The Dazzling Light of God: A Madeleine Delbrêl Reader

Sr. Margaret Kerry reviews The Dazzling Light of God, a book of meditations that read like poetry and insights into daily living from the heart of a mystic.

Even though Madeleine Delbrêl’s book, The Joy of Believing, was in our library it never attracted me with its too-plain cover. I began reading about Delbrêl when the church proclaimed her a Servant of God. I learned that she had been an atheist and a Communist. After her fiancé broke off their engagement to join the Dominican order and her parents became estranged from each other, she went into crisis. During this difficult time she met young Christian women who encouraged her through their presence and actions. She wrote that

By reading and reflecting I found God; but by praying I believed that God found me and that he is a living reality, and that we can love him in the same way that we can love a person.

I began to read her words in the pages of the monthly Magnificat missalette. She quickly became one of my favorite spiritual mentors. I found a kindle copy of her book We the Ordinary People of the Street and was smitten by her contemporary, contemplative and very practical insights for living in solitude amidst an active life. In 2018, Delbrêl was declared Venerable, another step on the road to beatification. She has been compared to St. Thérèse of Lisieux and Dorothy Day: a little of both in her call to engage the Marxist and to immerse herself in prayer. Her unique vocation was to live a life of adoration and solitude “in the most engaged and active of missions.”

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When a new publication on Delbrêl, The Dazzling Light of God, became available to review, I was so delighted to have an opportunity to read more of her writings. Translated from the original French, each chapter in this book is a page or three at the most. This book contains an introduction to the author's life and so much more. The editor put together a book of meditations that read like poetry and insights into daily living from the heart of a mystic.

Make us live our life not as a game of chess in which everything is calculated.
Not as a game of sport in which everything is difficult.
Not as a problem that racks our brain, not as a dept to pay, but as a party,
as a ball. as a dance in the arms of your grace,
In the universal music of love. Lord, come and invite us.

Delbrêl is also curator of very practical spiritual advice. In the chapter “Letting Ourselves be Evangelized” I found a thought that can apply to religious polemics often debated on social media: “We defend God like our property; we do not announce him as the life of all life, the immediate future of our lives.”

As you read this book you will find that each ordinary task—taking up the broom or the pen, answering the door, sewing or caring for a sick person—becomes “an immense event in which Paradise is given to us, in which we can give Paradise.” For Delbrêl God is coming to love us. “It is time to sit down at the table,” she says, “let’s go; it is God who comes to love us. Let’s let him.”

Ask for The Dazzling Light of God: A Madeliene Delbrêl Reader at your local Catholic bookseller, or order online from Amazon.com or the publisher, Ignatius Press.