Madeleine Delbrel: reaching out to those at the margins of society

I came across these two passages from the writings of Madeleine Delbrel whilst reflecting on the way in which Frank Duff during his life had a kind of charism on behalf of the marginalised. An early work of the Legion of Mary was with prostitutes in Dublin, but that is not the only example of Frank Duff's mission to the poor and marginalised. An article about this can be found here. From “Poverty and the Poor” in Madeleine Delbrel The Joy of Believing pp.98-99.

Note 1964 

The poor are not only brothers and sisters to be loved in a brotherly way because they are our brothers and sisters, they are also "our lords the poor" because the poor man is Our Lord. He is the sacrament of our encounter with Christ, of our love given to Christ - there is nothing Platonic about the parable of the Last Judgement. 

So, whatever the form that poverty takes in our life, we can only be faithful to Jesus himself if the poor may come into our particular nitty gritty life situation and feel at home there, just as Christ is at home with us: that is to say if they are not given the wrong kind of "priority" (there are multiple kinds of priority but each has its own concrete expression). 

One can write reams about the poverty of Christ - drawing conclusions about what an imitation of that poverty would be like and what kind of implica­tions this might have for us. What is beyond discus­sion is that whatever our life it must, if it is to be Christian, protect a place for Christ in our flesh and blood encounters - our meetings, our welcomes, our ways of relating - to the poor. 

The poor man by reason of poverty itself often repels us (cf. Francis kissing the leper). He brings into our way of life the very contradiction that is Christ. 

It is the real presence of Christ in the poor man, when this is really believed and the poor man is known as a person, that can transform the encounter with him from a purely "social problem" into some­thing essentially and authentically Christian. 

The poor must not be someone who is tolerated and put up with but someone who is waited for and expected. The poor must not have to receive from us .orne kind of regulation staple treatment (e.g. a bowl of hot soup and a shower) "we do this as far as this," "we do that as far as ... " The poor man never owes us anything. It is we who owe him what we owe Christ. 

It is this same faith that allows us to receive Christ: through the eucharist into ourselves; through the poor into our lives. 

Who is my neighbor? - Any human being.Who are the poor? - Usually someone who, from a social point of view, is "outside": "outside" other people's lives, a prisoner, a sick person, a stranger, naked, etc.

From “The Atheistic Environment as a Situation Favourable to Our Own Conversion” in Madeleine Delbrel We, the Ordinary People of the Streets pp.265-267.

The Disappearance of God and Solitude

What can be the sorest trial for us in a Communist city is the disappear­ance of a God who had been until then for us visible and grasp able. The sign of this disappearance is a total "uselessness" of God that is vividly ex­pressed in the life of the Communists as well as in the life of the city as a whole. 

The corollary of this disappearance is the blinding epiphany of man, of his value, his power, and his collective destiny. For if the exceptional Communist milieu of Ivry - made up of national, regional, and local leaders who have all been doctrinally formed according to the level of their responsibility, as well as the basic militants entrusted with the most diverse of tasks, from the hanging of posters to administrative positions, and in­cluding the responsibilities of para-Communist movements, of educa­tional or cultural groups, or of international meetings - if this milieu is at once a demonstration of indisputable personal virtues and effective hu­man activity in full force, it seems as if we could do just as well without God. Nothing and no one seems to be any worse off for his absence. 

The moment we cease to see such a milieu as a trial, it turns into a temptation - a temptation that is all the stronger to the extent that we are gradually able to look at things that used to be for us signs of God, with the eyes of our comrades and our friends. 

And we see that these signs are necessarily opaque if you do not al­ready know in advance what they mean. 

At the same time, in spite of the deepest affections, we begin to feel that the faith, which makes us love others more and more, is making us strangers to them. It can happen, at this point, that we begin to accuse faith, either under our breath or out loud, of being foreign to this world. This is a profound suffering. If we do not see the necessary test that is here concealed under temptation, we would very easily fall to it. But if, on the other hand, we believe in the one who called us and who remains faithful to those he calls, if we ask him to teach us, then he will explain to us what we need to know in order to be living converts, what we may have forgot­ten or perhaps never really knew: that faith is a gift from God. 

As a gift from God, faith, which is foreign to the world, is given to the world. To believe is to consummate between faith and the world an eternal covenant within time. 

If faith creates people who are faithful, it is not a fidelity of blood, country, or honor, but a personal fidelity to the living God who calls and to whom the one who is called must respond freely and always with the whole heart of a free human being. 

In order to hear this call and answer it, we need solitude. Solitude ceases to be painful and becomes instead the indispensable place wherein God makes contact with us. Prayer reinforces the roots of solitude - it transforms the way we see all community in the Church - the trees that together are meant to make up the forest are individually given life by their solitary roots. We learn that in order to offer us faith God calls each of us by name, and that faith is not a privilege due to heredity or good behavior ... and that it is the grace of knowing that God gives grace, the grace of be­ing in the world committed with Christ to his mission of Redemption. 

Once we have returned to the state of conversion, we learn that faith in the Son of God and the Son of Man binds us indissolubly both to the God who grants it and to man, the man of creation, humanity as a whole. For we too are able to say "all for one and one for all." Each of us has re­ceived faith on behalf of all of us. 

The solitude into which we are driven by God brings us into con­scious solidarity with every living human being that comes into the world, with all of the nations that Christ will gather together on the last day.