How can I follow Christ? Can an ordinary person really aspire to holiness? How can I know God’s will for me? How can I pray?
These questions tug deeply at the hearts of those who have been pierced by an encounter with Christ. But we’re not meant to puzzle over them ad infinitum.
Questions like them are really iterations of the Psalmist’s question: “How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?” (Ps 116:12). They are spurs that press us on to greater love, gratitude, commitment and sacrifice.
The Holiness of Ordinary People, a collection of 11 texts by Madeleine Delbrêl, who Pope Francis declared a Servant of God in 2018, is an extraordinary source of inspiration and practical advice for the ever-deeper journey into God. It beats with a tremendous pulse of energy and movement.
Delbrêl was a social worker, author and poet who died in 1964 aged 60 after devoting her life to the suburban poor on the outskirts of Paris. She founded a lay religious community inspired by the life of the French ascetic and martyr, St Charles de Foucauld.
A mystic, Delbrêl preached a spirituality of perpetual movement. She was no advocate for an escape into the heavens, or for attempts to create paradise on earth. Rather she wished to see Christ carried to every corner of the world in which human misery is “infinite.”
Her simple and direct style sweeps the reader up into her confidence in Christ’s saving work in the surrendered soul—work for the benefit of countless others as much as for itself. Delbrêl thought the simplest daily actions were, by the mystery of grace, inseparable from prayer.
Published in full for the first time in English by Ignatius Press, her essays and notes are utterly compelling spiritual reflections, and yield real glimpses of God’s presence in the circumstances of everyday life, especially for lay people of the 20th and 21st centuries.
And not only God’s loving presence, but, perhaps more importantly, the unceasing demands it makes on his disciples in the concrete realities of their daily lives and in union with the life of the church. The cross is ever-present.
Key to Delbrêl’s writings is a clarion call to evangelisation in cities and mushrooming suburbs with their myriad and diverse subcultures, at a time when the parish, she writes, is almost like a message in a bottle floating, serenely, in a de-Christianised world.
For Delbrêl, all Christians are called to live God’s holiness, all are ipso facto evangelisers, all are “missionaries without boats.”
“Christ does not provide his followers with a set of wings to flee into heaven, but with a weight to drag them into the deepest corners of the earth,” she writes.
“What may seem to be the specifically missionary vocation is in fact simply what it means to be embraced by Christ.”
The Holiness of Ordinary People brings together many of her most important essays including “Missionaries without Boats” (dedicated to St Thérèse of Lisieux, co-patron of missions), and “Our Daily Bread” (meditations on daily work and patient suffering).
Her poetic manifesto “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets” opens the book, and is a fine introduction to and summary of her spiritual writings.
In it she exudes her St Thérèse of Lisieux-style confidence in God’s saving action, and issues her firm belief that all the baptised, not only vowed religious, are called to live divinely-oriented silence, solitude, obedience and love.
“There are some people whom God takes and sets apart,” she wrote.
“There are others whom he leaves in the masses and whom he does not ‘withdraw from the world.’
“These are people who do ordinary jobs, who have an ordinary household, or are ordinary celibates. People who have ordinary illnesses, ordinary deaths. People who have an ordinary house, ordinary clothes, these are the people of ordinary life. The people we meet on any street.
“They love their door that opens onto the street, just as their brothers, who are hidden from the world, love the door that has definitively closed on them.
“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.
“We believe that we lack nothing necessary, because if any necessity were missing, God would have already given it to us.”
To follow Jesus is to be with him on his path, centred in God’s will. But for modern people “caught up in a hectic daily life that is likely to remain hectic” that also means never staying still or having the luxury to pray for long, without being interrupted by the needs of others.
“We must go, even when our laziness begs us to stay,” she urges.
“You have chosen us to stay in a strange balance, a balance that can be achieved and maintained only in movement, only in momentum. A bit like a bicycle, which does not stay upright unless its wheels turn.
“We can stay upright only by going forward, moving, in a surge of charity.”
Also in the book are assurances about the redemptive power of surrendering to God’s will in our “daily pain”—whether that means waiting on the platform in the cold for a train that doesn’t arrive, enduring endless interruptions to our leisure or prayer time, or even the pain of performing good works.
Suffering through a liturgy that is “something distant and indecipherable, or worse, something worldly and profane” can also be part of God’s loving plan.
In that case, “we will have participated in the humiliations of Christ,” she writes.
“In such a case, it is better to sink oneself, so to speak, in him, to make common cause with him, than to risk finding ourselves among the soldiers who mocked him.”
For Delbrêl, the true Christian loves and suffers as the church. Through each one Christ is present to all, in climbing the stairwell of a dusty Parisian apartment to visit a shut-in, writing a letter, working a machine, or teaching a class in a public school, in boredom and grief as well as in joy.
No one should be denied Christ’s presence in us, which asks of us charity “to heroic degree”—universal, complete, clear-sighted and pure without any expectation of seeing results.
Editors Gilles François and Bernard Pitaud have provided a timeline of Delbrêl’s life, helpful notes explaining the context in which each piece was written, and information about her influence on her contemporaries and on the church’s Second Vatican Council.
Pope Francis has praised her for her apostolic zeal and commended her as an example of a “constantly outgoing heart” who let herself be challenged by the cry of the poor, especially the spiritually poor.
But beware, as it was said of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Delbrêl is very good but not really “safe” for the reader hoping for a feel-good spiritual book.
People picking up The Holiness of Ordinary People seeking distraction from boredom or a flicker of inspiration may by the end be impelled into a whole new life, or way of being in it.