We are privileged to gather together today for this Mass at the Grotto. We come together on holy ground, on ground hallowed first of all by the encounter between Our Lady and St Bernadette, and subsequently by the presence and the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people who have come here on pilgrimage. We also gather on the feast of one of the greatest and most influential saints in the history of the Church: St Augustine of Hippo, and we are, of course, in communion with all the saints as we celebrate and offer this Mass. The theme this year, here in Lourdes, is: "Keep your lamps lit", and that theme has a special poignancy here at the Grotto since this is a place of lights, a place where people hold candles and light candles, and leave candles, candles which symbolize the prayer, the hopes and longings of those who come here and those for whom we pray. So it is good for us to be here, to be together on holy ground.

The first reading* we heard today, a reading for the feast of St Augustine, is all about love; about our love for God and God’s love for us. We would not be here if we had not been touched by God’s love and if the flame of love for God and for God’s people had not been kindled in our hearts. We see that very practically in those who care for the pilgrims in most need and in their response to those who care for them. Today’s liturgy suggests a connection between the theme of love and the theme of fire, a connection that is deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition and which finds a particular focus in devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which burns with love for us. As we light our own candles, as we carry them in the torchlight procession, we bring to this holy place our own desire to love, our attempts to express love and our need for love. Our capacity for love and our need for love are deeply rooted, they can bear great fruit and do great good. But our love, too, can be disordered, can be selfish and destructive, and we come here, I’m sure, seeking for our capacity to love to be purified. It’s not something we can do by our own efforts: it’s a work of God to which we need to be open, a work of God which the prophet Malachi describes as being like a refiner’s fire. Painful, gradual, but powerful and fruitful. So it was for St Augustine who we commemorate today: someone in whose life God worked powerfully, specifically, in purifying and deepening his capacity for love and eliciting a passionate response to the love of God when he eventually came to faith.

As I said, we celebrate this Mass in communion with all the saints but most especially with Our Lady and she above all illuminates our own lives and our striving to live in love of God and one another. A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, a feast which is intrinsically and inextricably connected with the feast of Easter when we celebrate the resurrection of Christ from the dead. On Easter night we light the most important candle of all, the paschal candle, the symbol of Christ’s resurrection, and at the torchlight procession we lit our candles from the paschal candle. The significance of the feast of the Assumption is that it is the celebration of the fact that a human person, one of our race, has been raised with Christ in glory. The feast of the Assumption, like Easter, is about hope, hope for the purification of our own capacity to love and, consequently, leading on from that, hope for personal resurrection as sons and daughters of God. The Magnificat antiphon for the first Vespers of the Assumption says it all and sums it all up. It is from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans where he says: "Those whom God predestined, he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified, he also glorified."

We come here with our lamps lit, looking for healing, for forgiveness, for new life, for a new start. The lamp of faith and love may be flickering uncertainly but all that is asked of us is that we allow the Holy Spirit, which came upon Mary at the Annunciation and came upon us in our baptism and confirmation, to fan that flame so that it burns brightly, giving us confidence in our place in God’s purposes, bringing us healing and equipping us for what God wants to do through us, and preparing us for the glory that is promised to us. Earlier in the letter to the Romans, St Paul says: "The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." Let us put our faith in that word, allow our love for God to grow strong, and live full of confidence in God’s action and full of hope in God’s promise.

Amen.

* First Letter of Saint John 4:7-16