Tag: Madeleine Delbrêl

Madeleine Delbrêl (1904–1964) was a French Catholic author, poet, and mystic who converted from atheism. She worked for decades as a social worker in a working-class communist suburb of Paris, establishing an experimental lay community and writing influential works, including We, the Ordinary People of the Streets, on finding holiness in everyday life.

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Saturday afternoon. Revisiting Merton, Newman, and this from Madeleine Delbrêl:

“We are not lacking silence. We already have it. / If we lack silence, it is because we have not learned how to keep it. / All the noises that surround us make much less din than we ourselves do. / The real noise is the echo that things have in us. / It is not speaking that necessarily breaks the silence. / Silence is the place of the word of God, and if we confine ourselves to repeating this word, then we can speak without ceasing to be silent.”

— The Dazzling Light of God, trans. Mary Dudro Gordon