She said, “This is home.”
When I ask myself what Madonna House has meant for me and my faith journey, I am always surprised at the significant role this little community, at the other end of the world from my home in Chile, has played in my life. Without Madonna House, my faith story would have turned out very differently.
In 2017 I had been living a consecrated life in one of the new ecclesial communities for 12 years.
I had always been a very free-spirited woman, but because of various wounds caused by my personal history and perhaps the inexperience of this new community, I suffered through many problems. For some reason, the Lord allowed or wanted me to share in this; he too had suffered.
I was 36 at the time and felt like the woman with the hemorrhage in Mark 5. I felt I was losing my blood, my life, and my voice. I was also probably experiencing a midlife crisis.
When you live in a difficult situation like this, you try to cope with it. You lie to yourself, you justify the people involved, you keep waiting (if you are as stubborn as I am) for things to change.
But I had come to a point where I didn’t know what I liked anymore. I hit a wall. It was like trying to keep afloat in a raging sea. A wave comes, you are barely able to keep swimming, and another wave comes. And then another. I felt I was going to drown.
I had always been a passionate woman, passionate for study, sports, community, social justice, humanities, my faith. But now all that seemed dead inside me.
I reflected a lot in those days about the deaf-mute person in the Gospel of Mark (Mk 7:32-35). I couldn’t speak about what was happening to me; I couldn’t hear anything but my own turmoil, loneliness, and sadness. I felt trapped. I was like a lost child in a dark room.
I resigned myself. I thought, “This is what the Lord wants. He wants this unhappiness for me, and I will bear with it.”
If I could talk to the woman I was then, I would tell her that her idea of God was wrong. I would tell her that God, who had made her in his image, wanted her happiness, that he is good and merciful, that he heals the broken-hearted.
It’s true that we have to carry the cross, but God also wants us to be free and joyful. I couldn’t see that at the time.
True, I loved my faith and I loved the Lord, but things had stopped making sense in my brain and in my heart. I wasn’t able to be logical.
But in the midst of that anguish, I found joy in talking with the young people I worked with who served the homeless. One day, one of them gave me a copy of Restoration.
When I looked at that paper, my eyes were drawn to an icon that had always attracted me. But I had never known its name. It was called “The Bridegroom.” It was an image of Our Lord after the scourging, with a purple mantle, a stick for a scepter, and the crown of thorns.
I also felt attracted to the community the paper wrote about—Madonna House. It seemed something like a community of Catholic hippies. at place for religious and priests in crisis.
Soon after that I hit bottom, and my community gave me the opportunity to go to a retreat. But remembering the bridegroom icon and the Catholic hippies, I asked if I could go to Madonna House instead.
A little more than a week later, I was on a bus heading for Combermere. I never did return to my community.
Mary Ellen Kocunik picked me up at the post office. She was gentle, respectful, peaceful, and quiet. When we got to Madonna House, she said, “This is home.”
It did become home for me, and it still is, five years later. I think it always will be, and that my vocation, even though I am not called to stay there, is intertwined with Madonna House in a mysterious way. “It is your lineage,” a religious friend told me once. And I think this is true.
My first two weeks at Madonna House were kind of awful. I thought I needed a lot of space, and there I was crowded into a dormitory and a schedule without any space at all.
But after those two weeks, something changed. We were reading Poustinia, Catherine Doherty’s spiritual classic, the part where she talks about the gift of tears. I heard, “When I weep, Christ weeps, because Christ is in me.” This hit me like a ton of bricks!
I realized that this was what was happening to me. Christ was crying somewhere inside of me, and I was crying inside of me, but in another place. I would just need to find him, and we could cry—together. His tears would heal me.
It was difficult to start crying, though; the pain had hardened me. But the silent and reassuring presence of the Madonna House members, some of whom became close friends, and of the guests and priests, allowed it to happen.
I realized in those first months that my new Madonna House friends were icons of the broken Christ, my beloved Bridegroom. They didn’t try to hide their pain, their imperfections, their brokenness. This allowed me to look at my own brokenness and to cry.
It was so comforting to learn that I didn’t have to do anything in order to be loved, that I was OK the way I was. These people saw in me a beauty I could not see, and they loved me without asking anything in return.
I think I was like one of those broken donations that come to Madonna House. The members clean, polish, and restore them, and they become better and more beautiful than before. Love renews and restores things, but most of all, it restores people. The love of the people at Madonna House restored me.
I could tell so many stories. I had two nine-month stays at Madonna House, and I have gone there a couple of other times for month-long visits.
It is reassuring to know that, even though it is far away, there is a place in the world I can always go back to, a place where people will always be happy to see me.
When I go there, some staff members tell me, “Welcome home!” And it certainly feels that way.
Thank you for your existence, dear Madonna House. Thank you, all you staff members who with your lives are able to keep and maintain this inn for the broken-hearted of this world.
Thank you for saving my faith and the faith of so many others. Thank you for showing me a path of vulnerability and poverty. I know that if I walk this path, I will be able to give everything to the Lord.
Barbara Symmes was a long-term guest from Chile who spent Christmas with us.
