The two notions are distinct, and refer to separate events, though the confusing of them, or the mistaking of one for the other, is understandable, due to their relation in name and association, and the merging they have undergone in the popular imagination.

I should say something about what is meant by the Immaculate Conception, as it is often confused with the Virgin Birth.

Which isn’t to celebrate an absence of learning for its own sake, as if that were a good in itself, but only to say that God tends to smile on the pure of heart, regardless of whether they are brilliant of mind, for in purity one is closer to the childlike humility that allows a soul to approach the environs of divinity where virtue thrives and joy proliferates.

It is telling, for example, that Bernadette Soubirous, who was so sickly as a child that she could not attend school with regularity, had neither the powers of vocabulary, nor the intellectual presumptuousness, to refer to the series of apparitions, during the fortnight that she experienced them, as anything more grandiose than aquero (Occitan for “that”). And that, initially, she had no understanding of what was meant by the phrase “I am the Immaculate Conception,” which was uttered to her, in her own native tongue, by the ‘young lady’ of her visions (after Bernadette herself had been pressed by a local priest, as the apparitions progressed, to inquire as to the lady’s name), so that she’d had to repeat the words to herself, over and over, phonetically, as she hurried back to the village from the grotto that day, so that she would not forget how to pronounce them, and would be able to communicate them to the ecclesial authorities who had taken an interest in her case, and who, to some degree, till then, had doubted both her honesty and her soundness of mind (though of course she still had doubters afterward, too).

You will notice, for example, where Marian apparitions are concerned, that it is always to those with the most unassuming of natures, and a faith that hasn’t been compromised by the intellectualizations to which adults are prone when their egos have been flattered, and their sense of their own importance has been exaggerated, that God is pleased to make explicit an instance of his will, by way of a vision of, and message from, Our Lady.

It is, perhaps, this willingness to function as an instrument for providence, not in a mindless way, but with the humility and simplicity of a child who would bring to bear, on a particular task, all the imperfect power of their talents and intelligence, that, of all the traits that saints can be said to share (regardless of their differences in temperament, personality, or aptitude, or any other category of chance that produces their variety), is the most important.

And, again, of Bernadette Soubirous, who, some years after she’d experienced the Marian apparitions at that grotto in France that came to be known for the healing power of its water, and she herself had entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Charity, where she’d spend the rest of her life, working in an infirmary, and as a sacristan, once said, not with chagrin but with the frankness and simplicity that was typical of her, when asked about the occurrences that had brought to her renown, “The Virgin used me as a broom to remove the dust. When the work is done, the broom is put behind the door again.”

To illustrate, it was Thérèse herself who said, “I prefer the monotony of obscure sacrifice to all ecstasies. To pick up a pin for love can convert a soul.”

I think of Thérèse of Lisieux, for example, the French Carmelite nun who, wishing to be holy, but recognizing that her cloistered life, in a convent, precluded works of great scope, or influence, discovered what she called the ‘little way,’ which, to her mind, meant finding within the realm of small gestures, personal interactions, and private or unwitnessed existence, the endlessness of occasion through which virtue, rather than sin, can be manifested.

In short, there are saints who would seem larger-than-life, like Joan of Arc, or Mary Magdalene, or Francis of Assisi, and while it is true that these have a specific kind of importance, in the ecclesial sense, as well as, perhaps, in the cosmic or eternal sense, insofar as they might even inhabit a special nearness to the seat of divinity, relative to other souls who attend to the beatific vision (though that is a point of theology I don’t feel is my prerogative to explore), there are also saints who might strike us as more ordinary, less bound to a transcendent reputation, because their feats seem less astounding, and more down-to-earth, which isn’t to say that they themselves are less venerable, or that the ‘larger-than-life’ figures are less accessible to us, or less real.

Which isn’t to make a hierarchy where one is unnecessary, or to imply the presence of one where one may not exist, but to distinguish again, I suppose, between sanctity as it avails itself to every person who becomes incarnate in the world, and the communion of saints as it is articulated and recognized by the various denominations of the Church, for the hope and inspiration it affords, very generally, but also for specific things like its intercessory power in heaven, where it persists in the beatific vision, and the protection and guidance that might obtain to those pilgrim souls, throughout creation, who would seek among its number those ‘patrons’ to whom they have a special devotion, and might address themselves in prayer.

Even if, perhaps, it is the lives of those saints who are well-known, and who have been, as it were, ‘canonized,’ rather than those who are hidden in the mists of time, known only to God (and to the few souls with whom they were acquainted), that are most likely to kindle a person’s faith, or encourage a person in the faith when that person is struggling, and is assailed by doubt. Insofar as the imagination is captured more easily, and brought to reverie, by saints whose biographies are specific, and exist within a tradition, than saints who are intangible, and whose stories must be constructed in the absence of one.

Though, of course, the life of any saint tends to bring on itself attention; for there is, in the abandonment of the self to the will of God (as it makes itself known in the sphere of reality that the particular saint inhabits), a summoning of virtue that will allow the saint to do things that are surprising; and that, try as that saint might to unbind those things from the arena of their personhood, for the sake of modesty and discretion (which is not a false modesty but true, insofar as a person can be a channel for good, but not an originator of it), will cause those around them to notice. Which is to say, I suppose, that no saint means to ‘hide their light under a bushel,’ and that to distinguish between modes of sanctity, as I have done in the previous entry, is not to compare or adjudicate holiness, for that would be absurd, but to recognize that providence can make a saint out of anyone, wherever and however it finds them, and that the historical record is only a glimpse of the fullness of history.

One might even say that the latter (the steady, unrecognized plodding) is closer to the precincts of God, even if, in the instances of its unfolding, it is not as visible to the masses, and to recorded history, as is the former, which draws to itself, by the flash of its color and its brightness, the gaze of a public that is susceptible to the tropes of heroism that would place such a life in the collective memory of a culture or civilization.

And, anyway, each person must work out their own salvation; and it makes no difference whether we do so through heroics, which are intense, but tend to be over quickly, or through the steady, unrecognized plodding that might describe, through its hiddenness, the lives of many saints.

Because to be near to the saints is to imitate them, and to imitate them is to attempt to replicate their virtues. Which may be, like, the way of a novice, or a beginner, but that is ok, there is nothing wrong with that, we are all beginners in the spiritual life, and the moment we start to think otherwise is the moment our spirituality begins to collapse on itself, due to the sin of pride.

Not that I would think I’ve responded very well to that influence (if in fact I’ve been subject to it) but that I’ve been trying now for some time, and want to continue to try. Because I love these saints and admire them, and know that by remembering them, and keeping them near to my memory and my consciousness (I guess you could say my ‘heart’), I can draw closer to what Catholics refer to as the Divine Will (or what generally might be described as the the will of God), and live more in accordance with it.

All of which I mention as a way of describing, I hope, why I feel that the saints (in this case Bernadette) can sometimes bring a person into the orbit of their influence, even before the person in question is aware that it has happened, or, for that matter, has intended for it to happen.

Because how can it be otherwise, really, if you are willing to grant to the saints the reality that the Church accords them? The invocation, by name or by iconography, of a person who is deceased is no trifling matter to those who are convicted of a supernatural realm, which Catholics certainly are. To invoke such a person is to invite them to ‘watch over’ you and guide you, whatever that ‘watching over’ and guiding will mean.

Meaning, I began to have an acquaintance and a familiarity with Bernadette almost before I was aware of it; so that, several years later, after I’d gone to college and had started grad school, and had begun to be interested in writing and art, and had drifted from the faith (even if I hadn’t abandoned it completely), I would, on encountering her story or her name in some piece of literature or iconography, recall the fact that I’d spent four years in a school that owed its identity to a place whose renown was attached to a very mysterious and beautiful event that had happened to her. And I would feel, in retrospect, that all along I’d been brought under the gaze or the shadow of her influence. As had everyone else who had spent, or would spend, their formative years there (even if the same thought never occurred to them).