“We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, this world, where God has placed us, is our place of holiness.”
Madeleine Delbrêl
After I had accepted a position as a Seton Teaching Fellow, but before I began my fellow year, I read an essay by Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl entitled “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets.” It was deeply moving and convicting. Her words painted a picture of holiness not as something hidden away in monasteries or on mountaintops, but lived in the midst of city streets, busy classrooms, and ordinary routines.
During my fellow year, I essentially became a professional shoe-tier. Being in a Kindergarten classroom for six hours a day will do that to you. I also became a professional braid-fixer, bathroom monitor, and, in some cases, a human tissue.
At first, I found great satisfaction in these small acts.
“I am Christ’s hands and feet,” I would think. “Look at me, serving these children!”
But then that one student’s shoes needed to be tied again, or twenty-four voices would call out my name all at once, and the mundanity of it all would set in.
My thoughts began to shift:
“I have a college degree, and I spend my days talking to five year olds.”
“Someone else could just as easily do what I do— why me?”
“I wanted to do something great! I want to be a saint! Is this really the big mission year God called me to?”
It was in those moments that Delbrel’s words returned to me. In “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets” she wrote that the “tiny circumstances of life… do not leave us alone for a moment; and the ‘yeses’ we have to say to them follow continuously, one after the other.” These small, repetitive demands are not, however, distractions from holiness; they are the path to it.
In the light of that truth, I began to see my life as a Kindergarten fellow differently. The interruptions, the tears, the countless tiny tasks were not barriers to God’s will but its very expression.
“When we surrender to them without resistance,” Delbrêl says, “we find ourselves wonderfully liberated from ourselves. We float in Providence like a cork on the ocean waters.”
It’s a magnificent paradox: obedience to the demands of our circumstances frees us from self-absorption, and, simultaneously, makes us wonderfully aware of how instrumental we are in His plan.
Maybe someone else could have done exactly what I did— honestly, they probably could have done it better in many cases. But the point is that Jesus called me to do it, and, in that sense, no one else could have been who I was to those students.
Yes, I wiped their noses, dried their tears, tied their shoes, walked them to the bathroom, taught them the Sign of the Cross, and sang silly songs over and over again. Many, many others could have done those exact things. But Jesus wanted these particular children to have this particular theology teacher in this particular year. No one else could have been Ms. Freund to them.
“Is the doorbell ringing? Quick, open the door! It’s God coming to love us. Is someone asking us to do something? Here you are!… it’s God coming to love us. Is it time to sit down for lunch? Let’s go— it’s God coming to love us. Let’s let Him.”
The circumstances of my fellow year were not just add-ons or distractions from His will for me. They were His divine plan for me. In each of those small, hidden moments, Christ called out to me, asking me to love and to be loved.
He calls out to all of us in ten thousand places; on the crowded subways of the Bronx, in the neighborhoods of Cincinnati, and on the streets of Mission. We meet Him in all these “little ones who are his own” (Matthew 18:6). We see Him in the ones who are hungry, the ones who are bored, the ones who suffer. Christ cries out to us, too, in the coworker we find difficult, in the roommate who loads the dishwasher differently, in the slew of emails or lesson plans we’d rather put off until tomorrow.
“For us, the whole world is like a face-to-face meeting with the One whom we cannot escape.”
He asks us to love Him in these tiny, ordinary places, moments, and persons. And each tiny act of love “is an extraordinary event, in which heaven is given to us, in which we are able to give heaven to others… it’s just the outer shell of an amazing inner reality: the soul’s encounter with God, renewed at each moment, in which, at each moment, the soul grows in grace and becomes ever more beautiful for her God.”
For us, the ordinary people of the streets, holiness is worked out in the ordinary circumstances of our ordinary lives. It is often unglamorous. It is often very unseen. Yet it is precisely in the small yeses and unseen acts that our sanctification— and, God willing, the sanctification of those we serve— unfolds.
