A Tour of the Madonna House Training Centre
Maintenance Work and the Machine Shop
The maintenance work at Madonna House is done by men who approach their repairs with a Gospel vision. What it means to them is well-put by Catherine Doherty. Let's go to the machine shop now and listen while she discusses their work:
To “maintain” means to keep whole, to keep intact, to prolong life and usefulness. It also means to repair, to make whole again that which was broken, damaged, dented, or misused. It also means sometimes to change ugliness into beauty. It means to restore something that seems useless, something that could be put to use again by loving care. Yes, to “maintain, repair, and make whole again” is the business of a maintenance department, especially in Madonna House.
Here maintenance and poverty are wedded together. We must never forget that we are beggars of the Lord. We have embraced poverty because we are in love with the Lord who himself was poor. In fact, we have made poverty our life. Therefore, the maintenance department of Madonna House is the citadel, the court, the workshop of Lady Poverty!
There should also be a hunger for knowledge, an ever-expanding knowledge about every tool and how to use it. About paints and their properties and the best way to apply them. About the restoration of antique furniture and ordinary furniture that will be used for long years afterwards by the apostolate. Yes, those who work in maintenance must have a constant hunger for that type of knowledge; it can easily be filled with a little ingenuity and orderliness. They must be hungry for the type of knowledge that will serve the Lord better in the apostolate.
They must be men of order, great order. For it behoves them to enter into the great tranquillity of God's order. By ordering all things sweetly, the Lord restores broken souls and hearts and minds and occasionally broken bodies as well. Maintenance men must realize that God has given them a very special grace, the grace of healing and ‘restoring’ his creatures. Houses, furniture, tools — all these are “creatures of God.”
What a grace! What an incredible, immense grace to be the restorer, the renewer, the healer of God's creatures. What an apprenticeship for our vocation — which is the restoration of the world to Christ! The apostolate of the maintenance men is world-wide. Wherever they go, they will teach others to restore the creatures of God.
Consider our modern society where waste is so fashionable. People think that it is a status symbol to be able to waste. Only the poor cannot waste things. We think that if we create a waste civilization there will be more jobs to go around. Perhaps this is true. But what kind of jobs? Imagine yourself creating a plastic container that you know will be thrown away. To work and create things that will be thrown away as useless as soon as they get into the hands of a consumer is a rape of the human mind, soul, and body.
Maintenance men have the task of showing that any creature of God should not be wasted. Their task is to use those waste products to help restore things, or to create new things out of what others consider waste.
By keeping the premises of Madonna House painted, by repairing furniture which has been given to us for our use, by restoring old things to their original beauty, the maintenance men transfer their love for one another, for Madonna House, and for all of humanity into loving service. How simple are the ways of God, and how glorious are the ways of men and their vocations when they unite with the simple ways of God!
Maintenance men must be men of prayer. Then the creature of God upon which they work with loving care will easily yield itself to them, and their job will be as perfect as it can be under the circumstances. And that job, that repair, that restoration will continue to praise God as long as it exists. And the apostolate of Madonna House will be tremendously enriched by the graces that God will give the maintenance men for their work.
God the Inventor, God the Creator, looked at man, smiled, and found him very good. Man understood that he was created in the image and likeness of God and that always, through the mercy of God, he has divine life in him and is co-creator with him in the measure that God wills.
God had created matter originally, but he had given to man the intelligence, the ability, the genius to work with that matter and give it new forms, shape it for new uses. The Lord had made man lord of creation and had subjugated to him not only animals but all of nature. True, man had to find this out through much labour, in the sweat of his brow, through trial and error. He discovered it through all the frustrations, anxieties, sorrows, and pains that accompany creative efforts. But slowly, while paying his debt to God through all those sufferings, man moved into this new creativeness of his, into his ability to rearrange and give new shape to matter.
Alas, as nature yielded its most hidden secrets to man (because such was the will of God), the Tempter came around. Many men fell once again for his temptation; they imagined that the machines they were creating were exclusively their own creation.
One important part of our Madonna House Apostolate, especially for its men, is to go into the marketplace and snatch Satan's apples from the mouths of men, teaching them that they are only co-creators of machines. They are to teach others that behind every machine lies an intelligence greater than theirs: the incredible, infinite intelligence of God.
Everything in the world contains God and is touched by God. Who is there among us who would dare to use the chalice of the Eucharist for some ordinary purpose, let alone for some menial purpose. Man can desecrate the creatures of God. A chalice and a Host are visible realities of God's presence. But to the eyes of faith, other realities are signs of his presence as well.
The car we drive, the corn-cutter we use, the truck that carries the packages, the electrical motor or fan, the chain saw, the heater, the tractor — these too are chalices of God's creation, transmitting his intelligence, love, and tenderness through the minds of men. It follows, therefore, that, in a manner of speaking, when we abuse a machine we are guilty of blasphemy and desecration of a creature of God.
This means that we must think ahead, recollect ourselves before we even put our foot on the starter, or touch a button, or put into motion any machine that man co-created with God. We have no right to mishandle a creature of God in any way. When we do, we challenge God, laugh in his face and say, “I couldn't care less that you are in this creature.” In fact, we almost add, “I don't really believe that you are in it. It was created by me, a man. It is my slave. I couldn't care less what happens to it even though it doesn't belong to me but to the apostolate. It has no life of its own. Man and man alone is its master, and I am a man.”
Or, we can take out on the creature of God all our frustrations, hostilities, and emotional disturbances, not realizing that the only thing we hurt is ourselves. It is just as bad to manhandle a machine because of our emotional disturbances as it is to take out our hostilities on a dog by kicking it for no reason at all. Better to have the humility and courage to say, “I am upset today. It would be better if somebody else worked with this machine today,” than to challenge the Lord himself by abusing his creature.
Yes, all these broken machines will come to the repairman. The workshop, therefore, must be a place of prayer, of atonement, of mortification, of silence and recollection. It is not enough to simply repair a creature of God with the knowledge of one's mind and the skill of one's hands. One has to repair also the harm done to the creature of God and the slight done through it to God himself.
Yes, the man in charge of the machines — in fact, all the men — must learn to be victim souls before God. A victim soul is one who has been given the grace to atone not only for his sins but for those of others. This is a great grace. These men can easily associate themselves with Gethsemane. On hot days, greasy sweat will run down their faces and bodies. It won't be bloody, but if they accept it lovingly for others it will mingle with the bloody sweat of Christ.
The eternal dirt and grease on their hands, so hard to get off, will remind them of the dust and dirt that must have added much agony to Christ's body when he was carrying his cross. His wounds were filled with the dirt of the road, with spittle, and with all the things that are usually found on the roads of the East.
Previous Page