Wednesday, January 7 : Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl

The essential revelation of the Gospel is the dominant and pervasive presence of God. It is a call to meet God and God is only found in solitude. To those who live among men, it would seem that this solitude is denied. This would be to believe that we precede God in solitude: it is he who awaits us; to find Him is to find it, because true solitude is spirit and all our human solitudes are only relative journeys towards the perfect solitude which is in faith. True solitude is not the absence of men, it is the presence of God. To bring one’s life face to face with God, to surrender one’s life to the notion of God, is to leap into a region where we are made solitary. It is the height that makes the mountains lonely and not the place where their bases are placed. If the outpouring of the presence of God in us rises in silence and solitude, it leaves us seated, mixed, radically united with all men who are made of the same earth as us. “Blessed is he who receives the word of God and keeps it” (Lk 11:28). There is no solitude without silence. Silence sometimes means remaining silent, but silence always means listening. An absence of noise that would be empty of our attention to the word of God, would no longer be silence. A day full of noise and full of voices can be a day of silence if the noise becomes for us an echo of the presence of God.

Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team