Introduction
Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964), though baptized and communed as a child, started her life as a strident atheist and student of philosophy; when her fiancé suddenly joined the Dominicans and her father went blind, she rethought the problem of God and embraced Catholicism. She dedicated her life to social work, through Scouting and through creating a community of young women (called "the Charity") in Ivry, a small factory town in France, at the time Communist-run. Through her conjunction of social work and deep Catholicism, she is often compared to Dorothy Day. Her spirituality can be summarized by her saying, near the end of her life: "I have been and I remain dazzled by God." Her cause for canonization was opened in 1993, and Pope Francis declared her Venerable on January 26, 2018.
Delbrêl wrote a number of works, including The Holiness of Ordinary People; Humor in Love: Meditations and Fantasies; Missionaries Without Boats; Marxist Town, Mission Field; Woman, Priest, and God; and We Others, People of the Streets. (The last book has been translated into English as We, the Ordinary People of the Streets.) The following passages are excerpted from a French anthology of her writings, fittingly entitled The Dazzle of God.
Our Deserts
When one is in love, one loves to be together,
and when one is together, one loves to speak together.
When one is in love, it is annoying to always have lots of people around.
When one is in love, one loves to listen to the other
all alone,
without other voices that come to bother us.
This is why those who love God
have always cherished the desert, and this is why to those whom He loves
God cannot refuse it.
And I am sure, my God, that You love me
and that, in this so encumbered life,
touched, on all sides,
by family,
friends,
and all the others,
it cannot be absent, this Desert where one meets You.
One never goes into the Desert without passing through many things,
without being worn out by a long road,
without tearing one's eyes away from that which is
their horizon, all the time.
Deserts gain for themselves, they do not give themselves.
The deserts of our life,
we do not rip them out of the secret of our human hours
except by doing violence to our habits, our laziness.
This is difficult, but essential to our love.
Long hours of sleepiness
are not worth ten minutes of true sleep.
So, too, with solitude with You.
Hours of almost solitude are, for the soul, a less grand repose
than an instant plunged into Your presence.
It's not about learning to go for a stroll.
One must learn to be alone every time life gives us a pause.
And life is full of pauses that we can either discover or waste.
On the heaviest, the greyest of days,
what a dazzle for us, to foresee
all these back-to-back pearls.[1]
What joy to know
that we can, towards Your face alone,
lift our eyes
while the porridge thickens,
while the telephone's busy signal buzzes,
while, at the stop, we wait for the bus that's not coming,
while we walk up the stairs,
while we go looking for some chervil leaves at the end of the garden path, to finish the salad.
What an extraordinary stroll will be our return on the metro this evening
when one can no longer see well
the people crossing the sidewalk.
What advances towards You are the delays when one is waiting for a husband, friends, children.
But our deserts have rude defenses, if only just our impatience.
Every impatience over what's not coming is very often the sign of a desert.
If only just our wandering daydreams.
If only just our sluggishness in looking out for empty places.
For we are so beaten
that we cannot prefer You
without a little fight, and so You,
our Beloved,
will always be set on a scale by us, weighed against that well-worn fascination, that well-worn obsession, with our trinkets.
Solitude
To us, people of the street, it seems that solitude is not the absence of the world but the presence of God.
It is meeting Him everywhere that makes our solitude.
To be truly alone is, for us, to participate in the solitude of God. He is so great that He leaves no place for any other except Himself. The whole world is, for us, like a vast face-to-face with God, which we cannot avoid. An encounter with His living causality in the hectic crossroads of movement.
An encounter with His imprint upon earth.
An encounter with His providence in scientific laws.
An encounter with Christ in all those "little ones who are His," those who suffer in their bodies, those who are troubled, those who are disquieted, those who lack something.
An encounter with the rejected Christ, in the sin in a thousand faces. How will we have the heart to mock them or to hate them, these many sinners whom we rub shoulders with?
The solitude of God in fraternal charity: Christ serving Christ. Christ in he who serves, Christ in he who is served.
How could the apostolate be, for us, a distraction or a noise?
Voices That Pray in the Desert
Many of those who leave in a boat land in deserts, to pray there.
In those stretches without human steps, they feel themselves in the heart of their task.
This silence is like the guarantee of their prayer, like the transmitter of their prayer to the door of all far-away hearts.
Solitude confers upon them, as it were, an omnipotence in the midst of all the lives that they want to touch.
There where there is no person, one truly speaks on behalf of all.
There where no human being breathes, one is as if alone, to receive the weight of the presence, of the grace, of the Redemption of God.
The desert gives men the size of the Church.
They speak of the "Desert of love." Love aspires to the Desert, for the desert delivers to God a man stripped of his homeland, of his friendships, of his fields, of his house.
In the desert, man is dispossessed of that which he loves, free of those who love him, submitted to God in a gigantic tete-a-tete.
This is why, at all times, the spirit has pushed those who love into the Desert.
[1] The French is égrenés, "things that have been shelled." The image seems to be of removing the "shell" of the bland day in order to find the "pearls" or "nuts" of desert hidden within.
Sources: "Our Deserts": Humour dans l'amour, méditations et fantaisies (Nouvelle Cité, 2005), 76ff.
"Solitude": La Sainteté des gens ordinaires, Textes missionnaires, Volume 1 (Nouvelle Cité, 2009), 25-26.
"Voices That Pray in the Desert": La Sainteté des gens ordinaires, 84.
All texts as reprinted in L'eblouie de Dieu: Les plus beau textes de Madeleine Delbrel (Nouvelle Cité, 2019).
Translation ©2023 Brandon P. Otto. Licensed via CC BY-NC. Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the translator.
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