As I use the room not only for office work, but also to talk with people, it all combines to create a rather cozy atmosphere.

This part of the house is the original part that existed in 1947 when Catherine and Eddie first came here to live. So one is aware that the pioneers lived in these rooms, and that our earliest history took place in them.

This is both a consoling and a challenging remembrance. Consoling, because there is a sense of their presence, of their support, love, and prayers, and this is a very real thing.

Challenging, because the pioneers in this place were heroic, especially in their acts of faith, when it really did not seem that much could ever develop in such an isolated, lonely place as Combermere was at the time, especially for folks moving in from places like Chicago or New York.

Catherine Doherty always tried to create a cozy, homelike atmosphere in the Friendship Houses she founded before Madonna House. This atmosphere had to do with bearing witness to the warmth of Christ’s heart, to his special compassion for the poor, and to the healing of wounds in those rejected or counted for little by society.

For these, Friendship House or Madonna House would offer a personal and cheerful welcome. Catherine’s word for it was "hospitality of the heart."

The last thing she ever intended was that any foundation would be a retreat from the world or a safe haven from the cross of today’s suffering humanity.

Unless the whole world is welcome, so to speak, and ministered to, it is an empty show. Unless we are prepared to take to our brothers and sisters what we receive in a place like this, it is an impious charade. That is why the whole world seems to come into this office, and through our "blue doors," wherever these might be.

It is still an interesting experience for me, though it may be old hat for many of you, that on this very screen on which I am typing this article, I can tap a few keys and get the latest news off the internet. In a way, the whole world becomes thereby very, very close, right at one’s fingertips in an almost literal way.

But even in the days when communications here in Renfrew County, Ontario, were more precarious and intermittent, Catherine and Eddie Doherty were very much in touch with the whole world. They knew themselves to be members of the Lord’s Mystical Body, and they were supersensitive to what was happening to that Body of his right around the world, especially in the Church itself.

But not only there. There is a fire God puts into some people, and they burn to bring the Good News to wherever it has not been heard before. That wherever may be a near neighbor or someone living far away, but that fire purifies with a radiant heat far more penetrating than anything our beautiful wood stove downstairs will ever be able to produce.

That is the goal of what has become the training center and headquarters for our international apostolate: to burn with love for Christ, and particularly for Christ in our neighbor.

This means, first of all, that you let pain in, the pain of your brother or sister. And that pain has a thousand faces: slavery to sin, loss of meaning, piercing grief and sorrow, sense of abandonment or rejection, fear, deep and abiding, poverty of all kinds, addictions just as numerous, struggles to believe, anguish of seeking vocation. The list is endless.

Catherine taught us that you cannot effectively preach the Good News unless you follow Christ’s example of being wounded with love for your suffering brother or sister. And that wounding comes from letting in the pain of the other.

This is not an easy task. It can be bewildering, crushing, overwhelming at times

I’ll never forget the time when, as a young priest only a year or two ordained, I agreed to listen to a couple who were having a terrible time in their marriage. After listening to the wife for over two hours, I blurted out in exasperation and in all honesty: "I don’t know what to say that will help you!"

She was not at all put off: "Oh, that doesn’t matter. It’s just that you have listened. That is what I needed today more than anything else, someone to listen."

Letting pain in, which is to say, letting our neighbor come deeply into our lives with whatever burden he or she may be carrying—that is one part of the foundations of Madonna House.

But what goes with it is even more primary, more at the root of things: to let God in, in other words, to let Love in—Love, who is a Person.

I can still remember the dark winter’s morning when this first happened to me. I was living at the MH Farm, St. Benedict’s Acres, and was the cheese-maker for the community.

I was going through a lot of personal pain, and I had spent the previous evening reading the book of Job. There was a question torturing me then, and it had been doing so for many years: "why do the innocent suffer?"

There were, of course, very personal reasons why I was asking that question.

In any case, it seemed that without an answer to it, I just would not be able to function much longer in any viable way. I was obsessed with the problem, and at the time, I didn’t know that such obsessions are not the compulsive kind but rather come from the Holy Spirit, as he prepares the heart and mind to receive a truth from the Gospel.

Then suddenly, while I was preparing to go out into that cold, dark morning, the words suddenly impressed themselves on my mind, indelibly and with power: "I, too, was innocent."

I knew it was Christ who was speaking, as if from his cross. His eyes, to my imagining, were filled with the majestic peace of victory, and with a compassion that was total beyond anything I had ever conceived.

It was at that moment that what Catherine Doherty had been repeating over and over became real for me: "God loved us first. Now we must love him back in our neighbor. That is the essence of who we are in Madonna House."

This is a grace that has never left me and has challenged me to respond all these many years.

Until then, I hadn’t realized from what kind of a fire Catherine had been speaking those words. Now I began to see. That Fire is the essence of our MH spirit; we long to share it far and wide, even as we learn to live from it more deeply in the dark night of faith.

Such are my thoughts on a winter’s night, ensconced above our cozy wood stove, with the whole world at my fingertips.