Water comes in a number of guises in Lourdes. Sometimes we meet it in those torrential downpours that only appear when you have neither an umbrella nor a waterproof. Sometimes it is in the daunting and prayerful experience of the baths. And then again, it can make us clean and quench our thirst at the end of the day. Water can be both destructive (in the first story of the Creation in the Book of Genesis, it stands for the powers of chaos over which God has mastery) and live-giving: no life is possible without it, and yet it can threaten life. It is this ambiguity that gives it its power as a symbol. And we must use the symbol to point us towards the mystery of God. The baths, in which we are not really made clean, but which symbolise our desire to be clean, the taps, which do not quench our thirst, even those wretched rainstorms which underline all too clearly our vulnerability and dependence upon God, all these can be symbols for us of what we are about on this pilgrimage. And it is up to us to make the symbols work.
Scripture reading
John 7: 37-39
On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, "If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’" Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.