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A Visit to the Grotto

Ronald M. Wade

    Max came in the back door, unannounced as usual, helped himself to a beer from the laundry room fridge and plunked down on my office couch. Max is a rather unusual friend in that he follows no religious or political convictions that customarily are found in the drawing rooms of more polite society. Max is a libertarian atheist. Introducing him to friends is sometimes embarrassing and inevitably awkward since I never know what route his conversation will take. Often he adapts to the conversational lead of someone else. Allow me to give you an example.
    He said, “I had dinner at the (name withheld) country club last night, had a good time capped off with a conversation with a lady of the Roman Catholic persuasion.”
    “Oh my gracious!” I exclaimed. “Was the poor thing in tears before they ejected you from the club?”
    “Oh not at all,” he hastily replied. “It was a civilized coming together of divergent faiths in intellectual discussion.”
    “And you thought I would find it useful when holding forth in print at some future time.”
    “Naturally,” he replied.
    I sighed, got out my pencil and note pad and prepared myself. As far as I know, the following is a faithful reconstruction of that conversation.

    Lady: (In response to a question) I’ve been abroad for the past four weeks. We stayed with friends in Paris, saw the city, then drove down to the southwest of France and visited Lourdes, I wanted to see Bernadette’s grotto.
    Max: I see you are unscathed, no visible injuries; you must have got along famously with the fro-, I mean with our Gallic cousins.
    Lady: (Smiling) I do take the precaution of traveling to France with a Canadian passport.
    Max: I see. Not heroic but discreet.
    Lady: Ahem. Anyway I finally had a chance to see the Lourdes Grotto and it was a tremendously moving experience.
    Max: No doubt. Tell us about it. (A whispered aside to a fellow diner, “As if we could stop her.”)
    Lady: Did you know they have built an underground church there that will seat 20,000?
    Max: Yes. I knew something of the sort had been done after we got Adolph and his cronies out of the way. The grotto must be wonderfully profitable.
    Lady: (Ignoring the capitalist observation) Three million pilgrims visit the shrine annually. About 50,000 of those are crippled or very ill.
    Max: My gosh, just think of the post cards, bumper stickers and bobble heads you could sell!
    Lady: What was that?
    Max: Oh, nothing, just mumbling about faith moving mountains. Please go on.
    Lady: You are familiar with the story of Saint Bernadette, aren’t you?
    Max: Of course, of course. My generation saw the movie Song of Bernadette which was based on the book by Fritz Werfel, who by the way, was a German Jew. The rather homely little Marie-Bernarde Soubrious was played by that scrumptious Jennifer Jones.
    Lady: What was that?
    Max: I said that Marie-Bernarde was her original name. Happily, she changed it to Bernadette after she took holy orders; looks a lot better on a marquee. They got four Oscars for that movie, by the way.
    Lady: Sir, are you troubled by Attention-Deficit Disorder? You seem to have trouble staying on a subject.
    Max: Heaven forefend! No, not I. Your story is absorbing. Please go on.
    Lady: (visibly irritated) Anyway, it was an emotional experience. The water works wondrous cures. There are literally thousands of crutches hanging from the wall of the grotto, even wheel chairs left by the disabled who were miraculously cured and walked away on their own two feet. And there are dark glasses and canes worn by the blind before their sight was restored.
    Max: Marvelous! Tell me, how many prosthetics were hanging on the wall?
    Lady: I beg your pardon!
    Max: Prosthetics, prosthetic devices; cork legs, flesh-colored plastic hands, metal hooks.
    Lady: (visibly shocked) What do you mean? There are none of those things there. That would mean the pilgrims had to grow new arms and legs!
    Max: Precisely!
    Lady: You can’t be serious!
    Max: I’m serious as a busted crutch, my dear. Hasn’t your deity gotten off his training wheels? I am appalled to learn that God still hasn’t learned to replace arms and legs.
    Lady: He doesn’t do that!
    Max: That’s my point, doll-face. That God of yours has some serious limitations. After all, curing a case of hysterical blindness is no big deal, any number of televangelists can do that. What I want to know is why some frolicsome lad that gets his legs chopped off by a trolley car can’t go down to Massabielle Grotto, Inc. and get a new pair of legs? Or how about the kid whose mother was on a bad acid trip and poked out his little blue eyes with a needle? What about him getting a new set of eyes? Or maybe the father of six who got his arm torn off in the farm machinery; what does the grotto do for him?
    Lady: The waters can’t restore limbs that are lost. That’s impossible!
    Max: You are saying your omnipotent God can’t replace an arm that he caused to grow in the first place?
    Lady: Of course he can. God can do anything. He created the universe.
    Max: But you’re saying that despite loving all of us, he picks and chooses. Otherwise, he’d have as much pity for the kid that got run over by the trolley as the kid who can’t walk because of the psycho-trauma induced paralysis left over from being molested by his strange uncle. If he can create a universe that’s millions of light years wide, surely he can let that little kid born with a spinal curvature so bad he has to crawl on all fours go get some of that water and straighten up, maybe play a little ball with the neighborhood kids.
    Lady: I’ll not listen to this.
    Max: (to her back), Lady, I’m just asking why. You should explain it to me. Some kid gets born that looks like a monster and can’t even feed himself and God says, “Oops, luck of the draw, kid. Sorry!” Why is that? It looks to me that more than anything, that grotto is a monument to the limitations of your Christian God.
    Lady: (Receding in the distance toward the hors d’oeuvre table) Harumph!
    Max: Gosh! She got away before I could ask her if it’s just that God has a rather dark sense of humor. That would explain a lot.

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    Max added a footnote to this parable. He notes that the 14-year old Bernadette saw her visions of the Blessed Virgin a dozen and a half times in 1858. But when she told her story, her parents and local priests were skeptical. However, when the Vatican got wind of it, things happened fast. By 1862, the Massabielle grotto cult was approved, fully chartered and in business.
    Max says that if you put “Lourdes” into your search engine, you get the Grotto’s web site and you can order vials of the water to be shipped to you to use as you see fit, all major credit cards accepted.

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