A great Dame and a little saint’s song

I once knew a hairdresser called Anthony or AJ, a Belfast man, who lived with his male partner, and made a point of watching The Song of Bernadette, an old black and white starring Jennifer Jones, at least once a year. He had seen it dozens of times.

I met him when I was living as a religious sister in a Belfast convent. He once asked me how many times I had seen the film. “Um,” I mumbled, “I have never actually seen it.”

He nearly dropped his scissors. “Are you serious? But you’re a nun – you must have seen it! How can you not have seen it?”

“No,” I stammered “My mom used to tell me about the film when I was a child… I just never got around to it…”

I found myself apologising and then confessing. “And I’ve never been to Lourdes either.”

It became a running commentary whenever I visited his shop. “Have you seen The Song of Bernadette yet?”

I confess that I haven’t seen it but I have, like Bernadette, peeled plenty of carrots in the silence of the convent kitchen!

Bernadette

Sadly, Anthony, who was a lovely man and had a premonition he would not live beyond 40, died quite suddenly a few years ago, and as St Bernadette’s relics are touring Ireland and heading north shortly, his memory and his love for this little saint are permeating my thoughts.

I plan to join the pilgrimage of her relics to St Mary’s Chapel Lane, Belfast and remember Anthony’s beautiful soul. St Mary’s features a stunning outdoor grotto in honour of Our Lady of Lourdes, in the heart of Belfast. Thousands are expected to visit and participate in the ceremonies on October 15 and 16. I may even finally watch the film before then.

One thing I will do is listen again to a song that has haunted me since my youth – ‘Song of Bernadette’,  co-written by a trinity of talent: the late Canadian artist Leonard Cohen, and Americans Jennifer Warnes and Bill Elliott, who was born on October 2, the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels.

Singer Bette Midler recorded Song of Bernadette but the best version is the one sung by Warnes herself, whose birth name was Bernadette.

Her siblings preferred Jennifer and within a week of her birth, this name stuck.

I was…thinking about the great saint who held her ground so well, and was not swayed from what she knew to be true”

Warnes was raised Catholic and went to Immaculate Heart College, and (I read recently) even entered a convent in the 1960s before discerning that her vocation lay in music.

Warnes, in 1979, was touring the south of France near Lourdes with Cohen, a Jewish-born truth seeker, when she was inspired to write a series of letters between “the Bernadette she almost was” and the “Jennifer she became”.  “One innocent and the other,” she said, “who had fallen for the world….

“So the song arose in a bus nearby Lourdes. I was…thinking about the great saint who held her ground so well, and was not swayed from what she knew to be true.”

Warnes also revealed that the song was rooted in her longing to return to a place that was “more pure, honest and true”.

“I still long for this,” she said, “and I think others do too.”

The song is very much about the healing power of chaste, spiritual love – in a fallen world, where we are, in the lyrics of the song, “torn by what we’ve done and can’t undo”.

Message

Notably, Cohen, who had a hedonistic streak, and spent five years in a Buddhist monastery in the 1990s, had his own fascination with the saint. As a child in Montreal, his Jewish parents hired a French Canadian nanny who would read him the New Testament at bedtime and speak of St Bernadette. His parents almost certainly would have objected, had they known, but the young Leonard, who loved to hear the stories, never let on.

This beautiful song is rooted in the message of Lourdes, of healing and mercy which was captured so well in the most recent film about Lourdes, The Miracle Club.

Sometimes on our journey,  it is the artist – and those who live outside the rules – who have the most to teach us about the beauty of God, and the healing grace that flows from the heart of God.

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A man walked into a crowded bar. And as he tried to order a drink, another man pushed in, but his female companion scolded him for his rudeness. The woman insisted he buy the man a drink in reparation. It turns out the injured party wasn’t buying just one drink – but a round for eight of his pals. Even so, the woman insisted her husband buy the whole lot before they all sat down together for a memorable afternoon. Who was this remarkable lady? The late great actress Maggie Smith, who passed away, aged 89, last week. I love this story – and also the fact that she intended to end her career as the Grand Dame of Downton Abbey – until she was made an offer she couldn’t refuse: to star in a film about Lourdes. How wonderful her last film was The Miracle Club, a story of redemption.

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I met a man the other day who said he had a very holy Irish Catholic mother who was full of faith.  “She only had one fear,” he said. “And it wasn’t death!”  What was it, I asked? “Reincarnation. She didn’t want to come back to this world!” The way this world is going – who could blame her?