Hope, O My Soul
Lourdes, mid-life, and the battle against spiritual attrition.
“Hope, O my soul, hope. You know neither the day nor the hour.
Watch carefully, for everything passes quickly,
even though your impatience makes doubtful what is certain,
and turns a very short time into a long one.”
~ Saint Teresa of Avila
Nearly two decades ago, when my husband and I were in the thick of our battle with infertility, we took a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Kneeling before the grey limestone crags and crevices of the Massabielle Grotto, we begged God for a baby. We begged again while processing around the shrine that night, reciting the rosary by candlelight with thousands of singing fellow pilgrims. We even breathed our plea during our respective ice-cold baths in the healing waters the Blessed Virgin directed Saint Bernadette Soubirous to claw out of the mud 167 years ago this month.
We didn’t arrive home to a miracle. I didn’t get pregnant the next month, or the next. Years passed; babies didn’t come. To all outward appearances, our pilgrimage of hope had been a flop.
Something happened to me at Lourdes, though, a little Godwink I never forgot. I described it in my 2012 memoir, My Sisters the Saints:
… I [was] milling about the back of the old Lourdes church on the last day of our visit, surrounded by people speaking in every language but my own. Suddenly, I overheard Luke’s Gospel being read in English, coming from behind a little side door I barely had noticed when I entered the sanctuary. The snippet I heard was from the Annunciation, where Gabriel tells Mary of Elizabeth’s miraculous pregnancy: “And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible for God” (Luke 1:36–37). Those words —“nothing will be impossible for God”— rang in my ears, and I felt sure that Mary had meant for me to hear them.
That intuition proved true. Three years after our Lourdes pilgrimage, when I had all but given up on becoming a biological mother, I conceived twins. Although what followed was “a nightmarish, harrowing pregnancy,” as one neonatologist put it, my husband and I welcomed a healthy baby girl and boy at the end of it. Another girl and boy followed over the next few years.
Now every February 11, on the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, I tell my children the story of what I overheard in that old French church. If I forget to tell it—as I did yesterday—they remind me.
I wish I could say I’m always swimming in gratitude on that feast, on my knees thanking God for His gifts with as much fervor and devotion as I begged for those gifts in the first place.
Truth is, while I’m still on my knees, I’m usually more focused on puzzling over where God is now and what He’ll do next than on praising His past faithfulness. The longing for babies has given way to the bustle of raising teens, and daily life has become a high-wire, sandwich generation juggling act. Bigger kids have brought bigger worries, more complex parenting problems and homeschool challenges, and far higher stakes for both success and failure.
Meanwhile, the demands of the outside world have shot up right alongside my four, fast-growing kids—aging parents, work commitments, obligations to friends, faith community, and the wider world. Crises seem to hit from every direction these days, and just as life seems to be demanding more than ever from me, my body is feeling the effects of middle age: runner’s knees that go snap-crackle-pop as I ascend stairs, joints that ache if I sit too long. As my kids race toward the peak physical strength and independence of young adulthood, I’m beginning my inexorable slide in the opposite direction. And no amount of strength training, mindful eating, or daydreaming about all those free writing hours I’ll have as an empty nester can change that.
No wonder the fictional senior demon in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters described middle age as “excellent campaigning weather” for Satan. By middle age, the mature Christian has passed through many of life’s most dramatic and obvious temptations. Yet other, subtler ones beckon:
You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it – all of this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.
Wearing out our souls by attrition—it’s an arresting image, and all too apt. If the Devil can’t entice us into flashy sins of the flesh or acts of apostasy, he’ll settle for luring us into cynicism, self-pity, or doubts about God’s goodness. Those traps are natural human responses to relentless stress, which seems to be the very definition of modern parenthood in a hyper-competitive, image-obsessed culture always goading us to do more and reminding us of how we fall short. As a relative my age told me recently, after recounting her life as a busy mom caring for a houseful of kids, schlepping teens across vast distances for college tours, watching over her elderly parents and a disabled adult relative, and meeting deadlines at the office, “I asked my husband the other day: When is this going to get easier? And he said, ‘Maybe it just won’t.’”
That realization—that maybe things won’t get easier anytime soon; that like it or not, we’re the adults now and no one is waiting in the wings to ease life’s burdens off our shoulders—is at the heart of mid-life spiritual vulnerability. It’s easy, in this pressure-cooker life phase, to feel exhausted, unappreciated, overwhelmed. Add in a high-intensity, long-simmering trial that refuses to resolve or a few nightmare weeks when all of life’s deadlines, dysfunctions, and disasters collide to form a cortisol tsunami and we can feel downright abandoned by God.
When those feelings strike me, I know intellectually that God is still there. I know He has shown up for me time and again, showering me with blessings I don’t deserve, coming through just in the nick of time when all seemed lost. And I believe He can do it again.
Still, I tire of waiting for His help. I resent His silence and apparent inaction. I start to wonder if maybe God, too, has confused my mid-life, busy-mom, plate-spinning act for genuine self-sufficiency. Maybe He’s decided He has better people to help—people more needy or patient than me, people who don’t screw up so often or thank Him so little.
On days when that lie feels like an irrefutable truth, the hope to which I cling—by grace and sheer force of will with zero emotional conviction—feels a smidge silly. Yet Scripture tells me hope counts the most on those days. When my prayers seem to go unheard and I have no rational basis to believe a situation will improve yet I keep doing what Jesus told me to do because I trust He’ll bring to completion the good work He began in me (Phil. 1:6), that’s where natural positivity ends and the supernatural virtue of hope begins. As Saint Paul says, “Hope that sees for itself is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance” (Romans 8: 24-25).
My ultimate hope as a Christian, of course, is heaven. As much as God wants to share my burdens and promote my flourishing on earth, the hope that is my “sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Heb. 6:19) is not for better health or happier kids or less stress in the here and now. It’s my hope for eternal life with Christ—and, God willing, with my loved ones, whose own path to heaven can be smoothed by the witness of me clinging to Christ in the midst of life’s storms.
The longer I journey through parenthood, and into middle age, the more I believe my mom had it right when she told me years ago that the key to the spiritual life isn’t passion but perseverance. It’s leaning on Jesus moment by moment, whether He’s sending warm fuzzies or heavy burdens. It’s greeting each new day with hope even when there’s no logical reason to believe it will be better than the last. It’s forgiving and seeking forgiveness, again and again, no matter how weary I am of facing my weaknesses or putting up with the weaknesses of others. It’s striving to be faithful, not successful, as Saint Teresa of Calcutta liked to say, and leaving the results to the Lord.
It’s digging for a spring of water that no one else can see and rubbing mud on your face despite the snickers of the crowd because the Mother of God told you to.
It’s saying yes to an angel who asks you to bear the Son of God when you’re barely out of childhood yourself and not yet married.
It’s standing at the foot of that same Son’s Cross, watching the blood drip from hands you once caressed as you taught Him to tie His sandal strap, letting Him lock eyes with you in His agony as the rest of the world laughs or flees.
Any unbeliever can hope in good times. Real hope begins when the consolations stop. Real hope emerges in the shadow of the Cross.
Maybe that’s why Pope Saint John Paul II described Our Lady of Lourdes as the “Virgin of Hope” when he made his own pilgrimage to the Grotto of Massabielle in 2004, eight months before his excruciating public death from Parkinson’s. Maybe that’s why Pope Francis highlighted Mary, “the Mother of Hope,” in his recent bull proclaiming 2025 a Jubilee Year and calling us to live as “pilgrims of hope” in a world riddled with despair. “Hope finds its supreme witness in the Mother of God,” Francis wrote. “In the Blessed Virgin, we see that hope is not naive optimism but a gift of grace amid the realities of life. … [A]mid the tempests of this life, the Mother of God comes to our aid, sustains us and encourages us to persevere in hope and trust.”
My family and I are headed to France later this spring. We plan to see all the big Parisian sights: the Eiffel Tower, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Louvre. Lourdes is some five hundred miles south, a tiny village far off the beaten path in the French Pyrenees. But we’ll make the trip; we wouldn’t miss it. I promised myself that if God ever blessed me with children, I’d bring them back there someday to say thanks.
The kids can’t wait. They want to see the grotto where Bernadette glimpsed her “Beautiful Lady,” touch the pure waters of that miraculous spring, join that nightly rosary procession where the sick and disabled lead candle-bearing throngs in singing to the Mother of God.
They also want to see the old church where their own mother heard God’s word as if for the first time, the place where she discovered—albeit in hindsight—that hope in Him never disappoints.
Thank you for this timely - marvelous and so true - article!...and may you all enjpy every moment in France, most especially Lourdes!!
So beautiful and so relatable. Especially about the hope thing. I can't go into detail but suffice it to say there are many unresolved situations in my life that for all intents and purposes seem impossible - humanly speaking. But I know I need to hold onto hope and yes, persevere (that word actually was one I wrote in my journal while on retreat a few years back) in prayer. It sometimes even feels radical to hope - stubborn even. But I have to find the littlest scrap of it and hold on for dear life. (And also let go at the same time and surrender to God.) I also keep having to remind myself that God says His grace is sufficient for me, for His power is made perfect in my weakness. (And boy do I feel weak a lot of the time.)