Everyday Holiness: Striving for Sainthood “on the Streets”
“All the faithful, whatever their condition or state, are called by the Lord, each in his own way, to that perfect holiness whereby the Father Himself is perfect” (Pope St. Paul VI, Lumen Gentium).
Jesus did not come just for priests and religious, and He calls all of us to holiness (Matthew 5:48). Still, when so many of our best-known saints were called to the religious life, it can sometimes be difficult to remember that we, as laywomen, are called to sanctity as well. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, what does it look like to strive for holiness?
A new book from Ignatius Press answers this question. The Holiness of Ordinary People is a collection of writings by Madeleine Delbrêl, a 20th-century French poet, social worker, and lay missionary whom Pope Francis declared “Venerable” in 2018. This collection speaks to all laypeople—single, married, parents, childless—and is full of both encouragement and challenges to follow God’s will “while we walk in the street, while we do our work, while we peel our vegetables, while we wait for a phone call, while we sweep our floors.”
A Modern Saint
Madeleine joins such figures as soon-to-be-Saint Carlo Acutis, Servant of God Catherine Doherty, Servant of God Dorothy Day, and Saints Zélie and Louis Martin, St. Gianna Molla in serving as a modern example of holiness in the secular world. She was born in 1904 to a stationmaster and his wife (both of whom were not religious). She studied literature and philosophy, drawing and painting, and nursing and social work.
As a young woman, she fell in love with a man who became a Dominican friar and then suffered from severe depression, after which she experienced a conversion. While she felt called to the Carmelite Order, she discerned that God wanted her to remain a layperson and became involved with a group of women called the Charity of Jesus. These women, she wrote, were “souls determined to live the Gospel without limit. These souls cannot stand unrealism: their apostolate is one of life. Their method is not to work for Christ but to relive Christ in the midst of a de-Christianized world. To this end, this group aims to be acted upon, not to act.”
What a model of receptivity in the modern world!
Being Christ in the Workplace
In her essay “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets,” Madeleine wrote:
Whatever we have to do: take up a broom or a pen; speak or keep quiet; do the mending or give a lecture; tend to a sick person or type on a machine.
All of this is but the exterior of the splendid reality of the encounter of the soul with God, every minute renewed, every minute enhanced in grace, ever more beautiful for her God.
As Catholic women in business, we, too, must make our work reflect our encounter with God. You don’t have to own a company making rosaries or selling Bibles to be Christ in the workplace. As Madeleine wrote, it takes the silence and solitude to hear God’s voice, it takes obedience to that voice, and it takes love of God and the people He’s placed in your life.
The Holiness of Ordinary People is a small and short book, but you’ll want to take your time with it. It’s full of wisdom and always points back to Christ. Purchase it, journal with it, and then use it to better listen to God and be His hands and feet in the world.
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
-St. Teresa of Ávila
Taryn DeLong is co-president and editor-in-chief of Catholic Women in Business. Her first book, Holy Ambition: Thriving as a Catholic Woman at Work and at Home, written with her co-president Elise Crawford Gallagher, is out now from Ave Maria Press. She works as a freelance editor and writer in between caring for her home and daughters outside Raleigh, North Carolina. Connect with Taryn: Instagram • Facebook • LinkedIn • Blog • Substack.