“We, the Ordinary People of the Streets“: the words express the core of Madeleine Delbrel’s vision: These are the people who have an ordinary job, an ordinary household, or an ordinary celibacy. People with ordinary sicknesses, and ordinary times of grieving. People with an ordinary house, and ordinary clothes. These are the people of ordinary life. The people we might meet on any street…. We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, this world, where God has placed us, is our place of holiness. (p. 54)”
“More than any other form of atheism, Communist milieus have been marked out as being particularly dangerous and even unsuitable for the life of faith. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise us, given the painful and far-resounding events that have occurred in the relations between Christians and Communists – these breakdowns have made more noise by themselves than all the other silent breakdowns of faith in all other milieus or even entire regions, breakdowns in which Communism has had no role to play. These reasonable warnings can bring to the fore a certain disconcerting paradox:
The faith, which was made to be proclaimed, seems difficult to live in precisely those places where it needs to be proclaimed. This appearance of a faith too weak to be able to endure contact with atheism has to be eliminated: faith was made to conquer the world – and where it seems, by contrast, to be the victim rather than the victor, what we are dealing with is not the faith itself, but the way we live the faith, a life that has distorted or left something essential out of the faith.
It is worthwhile clarifying the question, because it bears on the evangelization of the world we live in. There are two things we need to discern:
•whether the modern forms of atheism represent for Christians insuperable or only barely superable temptations;
•or whether, by contrast, these atheist milieus are places God intended us to be, places that provide situations that can stimulate the vigorous growth of faith within us so that it can be proclaimed to others. According to my own experience, this second possibility is the true one; and others have had the same experience.”
Working Towards Salvation
But there is still the working toward salvation. Is it perhaps because we have not lived it enough in the past we are incapable of living it in the future? Over half of the earth, people are not “seated” in the darkness of death, but standing on their feet, so that the apostasy of a class might become come the apostasy of a world, and here we go to take our part….
Joining our hearts with those of the apostles of every age, shouldn’t we ask that we continue to “be sent”? May those who guide us constantly tell us that we do not love people enough and that we do not hate evil enough. Seen from God’s perspective, Marxists are the most unhappy of human beings, and the sickest…. They need medicine…. And we have gone to them as if they were healthy, and sometimes as if they themselves were the healers – and that, I think, was our first mistake.”
— from “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets (Ressourcement: Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought) by Madeleine Delbrel, David L. Schindler, Charles F. Mann.
We, the Ordinary People of the Streets contains a series of powerful reflections by Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964), an award-winning poet, writer, and Catholic layperson whose conviction and insight led her to a life of social work in the atheistic, Communist-dominated city of Ivry-sur-Seine, France.
In these posthumously published texts, Delbrêl draws from her own experiences living in Ivry, witnessing to the possibility of a life at once rooted radically in the church and fully engaged in the world. Spanning the whole of Delbrêls life from a piece she wrote as a seventeen-year-old atheist to an essay on the Christian life written just before her death, these passionate literary texts explore the Christians role in a secular society, the difficulty of faith in an atheistic environment, the need for prayer, the centrality of the church, and the fundamental importance of loving both God and our neighbors. — Publisher
“The poor man is one who wants more, not one who is content with what he has“— Epictetus, Stoic philosopher
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