MODERN WOMEN OF THE SPIRIT:
Élisabeth Leseur and Madeleine Delbrêl (part
1)
Reginald D. Cruz, CFX
Attitudes toward saints have changed significantly in the past fifty
years. Immediately after the Second Vatican Council, regard for the
place of saints in their personal faith and spirituality changed
among Western Catholics. That is quite understandable given the way
these women and men had previously been presented as superhuman
intercessors for the living, romantically portrayed in plaster casts
or stained glass windows. The saints, it seemed, were too remote
from the realities that late modern women and men contended with in
their daily lives; they seemed removed from the complexities of the
politics and technologies of the late twentieth century. For many
forward-looking Catholics, the saints became an undesirable reminder
of the highly pietistic preconciliar church that they wanted to
leave behind. Such was the situation for some fifteen years until
Catholic and Protestant thinkers began to re-assess the place of
saints in Christian faith and spirituality. Notre Dame Professor
Lawrence Cunningham articulated one of these earliest
reconsiderations when he defined a saint as “a person so grasped by
a religious vision that it becomes central to his or her life in a
way that radically changes the person and leads others to glimpse
the value of that vision.”[1]
For Cunningham,
saints were not lifeless plaster cast statues but
historically-located individuals who, at a crucial point in their
life, became so in-touch with the Transcendent that they endeavored
– whether gradually or immediately – to center their lives on this
reality.
Under the promptings of divine inspiration, saints experience a
transformation in the way they understand themselves and interact
with the people around them. Even if saints choose to keep the
experience of transcendence to themselves, Cunningham points out, it
is inevitable that the people around them begin to glimpse the value
of a transcendence-centered life. A life centered on the
Transcendent radiates its appeal to others. By pointing to the
Transcendent, some people serve what is deepest in us as individuals
and as a community of believers.
TRANSCENDENCE POINTERS
Our communitas
“evolves spontaneously out of the desire of its inhabitants to get
to the bottom of the very mystery that brings them together.”[2]
Those who constitute the
communitas
ask the unanswerable questions together, find the energy for their
fellowship in That which they do not know, and are led by ‘learned
ignorance’ to a worship of the Truth, of which they are completely
ignorant. This idea forms part of what Christians confess when they
declare their belief in the communion of saints:
In a community of companionship in the Spirit
that circles the globe today, living saints seek the face of God,
cling to divine compassion in the face of suffering and sin, know
the joy of Holy Wisdom’s gracious action in their lives, and make
their own contribution to the Church’s heritage of faith and love.[3]
Yet,
belief in the communion of saints emphasizes that the
communitas
is not only one that “joins all living people who seek the face of
God into a circle of mutual companions” but also one that
… connects this living community with the
faithful dead of all ages; one that… embraces the totality of the
human community with the outstretched wings of the creating,
redeeming, liberating Spirit of God who unites and lures them
further into participation in God’s own life.[4]
We
become transcendence pointers not only through the influence of the
Spirit-centered people with and among us, but also through the
influence of similar individuals who have already died.
The dead become transcendence pointers through the narratives of
their lives, which we may discover and resonate with. Thus a
contemporary American who aspires for a deeper life in the spirit
may find resonance in the experiences of a fifteenth century
Spaniard like Teresa of Avila after encountering her biography and
writings. Underscoring this phenomenon is the sacramentality of the
Christian experience. Theologian Richard McBrien made this point in
the following reflection for All Saints Day:
Christianity is a sacramental tradition. We
believe that the God we cannot see is made visible to us through the
person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of faith. But there is no
possibility of communion between God and ourselves unless God
somehow reaches us at our level. God has done so in Jesus Christ.
Given our human limitations and the distance of centuries, however,
it isn’t possible for us to experience the historical Jesus in the
flesh. We who have never seen Jesus in the flesh need some models or
exemplars of Christ with whom to identify and through whom to
experience Christ sacramentally. The church canonizes saints in
order to provide a steady, ever renewable stream of exemplars, or
sacraments of Christ, lest our following of Christ be reduced to
some kind of abstract, intellectual exercise.[5]
Herein
lies the importance of the saints for our spiritual journey: along
with living women and men who inspire us in our search for spiritual
meaning, certain saints – canonized or not – may enlighten our path
if we allow them to be part of our
communitas.
This becomes especially true when we sense that these deceased
transcendence pointers comprehend what goes on in our personal and
public spaces despite the psychological, cultural, and temporal
differences separating us in time.
LOSS OF FAITH
I
would like to offer two exemplars of transcendence pointers.
Élisabeth Leseur (1866-1914) and Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964) are
in many ways different from us. As French-born women, they saw the
world and articulated their understanding of it according to their
cultural origins. Élisabeth is temporally the more distant from us;
she died from cancer at the age of 48 a few months before the
outbreak of World War I. Madeleine died in October 1964 at the age
of 60 – thus some of us may be familiar with the social realities
and anxieties that she beheld in her lifetime.
Separated by time and class, Élisabeth and Madeleine had
common experiences in their spiritual journey. Significant among
these was the experiences of loss of faith and conversion. Élisabeth
came from the privileged upper middle class Arrighi family which
raised its children to appreciate music, culture, literature, and
travel. It can also be fairly described as a formally Catholic
family that was content with following those religious obligations
late 19th century French society expected from members of
their class. Félix Leseur
entered her life when she was 21 years old, drawn to her
joie de vivre and
intellectual curiosity. For her part, Élisabeth fell for the young
man – writing to her parents that “I have found in Félix everything
that I desire in a husband”[6]
– and to everyone it appeared as a perfect match. Félix and
Élisabeth were united in a church wedding on the last day of July
1889, but Élisabeth may have carried within her some degree of
ressentiment
for it was only the night before their marriage that Félix
admitted to her that he was not only a non-practicing Catholic but
also a complete and militant agnostic. He promised, however, to
respect and support her religious practices.
Félix remained true to his promise for a while, even reticent in
expressing his views on religion so as to not offend Élisabeth.
Nonetheless, Félix was immersed in the anticlerical politics and
thinking of late 19th century France and he wanted
Élisabeth to share in his beliefs. He encouraged her to peruse the
books in his private library which included Protestant, rationalist,
and modernist thinkers. In the whirl of travel, social life,
entertaining, and Félix’s constant activity, Élisabeth’s habits of
recollection and her practice of the faith began to weaken. By 1896,
she had developed doubts about her faith which led her to stop her
religious practices altogether, much to the disappointment and shock
of her parents.
Madeleine, meanwhile, came from a petit-bourgeois family
originally from Dordogne in southwestern France. Her parents were a
thoroughly mismatched couple who openly bickered with each other –
even throwing pans and other things they could grasp at each other
while in front of their only child. Madeleine was the single factor
uniting the antagonistic couple, and they nurtured the intellectual
and artistic potentials they perceived in their prodigious
four-year-old daughter. Madeleine described her early education as
“a bit anarchical,” privately tutored and subjected to numerous
changes in teachers because of her father’s whimsical – though
brilliant – character and frequent work transfers. In her early
adolescence she personally sought catechetical instructions which
she did not receive from her religiously indifferent parents. She
was also on her own when she received her first communion at the age
of twelve.
This elementary introduction to Catholicism, however, did not
hold fast once Madeleine and her family moved to Paris in the fall of 1916
and got caught up in the city’s social frenzy and intellectual
currents. “In Paris,” she recollected later, “remarkable individuals
offered me a contradictory formation regarding religion. By the time
I was fifteen, I was a strict atheist, and the world grew for me
more absurd by the day.”[7]
The lively and inquisitive adolescent voraciously took in every
pleasure accorded her in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne and the
nightlife of Parisian nightclubs. But this lust for life gave way to
disillusionment with life as she reached the cusp of adulthood:
It has been said that “God is dead.” Because
this is true, we need to have the honesty to live as if God does not
exist. Since we have settled the question for him, now we have to
settle it for us…. The legacy of God’s death has yet to be settled.
He left everywhere bonds of eternity, power, and spirit. So who’s
the beneficiary? Death! God was everlasting; now only death lasts
forever. God was spirit – I’m not even sure what that is – but death
is everywhere, invisible, and effective. It gave a little tap, and
boom! – love stops loving, thought stops thinking, babies stop
smiling, and then there is…. Nothing.[8]
Her
nihilism became evident to family and friends who were alarmed by
her growing moroseness. The loss of a boyfriend further escalated
her withdrawal into her shell; she avoided her girlfriends and
dropped out of the Sorbonne – the gaiety of Paris had lost its
appeal for her.
CONVERSION AND RESOLUTIONS
Both Élisabeth and Madeleine experienced a return to the Spirit
after negating God in their personal lives. For Élisabeth, the
conversion happened unexpectedly two years after she stopped
practicing her faith. Having nothing to read, she asked her husband
to recommend something to her. Félix recommended Ernest Renan’s
Life of Jesus, a
widely popular book which courted controversy for dismissing the
authority of the Gospels for their lack of historical weight.
Élisabeth read the book, but instead of assenting to Renan’s
position she comprehended “the fragility of its debatable and
oftentimes contradictory hypotheses” using her own intellectual
acuity.[9]
In order to substantiate her suspicions, she revisited the Gospels
and soon became deeply affected through her daily reading of them.
Her strong mind compelled her to find answers to the pressing
religious and social questions which she faced in the anticlerical
intellectual and political circles she and Félix frequented.
Élisabeth began a program of reading, study, and prayer, and began a
journal for her spiritual musings. She eventually amassed a
collection of two hundred books on philosophy, morality,
spirituality, apologetics, and hagiography. By 1899, Élisabeth
returned to a life of faith, strengthened by the interior crisis she
had resolved on her own.
Madeleine’s conversion occurred in the late winter of 1924. On one
of her rare outings to the neighborhood dance halls, Madeleine fell
in with a group of young people – the “gang of six” – who relished
in the Parisian nightlife and
au courant
ideas:
I met several Christians, neither older nor
dumber nor more idealistic than I was; in other words, they lived
the same life I did, they discussed as much as I did, they danced as
much as I did. They even had a few things in their favor – they
worked harder than I did, they had a technical and scientific
formation that I didn’t have, and they had political convictions
that I didn’t have and didn’t practice.[10]
After
months of passionate debate and discussion with them, she was
introduced by the gang to Abbé Jacques Lorenzo. Unlike the pietistic
and overbearing priests she scoffed at, Abbé Lorenzo came across to
Madeleine as an intelligent yet self-effacing pastor, rooted in the
knowledge of Scripture and respectful of human beings and their
nature. Through the influence of these convinced believers,
Madeleine came to believe: “I was no longer able to leave God in the
absurd. At the age of twenty, my intellectual religious search ended
in a radical conversion.”[11]
After their experiences of conversion, Élisabeth and
Madeleine spent their following years reordering their familiar
circumstances so that they could harmonize with their renewed
spiritual lives. With Élisabeth, these negotiations had to take
place within the “givens” of her life as an upper-middle class
matron, which she would later lament as “a duty I find most
oppressive (because) I should remain calm in dealing with those
around me who hear me but who do not understand the language of
Christians.”[12] Sensitivity toward Félix was
always foremost in her mind. Lest it be misunderstood – especially
because of how past biographies wrongly portrayed the marriage – the
union of Félix and Élisabeth was completely loving and
unconditional. Privately, Élisabeth mourned only two things about
her marriage: one, that biological reasons prevented them from
having children – a sorrow she mitigated by showering her nephews
and nieces with much affection and attention; two, that she could
not fully share her Christian faith with her beloved husband.
Despite his acknowledged difficulty in accepting his wife’s renewed
faith, Félix remained completely in love with her. Illustrative of
this point is the writing table he gifted her with in 1901. In one
of his less-than-sensitive episodes, Félix began calling his wife
“Madame Péchin,” a character in Anatole France’s
The Amethyst Ring
who insisted on her belief in immortality. Élisabeth responded to Félix’s teasing with good humor. When Félix later realized that he
was beginning to hurt his wife with his persistent name-calling, he
sought to make amends by having the writing desk delivered together
with a love letter. Élisabeth responded to his thoughtful and loving
gesture by initiating her new desk by writing a love letter:
I am sending this to you, dearest Félix, from
the depth of my little Péchin heart, a feeling of tenderness, in
which all forms of love are mixed together, united so that it would
be impossible to separate them…. I am so grateful for the happiness
of being loved by another dear and good person such as you.[13]
To fulfill her desire for transcendent centeredness, Élisabeth
devised a flexible Rule of Life which organized her devotional and
ascetical practices. She imposed on herself a regimen which involved
daily morning and evening prayer and meditation. She resolved to
spend a day of retreat each month and a longer retreat once a year.
She reconfigured her inner life so that she could have as much
solitude as possible for meditation and self-examination. Élisabeth
also organized her outer life as part of her spiritual program. She
followed her Rule only when she was home alone and did not need to
consider the rest of the household, careful that her life of
devotion would not interfere with either the comfort or needs of
those she loved. Her relationship with her agnostic husband was her
primary concern:
My duty to my husband: deep love… constant care
to be useful and gracious to him. Especially, to be reserved
concerning matters of faith, which are still veiled to him. If a
quiet statement should be necessary, or if I can fruitfully show him
a little of what is in my heart, that must be a rare event, done
after careful thought, gentleness, and serenity. To show him the
fruit but not the sap, my life but not the faith that transforms it,
the light in me but not the One who brings it, to reveal God without
speaking his name. This is the only way, I think, I can hope for the
conversion and holiness of my dear companion, my beloved Félix.[14]
Since
she was not always healthy, Élisabeth took on only that domestic
work that her weak health permitted her to do, involved herself with
the needs of the poor, and sought to treat her servants warmly
without crossing the boundary of familiarity.
