God moves in with something new…
I want to reflect on Gospel love and relationships, on how God opens our heart through daily life, and to share something of what I’ve learned in the years I’ve lived in Madonna House.
I grew up as the child of American parents on a small farm in Western Quebec. I was a happy little kid and loved any kind of encounter with people. We weren’t in the Church at that time, and my parents wanted to give us a “free-range childhood,” so I wasn’t in school.
When you move into a farming area from another country, you are always something of an outsider. I didn’t have a lot of contact with other people. As a teenager, I found engaging with others difficult. I felt a bit odd, I dressed differently, and I didn’t know how to talk to people about the things they talked about. I became painfully self-conscious and developed great social anxiety.
For protection, I adopted an aloof, interesting “persona,” carefully crafted and presented. It gave the raw, insecure girl I was a shelter, and it drew admiration from others.
I wanted to meet people and develop friends, but my “self” was very superficial. I discovered that admiration doesn’t necessarily lead to friendship. Seeking admiration locks you into yourself, and genuine encounter with others is not a fruit of that kind of search.
After I joined Madonna House in my mid-30’s, I went through a time of interior suffering for about seven years. This gradually broke something open in my heart, as my “pretend self” collapsed. Sometimes being in pain, flattened by life’s circumstances that are out of our control, can open the heart. This was my experience.
The years since then have been a path of learning something of what it means to love. I have discovered that God brings transformation to my heart through relationships with the people around me.
I think sometimes we expect to be changed by grace in the chapel, in the poustinia, apart from ordinary life. We think that if we place ourselves in the chapel or the poustinia, God will infuse us with a new self.
My own experience has been, instead, that God works in my heart by giving me a situation that I must live through. Often it is the pain of conflicts or barriers that pushes me to seek his help, and I pray for an open heart, for grace to love someone difficult.
Or, in the case of someone I’m drawn to, I may need to ask for grace to love them with real integrity, with faithfulness to my life, and with respect for their life. These are the openings God uses to transform a heart that is limited and broken and very selfish into something life-giving. God does this. God moves in with something new that is not of me.
The union of the Body of Christ is more than a vague backdrop to Christianity. This union means that we go to God together, that together we are transformed into the people we are created to be. As we surrender our lives to that transformation, we bring new life to each other.
Someone is assigned to work with me, and I irritate them, and they don’t seem to trust me. There is conflict. That can be a closed door. But if I take hold of the Gospel call to love and turn in fear and trembling to encounter them, something other than ourselves is brought forth. God moves, and love is built, and we’re both transformed. God is incarnational, He moves in our actual lives.
Here is a secret of the Christian life: intentional acts of love are the source of joy. The card signed, the note sent to the member who’s been transferred, acknowledging a ragged-looking sister who has clearly had a rough day — these are small things, but they contain all the power of the Gospel if I step into them because to do so is to live God’s life.
The gift we are to one another is that here, between us, is the source of joy: love given and received, meaning and purpose in the heart of God.
It really doesn’t matter what the context is. I may be doing interesting, creative work, or I may be awash in noise and action with 30 women in the kitchen doing feast-day dishes. What matters is turning outward to see the opportunity to love and to take it, to let ourselves be led and not to shy away. That is life. That is living in the heart of God.
I think God leads us in small, accessible ways, and very soon he opens wide the doors of our heart to love in that same attentive way the stranger, the difficult one, the one who is an irritant. If we allow him, he moves in and takes over.
I want to close with a quote from Madeleine Delbrêl, a laywoman in France during the first part of the 20th century. She writes about the holiness of the ordinary person as she travels with strangers on the subway:
In this crowd, heart pressed to heart, squeezed between so many bodies…our heart quivers like a fist closed on a bird.
The Holy Spirit, all of the Holy Spirit in our poor heart, the love great as God that beats in us like a sea that wants to break forth with all its strength, to spread out and penetrate all these impermeable beings, all these beings with no way out…This love that inhabits us, this love that bursts forth from us, shall it not shape us?
Lord, at least let this rind that covers me not be a barrier to you. Pass through…This woman so sad before me; here is my mouth so that you can smile at her. This child is almost grey, he is so pale.
Here are my eyes so that you can look upon him. This man is so tired; here is my body so you can give him my seat, and my voice so that you can say very gently to him, “sit down.” This boy so smug, so foolish, so tough; here is my heart for you to love him with, harder than he has ever been loved. *
That is where we’re going. The wide-open heart that looks on the whole world and loves it, because God has taken over and given us his heart for the world.
* Quote adapted from We, the Ordinary People of the Streets, by Madeleine Delbrêl. English translation published in 2000 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. pp. 60-61. First published 1966 in French under the title Nous autres, gens des rues by Editions du Seuil.
[Photo by ©Jenna Gernon]
