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Sister Bauguin |
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I met a lot of remarkable people in France;
Sister Bauguin ranks right up with the best of them.
She was a healer. Not a doctor, nor a nurse, but she had a spiritual gift for making sick people better. She knew her way around the herbalist’s unofficial pharmacopoeia, but her gift was more special than that. She was “empathique,” able to discern the symptoms of others by feeling them in her own body. So she always knew, at some cost to herself, just what she was dealing with. The downside of her gift, she explained, was that it put a practical limit on the help she could offer to people with really serious symptoms. She couldn’t give much help to people in the end stages of cancer, for example, because their pain would disable her. Yes, I was skeptical, too, until maybe the sixth or seventh time that she looked at me and declared infallibly and precisely where and how I hurt: which tooth, what part of the head or belly or or foot or back. If I hurt badly and was toughing it out, she’d wince and tell me to sit down while she brewed up some infusion. It usually tasted bad but always helped. I became and remain a grateful believer… |
 Soeur Bauguin |
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One day, after Church, Sister Bauguin said she was troubled and needed some counsel. I was then a counselor in the Branch Presidency; so, we sat down, and she told the story.
Back during the War and the Occupation, when doctors and nurses couldn’t be had at any price, she had soigné a number of wealthy and influential people of the old nobility. Now, a couple of decades later, they were in the habit of sending her Christmas presents–usually expensive bottles of alcoholic spirits. Before she became a Latter-day Saint, she had enjoyed these gifts very much, and she treasured the loving and grateful sentiments of those who sent them. Now, though… what ever was she to do with the growing pile of valuable bottles in her closet? Gee, said I, that’s a real poser, Sister. Let’s both think and pray about it over the next week, and see what we come up with. Next Sunday, she bustled up with a huge grin, saying: “I got my answer! I put all those bottles in my wheelbarrow and took them down to my old parish priest (le curé) and sold them to him. We both got a good bargain.” She hands me an envelope. “Here’s the money; it’s for the Church.” The sum in the envelope would have sustained her household for several months. Note: It’s interesting (and perhaps cautionary) that my journal records a more modest version of this cherished recollection. Maybe both actually happened, but more likely the story has grown in the telling. Wish I could believe myself incapable of confabulating the details that differentiate the two versions, but storytelling is what it is. I actually enjoy both versions. The big picture’s intact, but please don’t hang your testimony on the stability and precision of my memory processes over half a century. And please do me the kindness to believe that I intend no deception. |
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