Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it
directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me,
going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.
Little — be
always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.
Preach the
Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead
you.
Go into the
marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.
Be hidden.
Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s
hearts. I shall be with you.
Pray always.
I will be your rest.
The Little Mandate
of Madonna House
Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. This line of the mandate can at times cause a blank stare of
incomprehension upon first hearing (or second, or third for that matter). Go
into the… what? The where? Why?
In the original
context of Catherine’s reception of the Mandate, it meant a very simple thing:
she was to go back into the slums and live among the people she was serving.
She was not to be some kind of professional do-gooder punching in and punching
out a time clock, doing good works from 9 to 5, five days a week.
No, she was to
live with the people she served, and so she did, in Toronto, Harlem, Chicago.
It was this whole business of immersion into
people’s lives, of presence where people are, being with them, being involved
with them without that professional kind of distance coming into it so much.
But of course as
years went by and the apostolate changed and shifted in mysterious and The
marketplace is a symbol of that place where people live, but not the place
where people love. Markets are places of buying and selling, where goods are
evaluated and priced, bargained for and consumed, rejected or accepted as a
cheap rip-off or a good deal. All of which is fine, when it is a car or a
cucumber, an apple or, well, an Apple.
Not so great when
it is human beings bought and sold, human integrity, human lives weighed in the
balance and found worthy of ‘use’ or useless. You are worth so much of my time
and energy… or not, as the case may be.
Marketplaces are
fine places for moving goods and services around efficiently and in a
cost-effective way. Not such great places to live in as the complete expression
of our humanity. And in our fallen broken world, this is too much the case, too
often, don’t you think? We buy and sell… affection, friendship, time, sex,
respect and so many other personal goods. The currency may not be money (it
usually isn’t) but it is cold hard cash regardless.
Cold and hard, and
the more the marketplace is our world, the colder and harder it gets. And so MH
strives to go into these places where human beings are, where human beings
live, where life can get very cold and hard and make it a bit warmer, a bit
more loving, a bit less acquisitive.
Catherine would
much later speak about this line of the Mandate in its depths, and said:
What’s the
marketplace? Is that the secular city? Is that the factual marketplace?... that
is to say the urban inner city or is it the suburbia where all the supermarkets
are? Or is it as we were invited to West Pakistan, a desert, factually a sandy
desert? No. It’s simply the soul of man. The marketplace is the soul of man.
The marketplace is the soul of man where man trades his soul either to God or
to the Devil, or to the in-between. [It is a place of a] sort of indifference,
complacency, where he sells hot wares and cold wares, which God tolerates,
especially the cold. But fortunately or unfortunately we have to deal also with
the tepid and that supermarket of the spiritual world, country, place, whatever
you call it.
Going into
the marketplace and staying with Jesus there means being acutely alive to every
little movement of un-love, of buying and selling in the human soul (starting
with our own soul, of course), of every reduction of person to thing, of every
cooling and hardening trend in our own human lives and hearts and in the lives
and hearts of those we are involved with.
And staying
with Jesus in that (I’ll cover the last part of this paragraph next week). That
is, living out our communion with Christ in such a way, such a proximity to
‘the marketplace’ in all the senses it can be understood, that it draws others
to enter into it.
When guests
leave MH after a long time, they often give a little thank you speech in the
dining room. More often than not, they say something along the lines of “I have
learned how to love here.” We don’t set out to teach people how to love; on any
given day we may feel pretty incompetent to do so!
But it seems like something
mysteriously gets transmitted—at least, that’s what they tell us, over and over
again. Our job is to stay with whoever God sends us. His job is to take it from
there and radiate love into all the buying and selling of our poor broken
humanity. And that’s what that line of the Mandate means, as far as I
understand it.
Dear Fr. Denis,
ReplyDeleteI think your reflections on the Little Mandate are some of the best writing you have done. You are writing about the fullest charism of Madonna House and I guess when writing about something of that great an import, words will always fall short though they spur reflections in those who read them.
You said "We don’t set out to teach people how to love; on any given day we may feel pretty incompetent to do so!" I chuckled at that, quite a bit actually because it is true. However there is a greater truth here I think and you touch on it. One meets God and is transformed, changed radically, never to be the same. The 'incompetent' way you live is how that happens.
So it is not really incompetent at all. No - not at all. I did not learn how to love at MH - I encountered love and was consumed by it. I like to think of the Little Mandate as God's love letter to Catherine. And by God's great grace, to the community she founded.
Kindest regards - John Lynch.