Following Jesus of Nazareth
The major intuitions of Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus
'He took me by the hand and blindly I followed.'
In attempting to assemble the pieces of Little Sister Magdeleine's life
for her biography one of the things that impressed itself very strongly
upon me was the extent to which she was not one who came to know God or
his will through rational thought or discursive reasoning. Her life and
the history of the Fraternity, as she recorded them, were repeatedly
defined in terms of God having taken her by the hand and of her having
blindly followed. Practical and concerned with the details of every day
life, though she was, her letters and journals are full of references
to feelings, intuitions, dreams, sudden realisations, and lights that
guided her, to the knowledge that she must do something even though in
human terms that action might be folly, precisely because life had
shown her from a relatively early age that what to human eyes was
madness was often divine wisdom.
The exact nature of her initial vocation is accordingly
characteristically lacking in clear direction. She wrote of how 'well
before her first communion' and 'almost from the age of reason' she
felt a calling to the religious life and maintained that her vocation
was probably born of a love of Africa. She spoke of how even as a small
child whenever she saw little African children, she felt spontaneously
drawn to them, and of how her favourite game was making a tent out of
blankets with one of her brothers. People who took to the road in
caravans, had next touched her heart. Later it was prisoners who
attracted her to be 'a prisoner with them'. Then a visit to a leper
colony awakened in her 'dreams' of a calling associated with them. It
would have taken several lives, she claimed, with what in the light of
all that was to come we now identify as irony, to fulfil so many
dreams. She acknowledged the impact of her parents' faith and of her
father's special affection and concern for the Muslim nomads. Her
father was in her eyes a saint, who never expressed regret for having
made a treacherous journey to Tunis on horseback, in order to save the
life of a little boy, at great personal cost to his own health and
career. Her father, perhaps not insignificantly, was also a man of
premonitions: when news reached him of the declaration of the First
World War, he is said to have knelt down with his head in his hands and
predicted: 'Today there are six of us. When the war ends there will be
three.' He was proved to be tragically right.
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