ABSTRACT
This chapter explores healing, rather than curing chronic health problems, at the Marian pilgrimage site of Lourdes in South West France. Significant shifts in contemporary expressions of spirituality, with a focus on self-realization, connectivity and well-being, have led to a new emphasis in scholarship on lived religious experience. Recent studies, in order to separate themselves from the prior medico-miraculous narratives, quite rightly stress a holism of mind, body and spirit. However, in so doing, they have left healing as a generalized concept often synonymous with well-being. Such generalities encourage the naturalized assumption that we all ‘know’ what healing means. Yet careful examination reveals complex nuance: to understand its efficacy healing requires a thorough investigation. To address this, our transdisciplinary, international team, draws on ethnographic observations and 2017 fieldwork data with 67 participants, including recorded in-depth interviews (n=33 people); focus groups (n=10 pairs or groups); and pictorial representations of what people thought was happening to them in Lourdes (n=19 pictures). To analyze this material, we take a methodological approach which is underpinned by phenomenology centred on context, interpretation, and relationship. We identify a nexus of beneficial factors which enable the healing process and couple this with a working definition of healing as a beneficial whole-person interpretive response to and within a context. Through a nuanced examination of our work and exploration of how healing might be understood, we have developed a new model – nourishing exchanges – to consider how the ‘low-tech/high-touch’ environment of Lourdes might provide a new and transferable model for care and holism in a time of chronicity.
