‘Lourdes is my favourite place in the whole world!’ marvelled the young girl. ‘Lourdes has brought me to Jesus,’ recognised the searching teenager. Lourdes is the closest place I have to home,’ the emerging adult believes. Though such reactions could represent many a pilgrim’s evolution alongside the small Pyrenean town, they are in fact symbolic of my own appreciation of Lourdes, from my childhood until today. A ‘Lourdes baby’, my roots are deeply intertwined with the holy sanctuary: the place bound my parents in eternal union in 1987, out of which I came into the world two years later. I cannot remember a time when Lourdes was not in my life. It has always been there, a prominent drumbeat or a gentle whisper in the back of my mind. All my truest longings have been satisfied there.

            If such wonders of faith, fellowship and joy are exclusively tied to Lourdes, then has it in fact been a curse in disguise, leaving me miserable and dissatisfied when I leave it? Here, I have experienced the greatest miracle of Lourdes. Just as the stream dug 150 years ago by Bernadette continues to play its happy tune within the walls of the Grotto, so does the Lourdes-injected source in each pilgrim – the inner flowing of water, nourishing parched souls and dry minds – never ceasing, regardless of the passing of time. Lourdes pierced my soul as a willow branch softly penetrates a still pool, sending ripples through it, gradually larger, well-defined and all-consuming.

Within the small amount that I have been able to return to this sacred haven, the most worthwhile action is perhaps this project. Producing this book has taken me on an uneven path from interviewing, a far subtler art than I could have imagined, and transcribing, which required extreme listening, to selecting and assembling. Over the five month period between September 2007 and January 2008, I experienced intense human interaction and quiet solitude, understanding and misunderstanding, smiles of delight and tears of misery. To hear from the victims themselves of cases of murder, abuse, illness, and suicide, amongst many other tragedies, was all too much. I would spend masses in deep emotion, my eyes glued on the large, wooden cross above the altar. There I was, always having profoundly disliked horror films or depictions of evil, writing my own!

Yet, with Lourdes came healing, with healing came hope, with hope came love, and with love came God. This was the deepest meeting I have ever had with God and perhaps ever will. I was seeing Him in action amongst pits of gloom that no-one would consciously enter into, total darkness that seems to anticipate nothing but itself, and blood-red pain which would scorch anyone touched by it. Lourdes had transformed these people’s lives and, in doing so, changed my own forever. My prayer is: ‘Thank you Our Lady for this privileged time with you.’ Now that I know the beginnings of what faith truly tastes like, what pain resembles and what wonders God can achieve, I can walk through the gates of Lourdes with an understanding that here, in this valley of song and tears, a ‘big bang’ is in operation, scattering sin and sorrow to distant lands, where people are entering as dark and weary souls, and exiting, clothed with robes of luminous white.