Faith teaches freedom - Madeleine Delbrêl

Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964), an unconventional Frenchwoman who grew from precocious child to bohemian adolescent and from confirmed atheist to Catholic convert. A woman of great compassion and awareness, she was vigorously involved in the major social, political, cultural, and religious movements of 20th-century France. After her conversion, she founded an experimental community of professional women who lived and worked among the French Communists in the Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine. A true humanitarian with a contemplative spirit, she came to love God intimately in the streets, cafes, subways, and people of Paris. Her "Cause for Beatification," the first step to sainthood, is currently under study in Rome. From her writings found in We, the Ordinary People of the Streets is this reflection on faith.

Faith teaches freedom

Vis-a-vis the world that is created to serve him, and vis-a-vis God who created him, man is free. He is free to accept or reject his vocation to live as a human being and his vocation to live as a child of God, but whether he accepts or rejects them depends on his choice.

On the other hand, man does not have the capacity to create. He cannot recreate man: he cannot invent some other child of God. He nevertheless retains the capacity in freedom to live what he was given in a way that degrades, destroys, or falsifies it.

The only thing that counts between us and God is what is free. God judges us according to our choices. Faith is given to that in man that has remained free. It is the science of eternal realities, of all that God has told us about himself and all that he has told us about ourselves.

It is the art of knowing how to do God's will, the science of charity. It governs our choices.

It was given to us so that we might attain eternal life, but that we might do so in time; it was given to us so that we might live God's life, but that we might do so in our human life; so that we might bring about the salvation brought by Christ, but to bring it about in the world and in history.

It is given to us so that we would choose God with human acts; so that we would do God's will in human history, in the human world, with human acts. It is as temporal as we are; it will pass away when we die.

Faith is given to the human being we are on behalf of all the human beings that we are not.

Moreover, faith teaches us that the Christian life should be structured like a living tissue, according to eternal laws, but that it must be lived in the immediate, in the moment, in the particular. We are destined for the eternal love of God. But we can only come to this love in our human life, in the time that belongs to us and others, in the world here and now.

Penetrating Presence of God - Madeleine Delbrêl

From We, the Ordinary People of the Streets, Madeleine Delbrel gives us a penetrating glimpse into the presence of God in our busy lives.

Allowing the Gospel message into our life means letting our life become, in the broad and real sense of the word, a religious life, a life referred to, bound back to, God.  

The basic revelation of the Gospel is the overwhelming, penetrating presence of God. It is a call to encounter God, and God allows himself to be encountered in solitude.

... to find God is to find solitude, because true solitude is spirit; whereas all of our efforts at human solitude are merely relative approaches toward the perfect solitude that is faith.

True solitude is not the absence of people, but the presence of God.

To place our lives before the face of God, to surrender our lives to the movements of God, is to roam free in a space in which we have been given solitude...

If the eruption of God's presence in us occurs in silence and solitude, it allows us to remain thrown among, mixed up with, radically joined to all of the people who are made of the same clay as we are.

~ Servant of God Madeleine Delbrêl 

(Madeleine Delbrel was a French laywoman, writer and mystic devoted to caring for the poor and to evangelizing culture.) - Magnificat August 2014

The Word transforming our life - Madeleine Delbrel

From We, the Ordinary People of the Streets, Madeleine Delbrel gives us a glimpse into being open to the Word and transforming process of spirit and life.

Madeleine Delbrel

The Gospel words are meant to reach into the very roots of our corruption, the depths of which we cannot fathom insofar as we do not know the great heights at which our holiness lies.  We should thus not be surprised at the sad interminable journeys, the deep upheavals that each of these words initiates within us.  We shouldn’t try to hold back this sort of free-fall of the word into our depths.  We need the passive courage that allows it to act within us – "Let it be done to me according to your Word."

And when once a single one of these words has stolen into us, we need to know how to desire communion with all the others, even if this little book seems vast, and our life tiny, narrow, and incapable of bearing it. . . .

The revelation of the Gospel is spirit and life.  Whoever wishes to receive this revelation must listen with her spirit and her life.  Often, we offer it only the “letter” of our lifetime, physical solitude, attempts to evade.  When our way of life becomes an obstacle to the Gospel, we readily believe it is not meant for us, or that only a distorted and falsified version is for us . . . .

From morning to night, every day of  our lives, between the shores of our home, of our streets, of our encounters, flows the Word of God in which God seeks to dwell.

The phrase from the Lord that we picked up from the Gospel at Mass in the morning, or during a ride on the metro, or between two chores, or at night in our bed, should no more depart from us than we would depart from our life and our spirit.

It seeks to fructify, to transform, to renew the handshake we offer, the effort we apply to our task, the look we give to those we meet, the way we react to fatigue, the way we wince at pain, the way we blossom in joy.

Servant of God Madeleine Delbrel 

(Madeleine Delbrel was a French laywoman, writer and mystic devoted to caring for the poor and to evangelizing culture.) - Magnificat May 2014

If we carry too little silence... Madeleine Delbrêl

"Whoever hears my word"

It is because the Word became flesh that we cannot know him without listening to him. But we can know him even less if we do not try to love him as we listen and try to imitate him with our flesh here where we are living his life; and try to follow his Word where it wants to lead us. And his Word wants to lead us into the depths of the alliance between ourselves and God to where the union of our own will with that of God becomes possible, to where it becomes possible for our acts to be his.

If we carry too little silence, too little recollection, to hold this new form of fruit or to enable us to come to touch the secret of the world, we cannot be alive with the mystery of this alliance. And every form of love on earth is merely an image of this great alliance.

It seems impossible to me to imagine a life lived in accordance with the Gospel that does not include both wanting a life of silence and knowing that such a life is essential.

If we pick out from the beginning of the Gospel to the end all the statements Jesus makes about the "Word" of God - all that he says about the conditions needed for it to be "received" and "listened to"; for it to be "kept," for it to be "done," for it to be "announced"; - we will quickly realize that for the "good news" to be known, lived and communicated it must be welcomed, recollected, and carried in the depth of our being.

And if our whole lives have to be made subject to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, if we desire to make all his words as far as possible our guide in the circumstances of our life, this will only be possible if we make creating silence an integral part of our life.

- Madeleine Delbrêl, The Joy of Believing - from the Magnificat