How to Give Our Life as a Ransom
- MADELEINE DELBRÊL
A few convictions can prevent us from going astray:
—The Lord will only give us his cross, that which unites us completely to him, if we have with all our strength and for love of him sought to receive cheerfully the sufferings, cares, and disappointments of our human lives.
—But it may be that he won't give his own cross, that cross which is marked by generosity and gratuitousness, to those of us who have never gladly included in our own suffering, out of love for him, an element of the gratuitous.
—The Lord can crush us under his cross, a cross that he disguises so that we do not recognize it and are constrained to howl and fight back against it, but this must not prevent us from searching for one tiny grain of dust that it might be possible for us to offer him with joy.
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Acknowledgement
Madeleine Delbrêl "How to Give Our Life as a Ransom." from The Joy of Believing, Ralph Wright, Trs. 1993. (Sherbrooke, QC: Mediaspaul, 1993).
This excerpt appeared in Magnificat in July 2016.
The Author
Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964) was a French Catholic author, poet, and mystic, whose works include The Marxist City as Mission Territory (1957), The Contemporary Forms of Atheism (1962), and the posthumous publications We, the Ordinary People of the Streets and The Joy of Believing. She came to the Catholic faith after a youth spent as a strict atheist. She has been cited by Cardinal Roger Etchegaray as an example for young people to follow in "the arduous battle of holiness."
