This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant
Young men and women become working guests at Madonna House for many reasons, but perhaps the most frequent is to find a place away from their usual cares and distractions, a place where they can more easily discern their vocation. Madonna House is a unique situation for this.
At our main center in Combermere there are over 100 community members ranging in age from early 20s to mid 90s, and before COVID we were receiving a few hundred guests into our home each year. (Please God, we will be able to do that again before long.)
Some stay only a week, some stay a whole year, but either way they are thrust right into our family life of work, prayer and play.
The majority of our guests are young people who come with the same question in their hearts: what is God’s plan for me? Perhaps they come for this reason but they stay week after week because they see gospel foolishness lived out.
While here, they live an intimate family life with 140 extremely different individuals who are stumbling along together trying to live a dedicated life of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
They are thrown into a Christian culture where time moves with the liturgy and the seasons. They are challenged to take Christ’s words of totality literally but are surrounded by a community who are imperfect, poor, and little.
Dedication to the Gospel is not divorced from littleness and imperfection and somehow that is an encouragement to them. What they desire is also what we desire, and they learn that it isn’t impossible.
Living with this endless stream of guests leads us as a community to reflect often on how we can welcome them and share the Gospel with them.
What do these young people desire? What do they need to follow their desire? What do they find here that helps them?
What our guests share and reflect back to us sheds some light on these questions. Many of them desire to make a gift of self.
Though aspects of this seem terrifying or perplexing, they possess a real desire for totality even when they are discouraged from this type of commitment in favour of “options” to be left open. They wonder what it could look like in their everyday life if their gift of self was directed towards God alone.
What do young people tell us they need in order to follow this desire? They tell us they need silence, healing, and challenge.
Because of our present culture, some amount of chaos and fragmentation will often be part of a young person’s internal landscape. If silence is given to them and personal healing addressed, they begin to know and hear God’s voice.
They need a basic or fuller experience of Christ’s love and mercy in order to move forward. Walking one on one with a young person, encouraging him or her to stand in difficulty or persevere even in little things that are challenging brings about a great freedom to act on God’s word.
Practically speaking there are some ways that our community addresses these needs by just living our way of life. Some aspects of our life that guests often mention as being helpful are family life, wisdom, mentoring, and liturgical rhythm.
At Madonna House loving one another is our main work, and our guests are not excluded from this work. We are together a lot, and the demands of our family life are high.
However, living in a large multi-generational Christian family and eating three meals a day together, can be a welcome change from the experience of relationships that are uncommitted, unstable, or distant.
The guests experience and see arguments, crying, sickness, tiredness and lack of charity but they also experience generosity, forgiveness and genuine love. Like us, our guests must be connected and dependant on others. Having others love you even when they see you in utter poverty is an experience of the Mystical Body.
Our elders are quite popular with our young guests. There is a thirst for wisdom that was gained by experience and can be passed on to them. The presence of our elders reassures them that the Gospel can be lived throughout life’s difficulties.
They find it deeply healing to be listened to by someone who has enough wisdom and years to walk with them through their pain.
Even the wisdom shared in learning how to make something with your hands or just take care of your belongings are parts of Christian life that help them become more human and whole.
Our life in Combermere has a strong liturgical rhythm which is very tied to the earth. This rhythm creates space for God and only allows very limited use of electronic devices. Our guests find peace as our life is not chaotic or noisy. However, it is very full and certainly isn’t slow.
It is full of work: growing and preparing food, endless maintenance jobs, wood to split, and donations to sort. It’s full of liturgy: daily Mass, communal prayer, and spiritual reading. It’s also full of celebration: preparations for feast days, customs to bring feasts alive, and time together eating, singing and playing.
The focus of the life of our guests can become Christ. They can begin to find him not only at Mass or in the celebrations of feasts but in the kitchen or the fields. The Gospel can then be incarnated wherever life leads them.
It would be hard to overstate how much our guests enrich our life. They challenge us to live our own vocation authentically, to put into words our own experience of God and to preach the Gospel with our lives.
We are so often encouraged by their example of love and service and how they embrace Christ in their own poverty. One could say it’s a mutually beneficial experience where Christ gives himself to all through all.
Adapted with permission from the NAVFD (Nat’l. Assn. of Vocation and Formation Directors) newsletter, February 2021
