OUR ORDINARY LIVES AS GOD’S PEOPLE
“As the number of disciples continued to grow,
the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews
because their widows
were being neglected in the daily distribution.
So the Twelve called together the community of the disciples and said,
‘It is not right for us to neglect the word of God to serve at table.
Brothers, select from among you seven reputable men,
filled with the Spirit and wisdom,
whom we shall appoint to this task,
whereas we shall devote ourselves to prayer
and to the ministry of the word.'” Acts 6:1-7
“Beloved: Come to him, and, like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” 1 Pt 2:4-9
These sections of the coming weekend’s Scripture readings (written 2000 years ago) support the third priority set by the current Synod’s North American Report published last month:
“Co-responsibility. A plea for renewed consideration of the mission of all the baptized.” (page 20)
Yes, we, all of the baptized, laity and priests, are equally and co-responsibly the Church! Note the makeup of the Synod NA (Canada and the U.S.) delegation:
At our baptisms, each of us, in our first official dialogue with the Church, replied and should still be replying, with what should be the illuminating and inflexible direction of our life as Jesus’ disciples, dedicated to His mission.
THEN AND NOW
What we did at our Synod Listening Sessions was to meet in the same manner as the Christians in the First Reading did: we gathered, aware of our Lord’s presence among us and faced the issues of today’s Church. We are considering changes, in the Church structure and in ourselves (the real Church) because it is our responsibility to live and help each other live in faithfulness to the God of our Baptism.
What we are seeking is the best way for us, in the ordinariness of our lives, to make our responses to the three Baptismal questions be the “illuminating and inflexible axis of our apostolic lives.”1
- What do you ask from God’s Church? Faith.
- What will you gain through faith? Eternal life.
- If you thus wish to possess eternal life. Observe the commandments: You will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind, and you will love your neighbor as yourself.
Let us ask ourselves: Are we, with God’s help, building for ourselves a life with no other source of support than these: Faith, the “nothing more and nothing less” of living true to the Gospel, the expectation of eternal life, and the two commandments. (See bullet three above.)
Here are some practical suggestions on how we “Ordinary People” can do this provided by Blessed Madeleine Delbrel (1908-1964)in her book “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets.”
Sister Loretta
In her book, We, the Ordinary People of the Streets, Blessed Madeleine Delbrel writes:
“There are many places where the Spirit blows, but there is one Spirit that blows in all these places.”
“There are some people whom God takes and sets apart. There are others whom God leaves among the crowds, people he does not ‘withdraw from the world.’ These are the people who have an ordinary job, an ordinary household. 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. . . .”
On Silence, Madeleine writes
“We do not need to find silence; we already have it. The day we lack silence is the day we have not learned how to keep it. All the noises around us cause much less disturbance than we ourselves do. The real noise is the echo things make within us. It is not necessarily talking that breaks silence. Silence is the place where the Word of God dwells; if we limit ourselves to repeating this Word, then we can speak without ceasing to be silent.”
On Obedience
“We, the ordinary people of the streets, know very well that as long as our own will is alive, we will not be able to love Christ definitively. We know that only obedience can root us in his death. We have opportunities to “die to ourselves” a little more each day when, in the tiny circumstances of life, we are faithful.
“When we surrender to them without resistance we find ourselves wonderfully liberated from ourselves. We float in Providence like a cork on the ocean waters.
“. . . From the moment we wake up these circumstances take hold of us. It is the telephone that rings; it is the key that won’t work, the bus that doesn’t arrive or arrives full, or doesn’t wait for us. . . . It’s the daily routine, one chore that leads to another, some job we wouldn’t have chosen. It’s the weather and its changes. It’s being cold, or being hot; it’s the headache or the toothache. It’s the people we meet and the conversations they choose to start.
“For us, the ordinary people of the streets, obedience means bending to the ways of our times whenever they are not harmful.
“When we live with others, obedience also means we set aside our own tastes and leave things in the place others have put them.
“And our hope is that death, too, will be easy. It will not be a big ordeal, but rather the outcome of small ordinary sufferings, to which we have given our assent as they passed, one after the other.”
Madeleine Delbrel. We, the Ordinary People of twhe Streets (Ressourcement: Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought), Kindle Edition.
- Dominican Fr. Jacques Loew (1908-1999), the author of the Introduction to Madeleine Delbrel’s We the Ordinary People of the Streets. Fr. Loew was also the founder of the worker priest movement that existed in France from 1941-1954. This and the wording of the Baptismal questions below this sentence are a translation from French.