The Madeleine Option: Joie de Vivre in the Ruins

“Make us live our life . . . not as a debt to pay, but as a party, as a ball, as a dance in the arms of your grace, in the universal music of love.”

—Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl

Madeleine Delbrêl (1904–1964) was a French laywoman, social worker, poet, and essayist who lived the second half of her life as one of the lone Christians in the Communist-run city of Ivry-sur-Seine, part of France’s Soviet-backed “Red Belt” during the early twentieth century. She was declared venerable by the Vatican in 2017, a major step toward canonization.

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In 1923, Madeleine Delbrêl—today, Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl—was sure there was no God. She did not have to struggle. It was easy not to believe. She was nineteen years old in Paris at the heart of the Jazz Age: cocktails, cabarets, Josephine Baker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Latin Quarter salons, Surrealism, and philosophy lectures at the Sorbonne, where she excelled. She cut her hair short, wore a short Charleston dress, and vowed with her friends to remain “forever young.” By day, she was getting some of the highest marks in her classes. By night, she hopped from bar to bar, dancing until dawn. If there was a heaven, life moved too fast to think much about it. Long before the invention of the Bluetooth speaker, she and her friends liked to parade over the gas-lit bridges of the Seine with a portable wind-up record player. The brilliant, four-foot-something Delbrêl was a sparkplug—active (perhaps even hyperactive), creative, naturally ebullient. Around her, life became electric.

This is especially remarkable considering that Madeleine had spent most of her adolescence within an air raid’s distance from the Great War. Railcars packed with young soldiers rumbled past her daily on their way to the trenches, just fifty kilometers away. The newspapers were soaked in reports of death, and so were the marketplaces: mothers who had lost sons, sisters who had lost brothers. By age eleven, Madeleine was a “strict atheist”—no surprise, since this was the faith of her own father. Somehow, though, she did not lose her native cheer. She wrote patriotic poetry, gave piano recitals to her parents’ guests, and threw herself into the fashionable books of her day: Tristan Tzara, Marcel Proust, and Paul Valéry. She was fifteen when the war ended. The twenties started roaring shortly after.

It was not until 1924 that the music went quiet for her. When personal loss struck, her atheism offered few resources for survival, and her trademark joie de vivre abruptly shorted out. First, her dad, Jules Delbrêl, the manager of a major train station and the self-taught leader of a literary circle in Paris, went blind from diabetes. In one stroke, he could no longer write, read, or work—his life’s chief passions—and the once independent man was made completely dependent on his family’s care. Already prone to rage, he slid into a depression that bordered on mental illness. He not only refused the help of his wife and only child, but cursed them both. He would disappear from the house and roamed the avenues of Paris like Oedipus, reciting tragic monologues to passersby. Madeleine sensed she had no choice but to throw herself into the full-time job of consoling Jules, leaving behind her own studies. She followed her father on his lonely hikes, guided him home, and encouraged him, despite his resistance. She had surprising success. Thanks to her transcription and her sharp editorial eye, Jules managed to turn his laments into a new poetry collection, Pauvre de moi! [Woe Is Me!], which, according to biographer Charles Mann, won a prize from the Académie Française. Despite this triumph, his marriage nevertheless unraveled, with the young Madeleine caught in the middle of her warring parents.

There also came a second blow. In 1923, at the height of her Sorbonne days, Madeleine had caught the eye of Jean Maydieu, a dapper engineering student with a quick mind and a joie de vivre to rival the girl’s own. The interest was mutual. They talked, philosophized, and danced for hours at a time, yet Maydieu’s energy came from a source totally foreign to her “strict atheist” upbringing: Saint Thomas Aquinas. Jean was a Catholic. Still, their chemistry was undeniable, and before long, their whirlwind romance led to a formal engagement. Just a few months later, though, not long after Jules Delbrêl’s collapse, Jean broke the news to Madeleine that the wedding was off. He would be entering the Dominican novitiate to study for the priesthood, and there could be no further contact between them. That was that. All at once, she was alone in her father’s bleak, mad world.

“More and more each day,” she remembered decades later, “I found that the world and its history were the most sinister farce imaginable.” Her simple girlhood unbelief now mutated into a personal hatred of Christianity. “I do not even speak about God,” she wrote in her journal, “but about the one whose priests threaten us, as if with a rod.” Religion was nothing more than an inability to look a cruel reality square in the face. The brunt of her contempt was reserved for the Catholic clergy, those “desperate salesmen in whose mouths are nothing but lies and spent ashes.” One cannot help but wonder if she had Jean Maydieu in mind. At some point in 1924, her despair reached such a pitch that her family sent her to a mental hospital in the idyllic Vallée de Chevreuse. It did nothing for her. She left the facility and traveled with her parents’ cook to the Netherlands, hoping to get a fresh start, but that did not work either. She came home to Paris and once again hid in her room.

One night that winter, a friend prevailed on the reclusive Madeleine to go out for old times’ sake. At a café, they struck up a conversation with a group of young people around the dance floor and hit it off:

They were no older, no dumber, no more “idealistic” than me—in other words, they lived the same life I did, argued as much as I did, danced as much as I did. They were even superior to me in many ways: they worked harder than me, had a scientific and technical formation that I didn’t. . . . They were fully at home the entirety of my reality. . . .

They talked about everything, but they also talked about God, who seemed to be as indispensable to them as air.

They became fast friends. Over the course of a few months, this “gang of six” pulled the young woman out of the shadows back into the light of human community. The fact that they were Catholics did not deter her. They debated with her about metaphysics, but they did it with tenderness. “I could no longer honestly relegate God to the absurd,” Delbrêl reflected. “If I wanted to be sincere, God was no longer strictly impossible; he could not be treated as if he definitely did not exist.” She could see that becoming Christian at least did not mean becoming boring or brainwashed. Through their persistent witness, she crossed the chasm from atheism to agnosticism. She even started praying.

By 1925, she felt compelled to write a poem to God in her journal:

You lived, and I did not know it.
You had made my heart your size,
my life to last as long as you, and
because you were not here, the whole world
seemed small and silly to me
and the fate of all men stupid and cruel.
When I knew that you lived, I
thanked you for having made me live, and I
thanked you for the life of the whole world.

The suffering we suffer on earth
seemed much greater to me
and much smaller, too,
the joys we find here much more real
and smaller, too.

His presence made life as gorgeous as she had once suspected it to be—indeed, far more, since suffering now had a noble place in the mosaic. Life’s joys, too, were more real. God, who had been there all along, actually provided a super-fulfillment of all she had wanted. “[You are] the friend without whom all friendship is fragile, contingent, shaky,” she noted. With the encouragement of her new companions, she started taking faith formation classes from her neighborhood pastor, Abbé Lorenzo, who walked her through whole of the Bible and, when she was ready, received her back to the Sacraments.

Madeleine’s path after this conversion is well documented. In 1926, she published the poetry collection La Route, which won a major national prize. She donated the prize money to her disabled father, helping him to publish some more of his own work. After a few years as a troop leader in the Catholic Scout Movement, she began animating a Bible study with a group of young women and, deciding against religious life, decided to devote her life to the Gospel as a laywoman, moving to the most joyless place she knew: Ivry-sur-Seine, a poor, Communist-run “Red Belt” suburb where most people had rejected God as a bourgeois idol. Mixing in as a social worker, she lived a life “faithful to the intransigent gospel,” not in order to mobilize the workers, but rather “to pace up and down all the streets, to sit in all the subways, to climb all the stairs, to carry the Lord God everywhere: here or there will be a soul that has kept its human fragility in the face of God’s grace, a soul that has forgotten to harden itself with gold or cement.” The Gospel demanded personal, not institutional, love. From 1933 until her death in 1964—spanning World War II, during which she directed the national social services department and won the respect of her atheist colleagues—she lived, ate, worked, and loved in this shabby gray city of factories, writing constantly. Her books have since appeared in various languages across the globe, and Pope John Paul II described her as a “shining witness.”

Although she was poor and celibate, her mission was not that of a consecrated religious. She was lay, and she did not regard her work as special. All Catholics, in her view, are “missionaries without boats,” going out of themselves in daily life to bring love wherever they are. Ordinariness becomes sacred when it is ordained by God:

There are some people whom God takes and sets apart.
There are others whom he leaves in the masses and whom he does not “withdraw from the world”. These are people who do ordinary jobs, who have an ordinary household or an ordinary single life. . . .
We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, that this world where God has placed us, is, for us, the site of our holiness.

What is this holiness? While Delbrêl emphasizes that “the Lord is not stingy” in giving us small crosses, she does not put sacrifice in the foreground. Rather, the chief Christian act is to celebrate—a lesson she first learned from the Catholics she met on a Parisian dance floor. Unlike her old pixie-haired self at the Sorbonne, however, the mature Madeleine, who fell in love with a crucified God, had the ability to make a party even out of all the tiny annoyances and splinters of life.

Life is a great celebration.
Every small action is an immense event in which Paradise is given to us, in which we can give Paradise.
Whatever we have to do: take up a broom or a pen;
speak or keep quiet; do the mending or give a lecture; tend to a sick person or type on a machine.
All of this is but the exterior of the splendid reality of the encounter of the soul with God, every minute renewed, every minute enhanced in grace, ever more beautiful for her God.
There is someone at the door—quick, let us open it. It is God who comes to love us.
A request? Here it is: it is God who comes to love us.
It is time to sit down at the table: let’s go; it is God who comes to love us.
Let’s let him.

As with any true festivity, this jubilation is relational. She celebrates because He is here, and she wants others to join them too, to share in this everyday Paradise.

The Cross comes “without grandeur,” in small pieces, which she terms “little bits of passion.” It can appear as “the bus that passes full,” “the milk that spills,” “the rising cost of living, the funds dwindling,” “our neighbor on the bench who takes up all the room or the window that vibrates enough to split your head.” When we say yes to such a “passion of patience,” we are laughing at a joke by our Friend. Through the Resurrection, human life—in all its undeniable darkness—becomes a comedy. Perhaps more accurately, it becomes a cosmic opera buffa, and Delbrêl does not shy away from asking God to let her join the opera’s chorus:

Make us live our life
not as a game of chess in which everything is calculated
not as a game of sport in which everything is difficult
not as a problem that racks our brain
not as a debt to pay
but as a party
as a ball
as a dance
in the arms of your grace,
in the universal music of love.
Lord, come and invite us.

Elsewhere, she would call this the “Dance of Obedience.” Notice that dancing, which she always adored, remains the strongest expression of vitality and vibrancy for her, even as a Christian.

Madeleine’s conversion began when she encountered a few music-loving Catholics with the courage to let themselves have a good time. Had they been a shy, serious bunch, Delbrêl would likely never have become Christian at all. What drew her in was their capacity for fun, curiosity, and conversation, all somehow imbued with their love of the God they trusted. They pointed to an authentic life rather than an ideology. This stood in stark contrast to her atheist friends from earlier years, two of whom had already committed suicide. The six energetic Christians lived as if the Gospel were really good news, for the body as well as for as the soul. At the same time, they cared enough about their new friend to speak to her about what they thought really mattered: her relationship with her Maker. This is a neat crystallization of the lay vocation as Delbrêl understood it: Christ’s call to “return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you” (Mark 5:19).

[These Christians] see society as the continuation of God’s creation. . . . They want to take everything in the world that is not sin and turn it into a place of grace. They want to have a home like everyone else, built upon peaceful order. Within that home, they want a household full of tenderness. They want to be a peasant among peasants, giving to each thing its due, strong like the others, ambitious for a better tomorrow. . . . To live a faith that each of those they came to save can live; to live it thinking of them, so that they can live it in their turn. To live it so beautifully, so joyfully, so supernaturally that everyone wants to live it.

These are the “ordinary people of the street.” They eat at restaurants, own homes, buy steak at Albertson’s, watch Netflix, go shoe shopping, play fantasy football, bake brownies, throw crawfish boils, toss the ball with their sons, glue PVC pipes, join funk bands, serve as pall bearers, paint portraits, run for office, buy gifts for their parents, kiss their grandchildren, talk to their sisters on the phone for hours, visit their deaf neighbor upstairs, and help their friends move furniture. They strive to be “a peasant among peasants,” but they are steered by the Holy Spirit through prayer. This prayer, however, cannot take the same form as monastic or priestly devotion. It must be looser and more minimal. It might be just “five metro stops at the end of the day,” Delbrêl says. Even the Divine Office “will often be inserted in the midst of much noise and agitation” in the lives of busy laypeople. “I think that for many people caught up in a hectic daily life that is likely to remain hectic, there is a great blessing in not making too many ‘resolutions’ with regard to the Office, other than remaining in contact with it. We are free for a quarter of an hour? It is nine in the morning? Let us take up Prime. We have a long trip at three: let us take up Vespers.” Such flexibility is part of the vocation. Laypeople can still have profound “contact” with the Church’s liturgy in this way, if they just open a moment of their day to it. A tablespoon of yeast will leaven a whole loaf.

By contrast, the evangelical vocation—marked by Christ’s famous call to “follow me”—takes a more rigorous form: “Others offer their life, their family, their home, their work, in order to make themselves the work of incarnation inaugurated by Christ. They ask that all of themselves be erased in order for Christ to clothe them with the life of man that he lived.” They eat frugally, meditate much, preach the Word, keep a distance from their natural family, and follow a tight schedule of prayer. They remain unrooted, ready to be sent to another city at a moment’s notice. Perhaps they have even renounced music, painting, or cycling, a passion of their youth. Why? Because they have been set apart to “put on Christ and nothing else”—the Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head.

These two forms of life look radically different. Yet for Madeleine, both are the lives of Christian missionaries, who cross the ocean of their selves to love their neighbor and receive their neighbor’s love, even in microscopic ways. We see this at play in her own conversion, when the friendship of laypeople tag-teamed with the priestly witness of Abbé Lorenzo. Both proved essential to her. There is a lesson for the Church hidden here. If much ink has been spilled over the Benedict Option, perhaps now we can speak of a “Madeleine Option,” even if Delbrêl is not yet canonized. What could this look like? For laypeople, it would be to remain rooted in this world “where God has placed us,” to “see society as the continuation of God’s creation,” to “take everything in the world that is not sin and turn it into a place of grace,” to live so “beautifully” and “joyfully” that it is contagious, using the trappings of everyday life as instruments for improvisation. This is grandiose language, but for Delbrêl, it is not all that grandiose. “Little bits of charity” are what count. “A little candle can illuminate the evening, can illuminate the darkness, can illuminate the night, can illuminate life.” She liked to tell the story of her evening in a coffee shop in a big city, when she had run out of money and gotten caught in the rain. Exhausted, penniless, and alone, she sat eating some cheap, stale food, crying as she waited for the storm to pass. “All of a sudden, both my shoulders were taken by a comforting and friendly arm, and a voice said to me: ‘You, coffee; me, give’.” The stranger did not speak of God, yet for Madeleine in that moment, she incarnated goodness itself. “What gives this woman the value of a Christian sign, of the distant but faithful image of the goodness of God, is that she was good because she was inhabited by goodness, not because I was part of her family, society, politics, nationality, or religion.” This is one clear example of the unheroic, small-scale charity that laypeople can sow in the field of the world, with fruits that God alone sees.

Meanwhile, for those who have been called out of this world (even if, like the apostles, they continue living in it), the Madeleine Option might mean living one’s consecrated life with more verve, “not as a debt to pay, but as a party, as a ball, as a dance in the arms of [His] grace, in the universal music of love,” with a laughing spirit of obedience to life’s miniature crosses. It could be, also, a deeper understanding of human work: “It was not the carpentry profession that Jesus sanctified during his hidden life but all human vocations, all the stones of the human city. . . . In this life, we are not alone. There are others too, and if it is our job to save them, we must do this through their human vocation.” To Delbrêl, priests and consecrated “must help others to be authentic Christians amid their machines, their cars, and the universal brouhaha.” They must teach them to work better. This may be what Pope John Paul II was calling for in his address to French bishops in 2004: “May [Delbrêl’s] shining witness help all the faithful, united with their Pastors, to put down roots in ordinary life and in the different cultures and to make the newness and power of the Gospel penetrate them through a life that is increasingly fraternal!”

Whatever one’s state of life, the Madeleine Option would be the way of joie de vivre. It is a happiness that looks straight at the Cross and says yes, trusting that “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). It is a happiness that encompasses sadness and grief, but does not stop at them. It is also happiness that is unafraid to make a joke, cheer at a basketball game, say hello to a stranger, play with a child, sing along to the radio, or split a bowl of ice cream. Cocreators, we work to fix what needs fixing in the universe, but we champion the good that is already there, whether explicitly Christian or not, whether significant or not. After all, the Creator made it. In an epoch of ever-rising suicide rates, normalized loneliness, and a boredom that no amount of violence can cure, the Christian joie, which has the freedom to embrace all that is good, is a mighty sign of contradiction. If Christ gave us his very self so that we might have life and have itmore abundantly, we owe him the joy of living it.

[This essay originally appeared the Fall 2024 print edition of Joie de Vivre. To order this issue or subscribe to the journal, click the “Subscribe” tab above.]

Thomas Jacobi is an editor and translator at Ignatius Press. He was born and raised in New Orleans, now living with his wife and children in California. He owes a debt of gratitude to Charles Mann, whose detailed biography Madeleine Delbrêl: A Life Beyond Boundaries provided much of the background for this essay.