The Dazzling Light of God: A Madeleine Delbrêl Reader

By Madeleine Delbrel

"Everything is so beautiful when we look at it with a little love," wrote the French social worker and poet Madeleine Delbrêl (1904–1964), whom the Vatican named Venerable in 2018.

Through the convulsions of the twentieth century, she made her home in one of the most brutal towns of Europe—the Communist-run Parisian suburb of Ivry. But to her shock, she saw the dazzling light of God everywhere she looked.

Gathered in this book are buds of wisdom from across the writings of Madeleine Delbrêl, who believed that Christian joy is possible—indeed necessary—in the bleakest settings. God can never abandon the world he loves. "We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, that this world where God has placed us, is, for us, the site of our holiness."

Delbrêl's luminous reflections on Christ, man, and everyday life tap into the depths of divine mystery yet shine with the simplicity of a child. If we read them carefully, we might finally become the saints we're called to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Aug 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642292053

Book preview

THE DAZZLING LIGHT OF GOD

The Dazzling Light

of God

A Madeleine Delbrêl Reader

Translated by

Mary Dudro Gordon

IGNATIUS PRESS     SAN FRANCISCO

Original French edition:

L’éblouie de Dieu

© 2019 by Nouvelle Cité, Bruyères-le-Châtel

Cover art:

Sacre Coeur Basilica, Paris

©istock/Wirestock

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

©2023 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-62164-558-0 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-64229-205-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number 2023932870

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Biography of Madeleine Delbrêl

Foreword

God Is Dead . . . Long Live Death

The Street, Site of Our Holiness

The Vertigo of Beauty

Little Bits of Charity

The New Day

Silence

Poverty

You Lived, and I Did Not Know It

The Goodness of Jesus Christ

A Little Candle

The Obstacle to Believing

Conversion

The Gospel Is the Book of the Life of the Lord

Witnesses

Apostolate

Hinged to the World

Letting Ourselves Be Evangelized

People Who Love

Hymn to Charity

The Heart Modeled on That of Christ

Bicycle Spirituality

Consenting to Our Human Condition

Our Body

A Shelter for Happiness?

Chastity

Our Daily Pain

For We Will Have to Find Everything in Ourselves

The Dance of Obedience

Make Us Live Our Life

It Is God Who Comes to Love Us

Our Deserts

Solitude

Passion of Patience

To Surrender Ourselves to Love

His Grace

God in the City

The Power of Failure

Patience

The Humility of Alcide

Two Abysses

Distortion of the Christian Life

The Good News

An Opening for the Gospel

The Ecstasy of Your Wishes

The Stranger

The Spirit of Justice

Gentleness

To Give Confidence

Prayer for When We Have Argued

Updating Imitation

Anywhere We Are, God Is There, Too

To Pray Differently

Seven Minutes on Prayer

Voices That Pray in the Desert

To Become Eucharist for Our Brothers

Reduced to the Essential

Eucharist

The Mass

Sacramental Life

The Realism of God

Love of the Church

Notes

Biography of

Madeleine Delbrêl

Madeleine Delbrêl was born on October 24, 1904, in Mussidan, in Dordogne, France. An only child, she grew up cherished by her parents. Her father, Jules, was the manager of the Montluçon train station in Allier, and was known for discussing politics and philosophy with his freethinking friends. Her mother, Lucile Junière, came from a merchant-class family of candlemakers and had a keen appreciation for the arts. Madeleine’s education was like that of other girls from the middle class at the time, focused on piano and painting lessons, but she also learned French literature from her father, an amateur poet and an active member of a literary circle. She made her First Communion, but after the death of her grandfather, the family was preoccupied with other concerns. She continued her catechism of perseverance for a year until her father was transferred to Paris in 1916. The family settled there at the Place Denfert-Rochereau, and later at the Place Saint-Jacques. But Jules and Lucile struggled—and in fact, they would eventually separate in 1935. Jules grew depressed by life’s sorrows, sorely testing his wife and daughter until his death in 1955.

It was in Paris that Madeleine became an atheist—and also where she converted. At seventeen years old, she wrote: God is dead, long live death. . . . Death of God makes our own more sure. Death has become the surest thing. This was 1922, just a few years after World War I ended. Much of the generation just before her—men barely older than her—had been killed. Death is doing just fine. . . . Even if we muzzle the war, out of 100 men, 100 will continue to die, that is to say 100%. For her, the only great, indisputable, reasonable misfortune . . . is death.¹ She spent four or five years as an atheist, on a quest for a reasonable absolute. Eventually, this search led her to a few Christians, especially Jean Maydieu, with whom she fell deeply in love. Jean and Madeleine’s conversations reopened the question of God for her. She decided to start praying. The first time, she would later write, I prayed on my knees out of fear still, out of idealism. Then God seized her: I believed that God found me and that he is the living truth, and that we can love him as we love a person.² It was March 29, 1924. But not long after, Jean Maydieu cut off contact with her without explanation, and she passed through a period of profound loneliness. Jean would ultimately enter the Dominican novitiate at the end of his military service—a blow from which Madeleine recovered little by little, thanks to her poetry and her involvement in the European scout movement.

While serving as a scout leader, she discovered the Catholic liturgy. An autodidact, she taught herself the faith not only on a catechetical level, but on the level of philosophy and art. She studied painting and pursued a literary career until 1928, when a meeting with a parish priest, Father Jacques Lorenzo, had a decisive influence on her. This unassuming vicar of Saint Dominique Church had a genius for putting young people in touch with the Gospel. He was, in this respect, a pioneer, and he helped Madeleine to develop what would become a permanent feature of her life: ardent and daily recourse to the Gospel.

She earned a nursing degree in 1931, then enrolled in a school for social work. Not long after graduating, on October 15, 1933, she left Paris for nearby Ivry—a working-class Communist town—accompanied by two young women and soon followed by others. What was their motivation? On the one hand, Madeleine wanted to go help the poor. This was certainly the reason why she had studied to become a social worker. But on the other hand, she also believed that the true greatest sorrow is to live without God. After all, she herself had experienced this during her own journey through atheism, followed by the immense joy of finding God:

You lived, and I did not know it.

You had made my heart your size,

my life to last as long as you, and

because you were not here, the whole world

seemed small and silly to me and

the fate of all men stupid and cruel.

When I knew that you lived, I

thanked you for having made me live,