Today is the feastday of Our Lady of Lourdes, and next week, Lent starts with Ash Wednesday. In Lourdes, France, in 1858, Our Lady appeared to a little shepherdess, Bernadette Soubirou, in a cave, to give her and through her the world a much-needed message.

I talked to my kids last night about Heaven and what it will be like. I heard many different ideas, one of which was a behemoth Nutella bowl! There was a general feeling of wonder, and I saw varied ordinary human reactions to a mystery. We all agreed that somehow God will make us perfectly happy, and we will experience pure joy. Then I told the story of St. Francis and Brother Leo when St. Francis answers the question of what perfect joy (true happiness) is. Saint Francis and Brother Leo are walking in the cold, and they are tired, cold, and hungry after traveling a very long way when Saint Francis asks Brother Leo to write down for the friars what is perfect joy. He tells Brother Leo that if the friars were great missionaries, converting millions, performing great miracles making lame walk, blind see and raised the dead, knew all about the natural world, could explain all of scripture, fortell the future and see the innermost of souls it would not be perfect joy. Poor Brother Leo, cold, hungry, and tired, then asks what pure joy is, and Saint Francis tells him that, when they finally arrived at the monastery, the monks would turn them out as robbers, if they beat them and accused them of everything evil, and Brother Leo and Saint Francis took this in humility and peace, it would be pure joy!

During my husband’s week of teacher orientation at the college he worked, the teachers were educated in the life philosophy of “enlightened self-interest”, which proposed that true happiness is attained by a sort of calculated give and take where the core of motivations is to get satisfaction. In this secular world, it is near to impossible to even conceive of the idea of self-giving that has God as its goal. That is because, on our own, left to our own, we cannot, in fact, conceive of such an idea. The real Love, and true happiness, pure joy, is a mystery. We need that mystery revealed to us to know it, to even think of it, envision it, imagine it. We couldn’t do it on our own. The subtler animal of the Garden of Eden attempted to reveal a Mystery to Eve, but he gave an aping ugly thing, a worm in the apple, to her instead. Only God knows and can give us happiness because He IS that mystery! The plan of action that would give Eve happiness the serpent fabricated and poor simple Eve fell for was only death and despair.

When Our Lady came to little simple Bernadette Soubirou, She told her, “penance, penance, penance!” Now, when most of us hear those words, we think, “Ugh, fasting, suffering…” and we are suspicious of our Mother. But what She did to cry out that word was to give us the only weapon against death and despair. She was really crying “happiness, happiness, happiness!”

I said to my kids, “you already know what Heaven is, what true happiness is, any time you do a true act of charity, when you, let’s say, pick up little brother’s toys just to make him happy without any thought of “what’s in it for me”, and fully aware that he will play with the toys and make a mess in a blink of an eye.  This is penance, this is true happiness, and this is what is a dangerous weapon in the hands of a child because it brings God right into the playroom.

We are in a spiritual battle. The serpent doesn’t want us to bring God to us. He wants our death and despair and utter defeat. But Our Lady knows how to protect her children. She comes with the mystery of Love and gives Him to us.

The childlike Saint Therese of Liseux said she would spend her Heaven doing good things on earth. I told my kids, “You know, it makes sense she would do good things on earth in Heaven because she had Heaven on earth!”

That’s what Our Lady’s cry, through the mouth of little Bernadette, means. If we rally to her, if we do self-less acts of love, of Charity, God will be amidst us, and we will be in Heaven already on earth.