The poem I selected for this Sunday is by Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl, a fascinating woman, a mystic, a missionary, a poet. Not surprising, she took inspiration from St. Charles de Foucauld. Her mysticism led her out to the “little people”.
“He’s with me among the people I encounter today. … All of them will be people he’s come looking for — those he’s come to save. … Through the brothers and sisters who are close to us, whom he will make us to serve, love, and save, waves of his love will go out to the end of the world and the end of time.”
I’ve always loved her writing, her down-to-earth, stab-you-through-the-heart writing. In this poem, she writes about the passion—a most apt topic for Lent—one that we can so easily think about in grandiose terms—how we’re going to lay down our lives for Christ. But Madeleine stabs-us-in-the-heart with what it really means for each of us and challenges us to embrace that reality with the same ardor that we embrace our own self-satisfying ideas of self-denial.
Pray for us, Madeleine.
The passion, our passion, sure we are waiting for it.
We know it must come and of course
we intend to live it with a certain grandeur.
We are waiting for the bell to ring that will inform us
that the time has come for us to sacrifice ourselves.
Like a log in the fireplace,
we know that we have to be consumed.
Like a piece of wool cut with scissors,
we have to be separated.
Like young animals that are sent to slaughter,
we have to be destroyed.
We are waiting for our passion but it does not come.
In its place there come small patiences.
Patiences, those small pieces of the passion whose job it is
to kill us gently for your glory, to kill us without
our getting the glory.
From dawn they come to greet us:
our nerves, either too much on edge or too numb….
It is our disgust with our daily ration of life
and the neurotic desire for all that is not ours.
This is the way our patiences come,
in serried ranks or in single file,
and they always forget to remind us of the fact
that they are the martyrdom for which we were preparing.
And scornfully we let them pass by,
as we wait for a cause that would be worth dying for.
If every redemption is a martyrdom,
not every martyrdom involves the spilling of blood.
From the beginning of our lives to the very end,
one by one,
grapes may be picked from the bunch.
This is the passion of patiences.
Madeleine Delbrêl
Witnesses to Hope 