A Tour of the Madonna House Training Centre
Office Work and St. Mary's
Next, let's walk over to St. Martha's, our little building that houses our office and its files. Catherine Doherty has some thoughts to share with us about office work:
What does office work mean to God? In what way does it lead us up the paths of sanctity toward union with God, which is the goal of life and our one desire? The office is the heart and brains of Madonna House. It correlates, collects, and gathers together all the information that we must have in order to do the job that God has allotted us to do, to implement his holy will, and work more efficiently in his vineyard.
It must be remembered that if people in the world work for cash, out of ambition, or out of necessity, how much more efficiently should we work for Christ, our tremendous Lover! All our faculties should be totally alive, alert and awake.
We are not robots performing a job. We are people in love with God, people who realize that in this office we hold our finger on the pulse of the whole apostolate. We must realize that souls depend upon our concentration, on our efficiency, on our charity, on our being fully alive. We should be pulsating with life and joy as we serve God in this ‘centre’ of the apostolate. For in this office lies the key to souls around the world.
Each file card (whether in a computer or on an old fashioned 3-by-5-inch card) represents a human being that is your privilege to bring closer to God. The master file is the key, not only to a person who can be led closer to God, but to an ever-growing chain of services in the apostolate which shows the face of love to others. The apostolate of Madonna House lives, breathes, prays and thinks constantly of new ways and new approaches to bring God to men and men to God.
The romance of this apostolate is laid out for you in steel boxes called filing cabinets. The pages of the romance are cards with addresses on them. If you have any imagination whatsoever, any tiny spark of the love of God burning in your soul, you will pray to God to help you realize what an immense privilege is yours.
God has written you a love letter which is strangely etched in your heart. Every crucifix you look at tells you it is so. Now it is your turn to write love letters back to God. And you can do so by understanding a very simple thing: each card, each letter, is one letter of your love letter to God that will take a lifetime to write. But how beautiful it will be to hear it read in heaven, to know that its poetry of love was in your heart, that it was shaped by such little things as cards, the letters of people to us and us to them. Better than any other department, the office exemplifies the very essence of the spirit of Madonna House: Little things done by little people with an immense, flaming, passionate, great love of God, for his sake and for others as well.
Filing is the bread and water that feeds humility. Men and women who consider themselves well educated, brilliant and smart, will despise the homely little files with their repetitive acts that bore them to death. The proud intellectual person, the brilliant person, filled with self-will and pride, will be bored to tears. How far such a mind is removed from Christ, who spent his day in the most repetitive acts possible! What could be more monotonous than planing a board up and down, up and down, for hours every day; yet the Incarnate Word did it for us.
By doing your job well — perfectly — by understanding why you do it, you can save the world of souls and do that which Madonna House sets out to do: restore all things to Christ by the grace of God and the help of Our Lady. This is what you are going to do in the office. May God show you his face in every card, and may he bless you from every card, and may you always begin every day's work with the sign of the cross, under the patronage of Mary and Joseph and your own patron saint and guardian angel. May you begin it thus, and let your heart sing an alleluia of joy because you were allowed to do so!
Just down the road is St. Mary's, home to a number of our staff. The building was originally a convent and boarding school and later acquired by Madonna House. It has its own chapel for daily prayer, its own kitchen, dining room and laundry, carpentry and machine shops, work space for artists and drama and wool processing, and our bakery. We all gather for Sunday liturgies in the chapel there, as it affords more space for our growing numbers.
The staff assigned to St. Mary's have been given a grace to enter in another way into Catherine's vision of Madonna House.
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