"Passion—our passion—yes, we await it.
We know it must come, and of course we mean
to live it with a certain grandeur.
The sacrifice of ourselves:
we wait for nothing but the hour to strike.
Like a log in fire,
so we know we must be consumed.
Like a thread of wool cut by scissors,
so we must be severed.
(…) Passion, we await it.
We await it, and it does not come.
Instead come the small trials.
These small trials, these crumbs of passion,
meant to kill us slowly for your glory,
to kill us without our glory.
From morning they come before us:
they are our nerves too tight or too sluggish,
the bus that passes full,
the milk that boils over, the chimney sweep arriving,
the children who make a mess of everything.
They are the guests our husband brings home
and that friend who, of all people, does not come;
it is the telephone that erupts;
those we love who love us no longer;
it is the wish to stay silent and the need to speak,
it is the wish to speak and the need to stay silent;
it is wanting to go out when you are shut in
it is staying home when you must go out;
it is the husband we long to lean on
and who becomes the most fragile of children;
it is disgust at our daily portion,
it is the feverish desire for what is not ours.
So come our small trials,
in tight ranks or in single file,
and they always forget to tell us
that they are the martyrdom prepared for us.
And we let them pass with contempt,
waiting—to give our life—
for an occasion worthy of the cost.
Because we have forgotten that
as there are branches destroyed by fire,
so there are boards that slow steps wear away
until they crumble into sawdust.
Because we have forgotten that
if there are threads of wool cut clean by scissors,
there are knit threads that day by day
wear thin on the backs of those who wear them.
Every redemption is a martyrdom,
but not every martyrdom sheds blood:
some are drawn out across the whole length of a life.
It is the passion of patience"
A scrap of paper, found by chance on a church bench in Milan by a friend of her mother's. This will be the tenth time Viola has read these words—and each time, they speak more clearly to her. She understands better what the author was trying to say: Madeleine Delbrêl, the French mystic, poet, and social worker (1904–1964), who in 1935 established her vision of simple communal life on rue Raspail, in the working-class outskirts of Paris. With a handful of companions, she built a living Christian presence among the dechristianized people of her neighborhood—a presence rooted in faith, in lived community, and in social justice. Born to atheist parents ("radical and profound," as she would later say), Delbrêl converted to Catholicism at twenty. A convert, she once remarked, is "a person who discovers the marvelous fortune that God is." Viola reads again, and another fragment of her own life aligns with the words of this woman—so distant, yet so close.
Giulia Galeotti, 2016