My family loves the Saints immensely. Throughout my childhood, we collected quite the celestial contact list for physical ailments: Saint Blaise for the throat, Saint Apollonia for teeth, Saint Junipero Serra for leg difficulties, and Saint Andre Besette for tummy trouble. Some of the Saints on our list are official Church patrons of these medical situations, while others became our personal intercessors simply based on details from their lives.
In society today, emotional health has gained ground alongside the physical. We speak more about psychological wounds and seek to soothe the inner child in us. With the help of counseling, spiritual direction, mentors, and good friends, we can identify patterns and hurts that stem from past trauma and seek healing. In light of this, I wonder whether we will soon have a detailed litany of holy helpers for wellbeing in psychology and matters of the heart, just like we do for bodily health.
If certain Saints do emerge as intercessors for specific interior struggles, I hope Saint Bernadette might be patron Saint of those healing from mother wounds.
A Distant Childhood
I discovered Saint Bernadette as a very little girl. There was a lovely animated movie about her that I knew by heart, and I would often pull an apron, shawl, and white taper candle from my costume box to dress like her. Yet I only heard more closely about her childhood on the cold, clear morning last October when I visited the Museum of Saint Bernadette in Lourdes, France.
When Bernadette was not even a year old, her mother Louise suffered a severe burn injury that left her unable to nurse her daughter. Little Bernadette was sent to be nursed by another woman in their town for almost a year and a half. Bernadette’s father Francois visited her frequently during this time, but Louise did not, as her recovery proved challenging.
Restored to her parents, two-year-old Bernadette did not return to a childhood of sunshine. Francois and Louise had just lost their infant son. In time, more siblings joined the family, and Bernadette became the eldest daughter in the bustling but poor Soubirous household. Her early childhood had altered Bernadette’s relationship with her parents, our tour guide told us. In the years to come, Bernadette had a closer relationship with her father than she did with her mother. A separation had occurred: We might call it a mother wound.
Daughters of Eve
We hear much about “father wounds” in psychotherapy and even in Christian circles, because many who had difficulty with their earthly fathers struggle to know the Heavenly Father. Wounds from a maternal parent might not be spoken of as often, yet I believe a certain type of mother wound affects all women. It originated in the same place that our fundamental father wound did: in the garden of Eden.
At the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Eve chose to grasp for knowledge and control, stepping out of the respect proper to her identity as daughter and the receptivity proper to her role as woman. When the serpent whispered, Did God really forbid you? You know that really means that He’s withholding something desirable from you, Eve’s heart wavered. Doubting God, she concluded that He was withholding something important from her.
Because of this, Adam and Eve’s fall not only inflicted a relational wound between us and our Heavenly Father, but also affected something essential to womanhood. All of Eve’s daughters would inherit an identity wound from her. It is a mother wound because it springs from “the mother of all living” (see Genesis 3:20) and stands in conflict with the virtues of woman’s maternal nature.
Sisters, this wound manifests itself in our own craving for control. We must take care to guide others rather than to grasp, and to show prudent foresight, not preoccupation with the future. We are called to curb our fallen tendencies by seeking God’s will with prayer and surrender.
Thankfully, there is hope! We can reject these vices and replace them with maternal virtues. A new Mother came to reclaim these tender and fundamental parts of the human heart. Where the original Eve grasped and doubted, Mary, the new Eve, received and trusted. We ourselves stand at the crossroads between Eve’s control and Mary’s humble confidence in God. How does our Lady draw us to be like her?
A Mother’s Personal Gaze
Back to Lourdes, into Saint Bernadette’s story. In the museum, beneath a luminous image of her, I noticed a quote by Saint Bernadette given in six languages. In May 1871, the girl recalled a lasting impression of her encounter with our Lady: “She looked at me as one person looks upon another.” More than a decade after being visited by the Blessed Virgin, Saint Bernadette still had not forgotten how it felt to be looked upon by those pure, loving, maternal eyes.
With the story of Saint Bernadette’s childhood in my mind, I suddenly felt chills thinking of how deeply our Lady’s loving presence must have touched the fourteen-year-old girl. Bernadette was likely accustomed to being regarded as less than a person. She was no one: ignorant, destitute, beneath the notice of most. I saw this firsthand when I stepped into Le Cachot later that morning, the former jail-chamber where Bernadette and her family lived at the time she saw our Lady. It was tiny: no wider than twenty paces of my own small feet. Battling asthma and poverty while she lived here, Bernadette knew well what cold was. How the warmth of Mary’s gaze must have transformed her!
Rediscovering Our Daughterhood
The same Marian eyes that told Saint Bernadette she was precious and valuable communicate the same to us. Sister, perhaps you have struggled in your relationship with your earthly mother. Perhaps you feel the influence of sinful tendencies that trace back to Eden. Our Lady heals the daughter identity within us so that we can be better women—sisters, mothers, brides. She does this by revealing herself to us as the Immaculate Conception—as God’s pure and chosen daughter—at Lourdes. The beautiful shrine that now stands there is an emblem to our Lady, regal queen and princess-like daughter of the Heavenly Father. The basilica even resembles a castle, reminding us that by Mary’s intercession and God’s grace, we can someday join her in the palace of paradise.
In our Lady’s purest daughterhood, may we, like Saint Bernadette, rediscover our own identity as His worthy, chosen daughters. May we overcome the fallen tendencies inherited from our Edenic mother Eve and grow deeper in the Marian virtues. May our Lady and Saint Bernadette intercede for the parts of our hearts that are tender with family wounds. May we remember that we are held in a maternal gaze that brims with love and receives us as precious persons worthy of healing and Heaven.
Leila Joy Castillo calls Florida home but left her heart in hill country long ago. An alumna of Ave Maria University, she freelances in Catholic communications and is a published writer, primarily on Blessed is She and Ascension. When not dabbling in the multitudinous Google docs of her articles, Leila delights in music, personalist philosophy, quality time with her younger siblings, and her literary trifecta: Austen, Lewis, and Dante. You can find her on Instagram @leila_joyinthejourney or follow her personal site here.
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