly fall, we mostly run / and every now and then we try / to mend the damage that we've done

But in remembering her childhood name and her patron saint as a signal of God's enduring love and mercy toward her, Jennifer experiences deep relief:

tonight, tonight I cannot rest / I've got this joy here inside my breast / to think that I did not forget / that child, that song of Bernadette

And now amid her sorrows all she wants to do is reach out once more to embrace her baptismal self:

I just want to hold you / won't you let me hold you / like Bernadette would do

Of course in pondering this song and the coincidence of Christ's Easter resurrection with the feast of St. Bernadette in this month of April, I can't help but recall the April coincidence of another event, the death of a son thirteen years ago and the mistakes I made that may have contributed to his early death. But remembering what Bernadette heard at Massabielle - that there were sorrows to be healed / and mercy, mercy in this world - I feel it's ok for me to lay aside (if for the moment) my remorse and raise from the deeper regions of my soul the one thing that will ever really count in my relationship to Phil - my infinite love - and say to him quite simply:

I just want to hold you / won't you let me hold you / like Bernadette would do.

-- Geoff Wood