Starting
Point Madeleine Delbrel and the ordinary people
By M. BASIL PENNINGTON
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the
Catholic Worker Movement, lived a colorful life advocating for the poor and all
things good.
Now a new book, Madeleine Delbrel: A Life Beyond
Boundaries, by Charles Mann (New World Press, PO Box 640432, San Francisco,
CA 94164-0432), introduces a fascinating woman I can best sum up as a French
Dorothy Day. This colorful little woman (4 feet 10 inches) moved from atheism
to Catholicism only to find her home among the communists of Paris, where she
gathered other professional women around her to live an authentic Christian
community life.
She engaged a mighty pen and a forceful personality, as well as a
certain diplomatic grace and unbounded energy, in all the major social,
political and religious movements that marked France before, during and after
World War II. She was a true humanitarian who loved God intensely and found God
in all the ordinary things in life. Happily, Rome is now studying her cause for
canonization.
Delbrel is hardly known in the English-speaking world (Mann's is
the first biography of her to appear) because none of her writings has yet been
translated. But here are some reflections of hers, not yet available in
English, which I came upon by chance:
"There are some people God calls and sets apart in convents and
monasteries. There are others God calls and leaves in society, the ones God
does not 'withdraw from the world.'
"These are the people who have an ordinary job, an ordinary
marriage or an ordinary celibacy. The people who have ordinary sicknesses and
ordinary sorrows. The people who live in ordinary houses and wear ordinary
clothes. These are the people of ordinary life. The people we meet on any
ordinary street. ...
"We believe that we lack nothing necessary here in the streets; if
we did need something more, God would have already given it to us. ...
"We, the ordinary people of the streets, have the distinct
impression that solitude is not the absence of the world, but the presence of
God.
"Our solitude is the encounter with God everywhere. For us, being
alone in a crowd is participating in the solitude of God.
"God is so great that there is no place for anything else;
everything is within God.
"For us, the whole world is the meeting place with the One whom we
cannot avoid. We encounter God's living plan right there on the busy street
corners. We encounter God's splendor in the laws of nature and science. We
encounter God's imprint on the earth. We encounter Christ in all these 'little
ones' who are his own, the ones who suffer in their bodies, the ones who are
bored, the ones who are troubled, the ones who are in need of something. We
encounter Christ rejected in countless acts of selfishness.
"How could we possibly have the heart to mock these people or to
hate them, this multitude of sinners of whom we are a part?
"Godly solitude is the love of people, it is Christ serving
Christ, Christ in the one who is serving and Christ in the one being served.
How could such activity be for us a distraction from God or mere busyness and
noise?
"We, the ordinary people of the streets, are certain we can love
God as much as he might want to be loved by us.
"We do not think love will be something extraordinary, but
something all-consuming. We believe that doing the little thing in union with
God is as loving as our greatest activities. Besides, we are unaware of the
size of the measurements of our own activities. We know that everything we do
can only be small and everything that God does in us is always great. And so we
go about our activities with a sense of great peace.
"We know that all our work consists of being at peace, one with
God, while not avoiding the very things that need to be done. Basically it is
letting God act through us. ...
"It matters little what we have to do, pushing a broom or a pen,
speaking or listening, sewing a dress or teaching a class, taking care of a
sick person or tapping away at a computer.
"All this is the meeting place of God, minute by minute, the very
place where God's love is revealed."
Madeleine Delbrel deserves to be better known in America.
Trappist Fr. Basil Pennington is living in Hong Kong.
National Catholic Reporter, December 27,
1996/January 3, 1997
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