Vine, Branches, Bride
- SERVANT OF GOD MADELEINE DELBREL
To be bride is to go constantly from the night of the theological mystery of Love out to the world.
Whatever the bridegroom gives to his friends — trust, confidence, responsibilities — it is to his wife that he gives his name, so that she may be what he is, may do what he does, and so that he may transmit his own life through her.
It's not because she goes out into the streets to do the shopping — where his friends are — that she is his bride: the housekeeper could do that just as easily. It is because she dines with her husband and sleeps by his side.
Being the bride is not being in the world as the Son of God who was sent into the world and who grafts us onto the Church as Bride; to be bride is to go constantly from the night of the theological mystery of Love out to the world.
It is not working with her husband that makes her his wife; his friends work, as she does, and sometimes much better than she does; it is being entirely possessed by him. What she earns is doubly his, because she herself belongs to him.
It is not doing perfectly this or that particular work or exercising a particular profession perfectly that grafts us into union with the Church; it is being so driven by Christ, wherever we are, that this small action of ours in the world is truly his.
The bride is not bride because she can organize the house: a hotel manager could do this extremely well. But because before her husband's children came to reside in the house they resided in her flesh; because she carried them and nourished them with her own self.
It is not because we can organize the world that we will be grafted in marriage to the Church, but it is in carrying within us each person in the world, each person that we meet; it is not in organizing their lives for them but in giving them the right to live in our life; in sharing with them everything that we are, all that is ours, from our bread to God's grace.
This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.
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Acknowledgement
Madeleine Delbrêl "Counting on Mercy." from La Joie de Croire. (Sherbrooke, QC: Mediaspaul, 1995).
This excerpt appeared in Magnificat in November 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."
