Pilgrimage of Lourdes 2025: Follow the on -board book of our Assumptionist journalist

“Me it’s Chantal!” At the end of a conference, Chantal comes to present with eagerness. In her armchair, pulled by a young hospitality a little in a hurry, Chantal wants to make it known that she appreciates so much the reading of the pilgrim. A shared joy therefore. Originally from Montpellier, Chantal is a retiree who seems happy. “I live in a house managed by habitat and humanism. We are there for several generations. Retirees, sick people, students. It’s a good place for me. “

Opportunity to remember that Lourdes is also for some, one of the rare opportunities in the year to get out of his partitioned daily life to take a little air. An appointment which then becomes a necessary breathing and a desired horizon, especially when the daily life of the rest of the year is sad or rough. So, the pilgrimage becomes an appointment and an opportunity to find friends made in the years among the volunteers, the residents of the hotel or the hospitals of a service. With some, moreover, letters have exchanged. As with a member distant from the family.

It is a funny party that the one that is celebrated on the day of the Assumption. At the heart of summer, while parish life is often a little idle, communities of locals, passing families, tourists and people who have passed there by chance. Often around a small Marian sanctuary, a copy of the Lourdes cave or in a church where a statue of the Virgin has been revered for a long time. Sometimes it is also an opportunity to reopen a small chapel, closed all the rest of the year. We then change the flowers that have faded, raised in brown vases without water. And we give a boost to get the dust out of days and the smell of withdrawn.

Others celebrate outdoors, around an altar on which moss or ivy have hitherto taken their ease. There are also sometimes old sources that are released from branches and ex-voto on rocky walls that are rid of the lace of the cobwebs. At the heart of summer, the feast of Assumption comes to tell us about heaven, in our granaries of past devotions and forgotten prayers. Who could have thought that a creator could “assume” his creatures, to the point of sharing with them the grace of being? It probably took this frail little girl, crossing the bare feet the rude to look for wood in this rocky trough, so that this muddy world from below could experience a glowing source. In Lourdes, it looks like and it is visited. It is sowing and it trusts. It starts and it keeps in his heart. Winter takes on summer. And spring assumes fall. On this day, huge crowd or small herd, the sky comes to visit the earth.