Lourdes, Bigorre, Pyrenees, France.

by Joe Grundy 3 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Joe Grundy

  (I never was a JW).

  This topic occurred to me randomly. I don't know whether any/many posters heer have visited. The region is beautiful but marred, IMHO, by the scar that is Lourdes. And that's because, and only because, of religion.

  About 15 years ago I visited the area with ex-wife #1 and our French friends. They were practising and believing RCs and this was a 'must see' place to visit. We went along out of interest. I have never seen anything like it.

  More than 7,000,000 people visit Lourdes annually. It was a small village until 1858 when a local 14 year old poor peasant girl had the first of 18 visions of the virgin Mary. People started to come hhoping for miraculous cures. Today, it has more hotels than any city in France outside Paris.

  I found it an incredibly depressing place. The town streets are full of 'tat' shops selling stuff like hollow plastic 'Mary' bottles you can fill with 'holy water', battery-operated 'flashing light' plaques of Mary, and so on. The square was filled with wheelchairs and trolley stretcher beds containg the hopeful, some of whom had travelled thousands of miles hoping for a miracle. Some pilgrims crawled on hands and knees round the 'stations of the cross' route.

  It was deluded religious belief on steroids. Xw#1 and I were by this time atheists and found it hard to comprehend. I confess that the sacred grotto was empty and deserted and we found the time and place for a quick copulate. I put that down to the sun and the wine.

  Our French friends (esp. the wife) were completely convinced by the place - she felt that some of her undefined symptoms were relieved by her pilgrimage, and it would have been unkind to challenge this.

  I understand that there is a large standing medical and scientific committee at Lourdes which investigates 'miracle' claims. So far, I think, they've pronounced about 60 cases as 'miracles'.

  This place has to be seen to be believed (or not).

  As I understand it, some/many/most JWs believe in divine intervention and/or miracles - anything from finding their car keys to a cure from cancer. I wonder how some of them would react if you transported them from Smallville USA and plonked them down in Lourdes, where they could share their experiences with 7,000,000 other hopefuls?

  Just a random thought, as I said.
  
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  GrreatTeacher

  Placebo effect. It's real.
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  kepler

  JG,

  Perhaps because I have never been a JW either, I can write this in reply.

  There was a recent article in the National Geographic on the apparition of Mary phenomenon. Lourdes was mentioned among many other places and temporal settings across the globe. The nearest one to the US, of any consequence, was Guadalupe in Mexico. I imagine that if I were set down in the midst of Guadalupe - or most anywhere else in Mexico where the canvas image of "Our Lady" is sold, the picture would be similar to what you describe.

  But still: I had been informed in several history classes or accounts that the Guadalupe legend originated in the 17th century. But yet when I read the account of conquistador Bernal Diaz of the "The Conquest of New Spain", put to ink in the 1570s or 80s by a witness and participant of the campaign of Cortez only a decade or two before

  In the siege and capture of Mexico:

  "Cortez ordered [Sandoval] to abandon his camp at Iztapalapa and go by land to blockade the other causeway, which runs from Mexico to a town once called Tepeaquilla, but now Our Lady of Guadalupe, the place of many miracles"

  There are a few more brief references to Guadalupe in the Diaz account. I pulled that from my Penguin paperback, but I think there are more extensive versions available on line. Unfortunately, Diaz never spells out exactly what transpired, because he assumes that all the readers just knew. And elsewhere his account, though often righteous in perspective, invokes little or nothing of the supernatural, save what would be expected from a Catholic monarchist of the time. Natural selection at work when you are surrounded by a cult that sacrifices its victims.

  So my point is that despite the tawdriness of the tourist towns, I would not dismiss the mystery entirely.

  I think there is one.

  Best regards, and have a good ( or better) continental stay.
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  Xanthippe

  I like the Pyrenees but further east, Languedoc-Roussillon area. Fantastic scenery, wonderful wine, great restaurants. We stayed in a beautiful gite I found in the Times and the owner told us about the Cathare castles in the area, amazing citadels built high up almost on mountain crags that the cathares escaped to in the twelfth century when the Pope declared their beliefs heretic.

  They were all starved out and burnt of course. Isn't religion wonderful. They were interesting though. They believed men and women were equal, were vegetarians and believed in reincarnation even though they were Christians. Sort of East meets West.