The Blessing of the Sick

The Places We Carry Our Wounds

I am just wrapping up my time in France, and just yesterday I spent most of my day in Lourdes, one of the world's largest pilgrimage sites for healing, with millions of visitors each year.

Lourdes is not the only place we visit in search of healing. We take refuge in churches, chapels, synagogues, temples, and shrines, often in our own neighborhoods, and for some, even in our homes. There are also pilgrimage sites across traditions where we travel because sometimes it feels like our chance of glimpsing the extraordinary is greater if we leave our ordinary surroundings.

Each night during the pilgrimage season (April through October) at 5 pm, there is the Eucharistic Procession with the Blessing of the Sick. Pilgrims who are ill, disabled, elderly, or fragile are brought forward in wheelchairs, on stretchers, and in carts almost like rickshaws by their caregivers and hundreds of volunteers. This happens every single day of the season.

I had the blessing of spending the hour before the procession roaming the Grotto area, the place where Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette 168 years ago. I sat on the riverbanks and watched as pilgrims prayed the Rosary in a different language every half hour in front of the Grotto, while behind them, others walked slowly past the site of the apparition, trailing their hands along the stone and the water that seeps through its cracks.

I think we all long to find a place like that. A place where we can bring our wounds, seen or unseen, and offer them for healing. A place that holds the hope that our suffering is not permanent. Catholic or not, Lourdes is a powerful symbol. In Lourdes, the water becomes a sign of healing, mercy, and grace. In Mecca, millions move together in surrender and belonging. Along the Ganges in Varanasi, people gather at the water's edge for release and renewal. At the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the weight of our prayers is pressed into the stone in small folded notes, offered in trust. There are so many more such places, most I will likely never have the privilege to visit. But yesterday, I was at Lourdes.

When We Forget We're on a Pilgrimage

The pilgrimage itself is something I have thought about more than I realized. The human need to make a journey toward the sacred. Whether that journey looks like building a business while raising children, or traveling to the other side of the world, sometimes we forget we are on a pilgrimage at all and begin to move through life more like tourists: filling the hours with distraction, photographing our meals, sharing our experiences before we've fully had them. And yet somewhere underneath it all, we know our moments will not last forever and that another kind of journey is quietly unfolding. The same thing happens on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. We find ourselves taking in new sights and sending pictures home, but all along, something in us knows: this is not tourism. The journey is sacred.

Consider

How often do we answer the question "Who are you?" with where we live and what we do, as if to say, that is all we are? Or perhaps we answer that way because we are quietly checking to see if we are winning the race of life with the person asking?

How often do we rush to share our accomplishments or adventures with the world before we have sat inside them, held them, let them change us?

How often do we move through the world as its main character, seeing the people around us as supporting cast rather than fellow pilgrims on their own journey and remember we are there to support them?

The Labyrinth

When I first envisioned Alumah, it came to me as a labyrinth.

I love labyrinths. For me, they are themselves a form of pilgrimage. I like to enter one with a question held quietly in my mind, sometimes a problem, sometimes a request for guidance, and most often a heady question of how am I to do this? As I walk, I try to let my mind settle and follow the path. I try to focus on the moment instead of worrying about my question, the feel of the ground as I walk, the smell of the air, and stones along my path. When I reach the center, if I have not hurried too much, I am ready to sit with the question and surrender. It is in that stillness that I sometimes hear the whisper of my own heart and, it usually surprises me. I hear a blessing. A gentle nudge to let go. A voice that says, "Do not fear, all is well." Sometimes I hear the next step clearly. And sometimes, for just a moment, I feel the beauty and mystery of the Divine working herself out in my life. If this happens, I can remember the next feeling is usually one of being humbled by my role, which is really just to be available, to be of service, to be a witness of the beauty of God. On the way back out of the labyrinth, I hold in my heart what I was given in the center as I walk, and pray it takes root. I step back into the ordinary world, but at least for a moment with the reminder that everything is extraordinary, if I am just willing to see it.

My first vision of Alumah was exactly that: a labyrinth. And when I reached the center in that vision, it lit up illuminating the entire path from the center outwards as it flipped into a new perspective. I couldn't speak about what I had been given for months, I didn't have words for it. The people in my inner circle for months leading up to the sale of my company told me I would build an app again; I adamantly denied it, it was the last thing I wanted to hear and the last thing I wanted to do. Only two days after the close of the sale, I saw that vision of the labyrinth and all I could say was that they were right. I couldn’t answer their questions if I tried, the new idea needed time to take root in me. But in my heart I understood that the purpose of whatever I built was to help myself and others navigate the labyrinth of our daily lives and minds in order to reach our hearts, the center of the labyrinth so that we might live with more courage, more presence, more meaning, and more love. I didn't yet know what it would look like or how I would do it, but I began right away.

That was just over a year ago. Alumah now has a name and is beginning to emerge. Nine months ago we finished the design, six months ago we went live with our first release into the app stores. But, it was only two months ago that I first understood what I was building: something made primarily to empower the coaches and teachers of this world. Alumah is for us individuals too of course but I was putting a pressure on doing something that wasn’t mine to do. Just as I have prayed most of my life to be an empty vessel of grace, my part in Alumah is to build the container and to allow others to fill it with their own wisdom, so that daily practice and reflection can become transformation. I don't know exactly how it will all unfold. But I know it will, because it already has begun. And what a gift it is to not be able to take credit for any of it, instead my job is simply to witness the unfolding of something sacred.

What the Procession Taught Me

Which brings me back to the Blessing of the Sick.

As I mentioned, I spent an hour alone in reflection before the procession began, sitting on the riverbank with the Grotto ahead of me and the sound of pilgrims praying all around. I heard singing behind me. I walked toward it and found a bench in the shade, where I watched the volunteers preparing for the procession. They were singing, dancing, and celebrating with a joy so full it was contagious. I couldn't help but sway and hum along.

My heart was full, but I didn't yet understand why.

Not twenty minutes later the procession began, and I realized many things in an instant.

I saw the Divine in every face that was passing me.

I watched the volunteers, the same ones who had just been singing and laughing, now quietly pushing wheelchairs and walking alongside the sick and the suffering. And I understood: we are all just walking each other home. I remembered their joy and remembered how there is so much joy in the honor of being a guide and support for another.

I saw those who could not walk and thought about all the times in my own life I have felt unable to take the next step on my path.

I thought of those who cannot see and how rarely I truly see what is right in front of me.

I saw those suffering from illness and thought about the ways I have, in my own quiet way, resisted my truest self.

What I want to be clear about is this: I did not look at those pilgrims and think I was somehow better, or spared, or apart from them. I understood that they were angels of grace, that their willingness to make their suffering visible was a gift to all of us. A reminder that we share in this. That we are not alone in our wounding nor are we alone in our healing, we are all one.

And the thought that we are all just walking each other home returned again, and my heart broke open.

I wept. I wept from the love I felt, from gratitude at being present in that moment, from the quiet honor of having something to offer and someone to serve, for the knowledge that I too have my guides walking me home, and from a small glimpse into the beauty of the mystery of this life.

What a privilege it is to be alive.

If something in this piece stirred something in you, a question you've been carrying, a longing for a place to begin, that is worth sitting with. You don't have to travel anywhere to find the center of the labyrinth. Sometimes it's closer than you think.

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