Whenever I see her on vacations to visit my family, she asks me questions. In fact, over the years she has asked me more questions about Madonna House than anybody else ever has.

Unlike most people, she rarely comments and never reacts to anything I say. For her training carries over into her other conversations.

Just a Word

One day in answering one of her questions—I have no memory of what she was asking me—I happened to say the word “dormitory.”

Her mouth fell open. “Dormitories!” she said in astonishment. “You mean you people live in dormitories!”

Well, yes, we live in dormitories, though I must admit that, until that reaction from my friend, I hadn’t thought about it very much.

Our foundress Catherine explained it very simply. “We live in dormitories because a dormitory is a school of love.”

School Begins

This school begins the day you enter Madonna House, for guests, too, live in dormitories.
It’s a very practical school. When there are fifteen or so women in one room with beds less than three feet apart, there are many opportunities to put what you are learning into practice.

You are asked to make your bed neatly and to keep your nightstand uncluttered, for example, out of love for the others. For order, you are told, brings peace.

Perhaps that’s no problem for you. Perhaps you have a need to have everything just so. You are not off the hook. God’s order is not perfectionism, and your challenge to love is to accept the person on the next bed for whom neatness is a struggle.

Then you learn to let go of some of your desires in favor of the needs of the whole. When you are wide-awake at 11:15 p.m., reading a book you can’t put down, for example, it is love to turn off your lights so that others can sleep.

Does someone in the dorm drive you crazy? You may feel like strangling her, but if you want to follow Christ, you will try to be charitable instead.

Then comes the evening when you have had enough of everything—work, new foods, people, etc., etc. You just want to turn off the whole world—at least for a little while. You want to read your book or sleep. But someone comes to your bed wanting to talk to you. Will you put down the book and listen?

Or someone looks sad. Will you smile at her, maybe joke a little? Will you pray for her?*

Then a new guest arrives. Will you help make her feel welcome, answer her questions, help her to settle into this strange new world of Madonna House?

Bowls for Popcorn

There’s a party at the dorm. No one brought bowls for the popcorn. You have the opportunity to offer to go back to the house for them.

Yes, if you want to live the Gospel, whose essence is love, a dormitory offers endless opportunities.

For the guests, dorms are a short-term thing. For the staff, (though only in one dormitory in Combermere does it mean living with fifteen or more people), they are, in one form or other, for the most part, for the rest of our lives.

For the staff, the things I mentioned don’t change. But now the person whom you find difficult is someone with whom you may be living a very long time. And even if she is transferred to a mission house (or you are), she is your sister (if you both persevere) for the rest of your lives.

At Madonna House dormitories are one of the crucibles which God uses to purify us and to form us into a community of love. He forms it through a daily dying to self in such things as windows open either wider or narrower than you find comfortable, hair in the sink, and an irritating conversation nearby when you are in a bad mood.

He forms it through our joking and laughter, through our discussions and our sharing of the little events of the day, and he forms it through our parties and gatherings.

He forms it through our listening to one another and supporting one another and putting up with one another and praying for one another as each of us goes through our various spiritual and psychological struggles.

And he forms it through our problems, conflicts, misunderstandings and personality clashes, and through our efforts to work them out. And especially when, as sometimes happens, we cannot work them out, he forms it through our struggles to love unconditionally.

The People I Live With

The dormitory is a crucible, and it is also a test. Do I love the people I live with? Not do I like them? Sometimes I like them and sometimes I don’t. That’s not really important. What is important is that I treat them with love.

And as any member of a community or family knows only too well, it is far harder to love the person you live closely with than it is to love the person who comes to the door.

Closing Our Doors

Catherine Doherty used to tell us that if we cannot love one another, we might as well close our doors, for unless we do, our love for the person who comes to the door means nothing.

I think I can understand why my friend was so surprised that we at Madonna House sleep in dormitories. In an individualistic culture like ours, it certainly is most unusual. But we live in them because of something else that is also unusual about us. We of Madonna House see forming a community of love as our number one priority.

(*Though both men and women live in dormitories, I am using the feminine pronoun in this article because I am writing from my experience of women’s dorms.)