Serendipity and the Miraculous Medal
Every year we travel outside the country for vacation, I love traveling to new places and experiencing mini discoveries. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised at what we find! Our most recent trip was to Luxembourg and the neighboring Champagne region in France ending with a two day stay in Paris.
We love to visit cathedrals and sacred places and always include it on our trips. This trip we planned to visit four and ended up visiting eleven! Our last stop was in Paris, and after our first day, my husband passed me his iPad and said, search and see if there is any place you’d like to visit tomorrow, because we don’t have any plans. Of course, I always want to go to sacred places, so I immediately googled sacred destinations.
On one particular site, they listed about 12 places to see in Paris. We’d been to about a third of the big ones already, but one small chapel we hadn't been to caught my eye. It was The Chapel of the Miraculous Medal. The small description about it read, “This Catholic shrine marks the site of three appearances of the Virgin Mary in 1830, which revealed the design for a protective medal.” Similar to Lourdes, this was the actual place were there were visitations of the Saint Mary and it had become a pilgrimage site. Pilgrimage sites are wonderful because they hold strong divine energy from not just the reason for visiting the place but also because so many people go there to pray and receive blessings. This place sounded very interesting, even though it was tiny. The other cathedrals we’d been to were huge and drew big crowds of tourists.