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“Do you go to Lourdes for a miracle?”
“No, sometimes for reconciliation.”
—The Miracle Club (2023)
All Saints Day is a good day to revisit the movie whose screenwriter recently screened for students at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.
The Miracle Club (currently on Amazon Prime) is the story of three women in a small Irish town who, for their own reasons, wish to travel to Lourdes to experience their own miracle and testament of faith. Their husbands object, but the women go forward with tickets they won at a church raffle. In the midst of their excitement, a woman from their past, the daughter of a friend who died, comes back from America to ostensibly clear out the family home and go back to Boston. The story progresses from there, and I will simply point out the film communicates that the trip to Lourdes may be what is going on, but it is not the story.
The line above, delivered by Dame Maggie Smith, is brilliant in its simplicity. We ask for miracles, in true faith, and we likely are disappointed when that miracle doesn’t come to pass. Perhaps those requests aren’t ours to seek. Perhaps it is enough to ask God for His guidance and His protection. Perhaps what we need is to be present in our needs and listen for the whisper that will take us forward. The reconciliation part may be the self-accounting we do when we are alone, in our prayer space, and our dialogue is between God and us.
There certainly are miracles in our midst, and our faith tells us they are gifts from God, often attributed to the intercession of the saints to whom we pray.
There are the miracles of the sunrise, the sunset, our families, our friends, our surroundings, our own gift of life. There is the miracle at mass of the Transubstantiation of bread and wine into Our Lord’s body and blood. That is the greatest miracle Our Lord has given us. We ask His forgiveness for our slights, our anger, our fretting, our doubts and discouragements and, at times, our despair.
You are I are lifelong members of “The Miracle Club”. We see them and celebrate them every day.
Image: Jan Hager, Flickr
Tom Hoopes, author of The Rosary of Saint John Paul II and The Fatima Family Handbook, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas and hosts The Extraordinary Story podcast about the life of Christ. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, he served as press secretary of the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent 10 years as executive editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in Catholic publications such as Aleteia.org and the Register. He and his wife, April, have nine children and live in Atchison, Kansas.
