Una O'Hagan
Photo: The Irish Sun A well-known journalist who has written a new book about Lourdes with her husband has spoken of the miraculous feeling of “peace and calm” after her son passed away. On RTÉ 1’s Sunday with Miriam, Una O’Hagan described the “enormous sense of peace and calm” she felt after her son Seán died from cancer in 2007.
When asked why not everyone receives a miraculous healing at Lourdes she said: “Maybe the miracle is not avoiding death, or not avoiding great illness, sometimes a bigger miracle can be coping with it.
“Getting a sense of serenity, which you can get in Lourdes. A miracle automatically in a lot of people’s minds is: I was ill, now I’m fine. I think you need a bigger definition of what a miracle can be.”
Loss
Presenter Miriam O’Callaghan asked if she has this belief because of the loss of her son, to which she replied, “no, because I wouldn’t want to believe in a falsehood – what’s the point of doing that?’
“We’ve been through a traumatic time and yet we still believe. We saw what Seán went through, and after he died there was an enormous sense of peace and calm and an enormous sense that he had travelled on to somewhere else,” Mrs O’Hagan said.
She added that sceptics might say it’s impossible and has no explanation “but they weren’t in the room with us and they didn’t feel that, and nobody can contradict me on that”.
Mrs O’Hagan and her husband Colm Keane recently published their book on Lourdes entitled The Village of Bernadette.