Madeleine Delbrêl’s “writing reenchants everyday life….through Christ’s love”

Madeleine Delbrêl (1904–1964) was a French author, poet, and mystic whose cause for sainthood has been officially opened by the Vatican. Her personal story and her writings are powerful, but not well known to many Catholics outside of France. The Dazzling Light of God: A Madeleine Delbrêl Reader, published recently by Ignatius Press, is an introduction to her writing and thought. CWR recently corresponded with Thomas Jacobi, Assistant Editor at Ignatius Press, about Delbrêl’s life and writing, and this particular collection.

CWR: Who was Madeleine Delbrêl? How did dramatic events in her early years eventually lead her to embrace a life of radical discipleship?

Thomas Jacobi: Madeleine Delbrêl—whom the Vatican actually named Venerable in 2017—was a French laywoman: poet, social worker, and “missionary without a boat,” as she liked to say, meaning that she did all her work right there in her own homeland. She spent most of her life working, writing, and secretly evangelizing in the Communist-run city of Ivry-sur-Seine. She could have gone to Morocco or Algeria or the Congo, but in her eyes, people who’d forgotten God were really the poorest of the poor. Her version of evangelization was one of small everyday actions, rather than ideas. Atheists needed to feel Christ’s goodness, she believed, before they could understand his words.

Born in 1904, she grew up an only child, nominally Catholic, in a town in southwest France, where her parents gave her a pretty strong education. Her dad, Jules, ran a train station for a living, but he was extremely active in a literary circle in his town, and he helped Madeleine hone her craft as a poet from a young age. When she was twelve, during World War I, her family packed up and moved to the huge metropolis of Paris. By this time, her father had become an atheist. Madeleine followed suit. The war, along with Jules’ mental health struggles, cast a shadow over the family. Death and anxiety were in the air they breathed. The teenage girl threw herself into her poetry—including a poem called “God Is Dead. . . Long Live Death”—and wound up winning a national prize around age eighteen. That title might sound almost comically angsty now, but part of what made her writing so powerful is that she was honest, always seeking a “reasonable” truth. If God is dead, she thought, then we need to live as though he is dead. Yet she knew something big was missing, and she hunted after it.

A long search led her to a group of young Parisian Christians, who had some glimmer of the unnamed thing she’d been longing for. In fact, she began dating one of them, Jean Maydieu, who had a spark in him that fascinated her. It turns out that spark was Christ. When Jean decided to become a Dominican priest, she felt hollowed out, but the emptiness drew her deeper into prayer, perhaps for the first time. She read the Scriptures, went to Mass. She found life there. After a few years, with the help of a local parish priest, she came back to the Church and sensed she had some kind of special mission.

At first she thought of being a Carmelite nun, but she knew somehow that she needed to stay in the world, to be in “plain clothes,” an ordinary woman yet somehow set apart. It wasn’t clear how to do this. After studying nursing and social work, she solved the riddle. In 1933, at twenty-nine years old, she decided to move with a few friends to the depressed Communist suburb of Ivry as a consecrated laywoman—living poverty, chastity, obedience—in order to work and to bring Christ’s joy to a people who’d forgotten God. As it turns out, she would spend the rest of her life there.

Madeleine never hid her faith, but nevertheless she earned respect among her peers and eventually even became the head of Ivry’s social services department during the lean years following World War II. She also started a community of consecrated laywomen called La Charité. But to her, the most important work was just in everyday interactions: if we are praying and listening to God, then the smallest little conversation or smile can, like a mustard seed, give rise to a tree of grace. She called these “little bits of charity.” Her profound understanding of the lay charism—how to live sanctity from the heart as an ordinary layperson, whether consecrated or married—is basically unparalleled in the Church.

CWR: What were some of her major works? And how were the contents of this book selected?

Thomas Jacobi: Delbrêl wrote constantly, but she was so focused on day-to-day life that she published little in her lifetime—two out-of-print books of spirituality, a few essays. One article, “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets,” a manifesto on lay sanctity, went viral among French Catholics in her day. (The highlights of this article appear in The Dazzling Light of God.) With the exception of La Route [The Road—still untranslated into English] and Ville Marxiste terre de mission [Marxist City, Mission Territory—also untranslated], her major works were all compiled by editors and published after her death in 1964. Two good collections have appeared in English up to now, The Joy of Believing (Sophia Institute Press) and We, the Ordinary People of the Streets (Eerdmans), both of which rely on edited versions of her texts rather than Delbrêl’s original manuscripts. The Holiness of Ordinary People (Ignatius Press), which is coming out in early 2024, will give complete versions of many of her most important works, including “Our Daily Bread” and “Missionaries without Boats.”

The Dazzling Light of God is by far the most direct and readable introduction to Madeleine Delbrêl. Put together by her postulator and a few collaborators, it gives a sketch of her life and then takes short page-sized excerpts from writings across her entire lifetime—articles, talks, books, letters—all for the purpose of prayer, rather than study. This was the heart of Delbrêl’s mission: to help people link up their workaday reality with the love of God, turning life’s twists into an elegant “dance of obedience.” In modern life, especially for those of us who have kids, our window for prayer is often very, very narrow—“five metro stops at the end of the day,” as Madeleine puts it—so these short, concentrated bursts of insight are perfect for busy laypeople. They’re like little espresso shots of prayer. And besides, it’s very much suited to her writing style: succinct, straight to the point.

CWR: How did you first encounter her work? How would you describe it to those who’ve never read anything by Madeleine Delbrêl?

Thomas Jacobi: I first read Delbrêl’s essay “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets”—which appears several times in Dazzling Light—in a theology reading group back in New Orleans, where I’m from. This will sound like an exaggeration, but never have I encountered words that so immediately changed the way I look at life and the world around me. In just ten or so pages, all in short, terse lines of poetry, she shows how the supernatural graces that permeate religious life—through poverty, chastity, obedience, stability—actually overflow into lay life and (if we say yes to it) turn it all into a great poem, or a love song. And this includes the key that sticks in the lock, the bus window that won’t stop rattling, the rude neighbor, the tired look from your spouse, and so on.

Her writing was like a Christian fulfillment of what Walt Whitman—poor guy—was really after: everything, even the dark corners, can be full of light, through Christ. “We, the Ordinary People” was only the beginning, it turns out. Working on The Dazzling Light of God, I’ve discovered in Delbrêl so many of these “secret portals” into the divine life we’re called to. Now that I’m married and a dad, I draw from Delbrêl more than ever. Her writing reenchants everyday life—but through Christ’s love, not through magic.

CWR: What do you think readers will fine and appreciate in this collection?

Thomas Jacobi: Readers I’ve talked to have appreciated Madeleine’s terse poetic flair—her ability to give you a whole book’s worth of insight in just a few words. She looks at the details of life more than the broad strokes. She refuses to rely on those clichés or platitudes we’ve all heard a thousand times, but keeps things fresh, new. Her metaphors and images surprise you, yet at the same time they come from the world we know, much as Jesus’s parables did. They make intuitive sense. She writes from a life of committed prayer and charity, but at the same time she is very, very practical, not abstract or speculative. She calls herself a realist. Also, unlike some consecrated people, she does not look down on the married state at all and very often includes family life in her reflections. This makes her a spiritual writer for the entire Church, especially the laity.

CWR: Are there plans to publish more of Madeleine Delbrêl’s work?

Thomas Jacobi: Yes! The Holiness of Ordinary People—a more scholarly book of full-length essays, including the landmark “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets”—will be in stores by March 2023.

CWR: Any final thoughts?

Thomas Jacobi: Everyone I know who has read this little book has been amazed by it. Let’s be honest: almost nobody has time to read books. Yet you don’t need to read more than a page of Dazzling Light at a time. Almost every paragraph gives you a true meal of soul food that can fuel you all day; and unlike some spiritual writers, Madeleine is easy to understand. It’s only 139 pages, and narrow enough to fit in your back pocket (if you bend it a little), but I heard one radio host say that if we really read this book a few minutes every day and took it seriously, we might actually become saints. At any rate, we’d definitely become happier. To me, this kind of generous, even contagious fruitfulness—which I’ve heard Mother Teresa also had—is yet another sign of Madeleine Delbrêl’s real sanctity.

Huge thanks also to my friend Colleen Dulle at America—who, with her husband, was part of the same reading group in New Orleans that first introduced me to Delbrêl—for helping Ignatius Press get the opportunity to collaborate with the Association des Amis de Madeleine Delbrêl in publishing The Dazzling Light of God. If it weren’t for Colleen with all her competence, this book might never have seen the light of day in English.