Nourishing exchanges

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.