Ordinary People

During the spring of 2001, as I was contemplating which graduate program to enter, and seriously considering moving to New York City to attend Fordham University, I entered our kitchen on Springfield Road and noticed a book Dad was reading on the table. It was titled, We, the Ordinary People of the Streets. The book was a collection of writings by a French woman named Madeleine Delbrel, and was compiled after her death.

Believing as many progressives did during the opening decades of the 20th century that belief in God had become absurd, Delbrel declared herself an atheist at age 17, pronouncing in her writings, "God is dead....long live death." Her passionate intellect and poet's heart did not let her hold on to that belief for very long, and by the age of 20 she had a radical conversion and would devote the rest of her life to the Catholic Church. In her own words:

"You were alive and I was completely unaware of it. You had fashioned my heart to your size...[but] because you were absent, the whole world seemed to me tiny and ridiculous, and the destiny of man stupid and cruel. When I realized you were living, I thanked you for having given me life, I thanked you for the life of the whole world."

She would eventually move to the French communist city of Ivry and create a group of lay women dedicated to poverty, chastity, and working with the poor. The following is an excerpt that I thought a lot about when I moved to NYC. (Sorry for the lengthy post, but it's not like everyone is clamoring this month...)

A Voice Praying in the Desert

There has been a lot said about "the desert of love." Love seeks the desert because the desert is where man is handed over to God, stripped bare of his country, his friends, his field, his home. In the desert, a person neither possesses what he loves, nor is he possessed by those who love him; he is totally submitted to God in an immense and intimate encounter.

That is why in every age the Holy Spirit has compelled all lovers to seek the desert.

We, missionaries without a boat, are seized by the same love and led by the same Spirit into new deserts.

...From the top of a long subway staircase, dressed in an ordinary suit or raincoat, we overlook, on each step, during this busy rush-hour time, an expanse of heads, of bustling heads, waiting for the door to open...Hundreds of heads - hundreds of souls. And there we stand, above.

And above us, and everywhere, is God.

God is everywhere - and how many souls even take notice?

In a moment, when the subway doors open, we'll climb aboard. We'll see faces, foreheads, eyes, mouths. Mouths of lonely people, in their natural state: some greedy, some impure, some malicious; some mouths that hunger, some filled with every earthly sustenance, but few - very few - that bear the form of the Gospel.

(snip)

The Holy Spirit, the whole Holy Spirit in our tiny heart, a love great as God is beating within us, like a moiling sea struggling to break out, to spread out, to penetrate into all these closed-up creatures, into all these impermeable souls.

(snip)

Won't this love that dwells in us, that explodes in us, also transform us?

Lord, Lord, let the thick skin that covers me not be a hindrance to you. Pass through it. My eyes, my hands, my mouth are yours.

This sad lady in front of me: here is my mouth for you to smile at her. This child so pale he's almost gray: here are my eyes for you to gaze at him...This smug young man, so dull, so hard: here is my heart, that you may love him, more strongly that he has ever been loved before.

I have tremendous respect for her. Imagine orienting your heart in such a way as to see people like this! The burden of faith, however, tell us that this is precisely what we are meant to do. In the words of my former student, Livingston, "woah".