As a young woman, Madeleine Delbrêl was anything but a missionary, or even a Christian. She spent many nights dancing at balls and clubs, or discussing the absurdity of life with the audacity inspired by “the crazy years” in France between the world wars. But then she rose from the comfortless seat of atheism to “dance” with the Lord. And she danced, not in a ballroom, but in the streets of a grimy Paris suburb that was a hub of communism. So it’s fitting that Pope St. John Paul II once prayed that her “shining witness [might] help all the faithful . . . to put down roots in ordinary life and . . . to make the newness and power of the gospel penetrate” both ourselves and others around us.

“How Would You Like Us to Dance?” Madeleine was born on October 24, 1904, in Mussidan, a city sixty miles east of Bordeaux in southwestern France. She was a cherished only child who received the standard education afforded many girls of her day, which consisted mostly of painting and piano lessons. Her father, an amateur poet and literary enthusiast, schooled her in French literature, and her parents saw to it that Madeleine made her First Communion and received some religious instruction.

But when she was twelve, the family moved to Paris, where Madeleine received a different catechesis: “By the time I was fifteen, I was a strict atheist,” she wrote, “and the world grew for me more absurd by the day.” At seventeen, she proclaimed, “God is dead, long live death. . . . [It] has become the surest thing.”

Madeleine was serious and intelligent but also “lyrical.” She wrote prolifically, danced frequently, and became engaged to a young man, who broke the engagement and later became a Dominican priest. Madeleine was left to cope with that heartbreaking loss as she also wrestled with the emptiness of life and searched for a “reasonable absolute.” A short time later, she met a group of Christians who were “neither older nor dumber nor more idealistic” than she. These believers liked to examine ideas and to dance just as much as she did. Her association with them left her unable to keep counting God as part of “the absurd” and fueled a religious search that led to a “radical conversion.”

“We have to let you re-create us, to be glad-hearted people who dance their lives with you.” Madeleine began to pray, admitting that if God did exist, she couldn’t ignore him. “By reading and reflecting, I found God,” she wrote, “but by praying, I believed that God found me and that he is a living reality . . . [whom] we can love in the same way we love a person.” Her faith came as “a stupendous happiness . . . that we receive from the God who loves the world.”

Madeleine’s first inclination was to become a Carmelite and live a contemplative life of prayer and sacrifice for God and neighbor. But as she sought discernment for her future, she came to believe that God was calling her to a lay life. Her aim became to live the gospel “freely and openly” in the world in which she lived. So would begin her dance with God, what she called the “peculiar ball” of obedience.

Madeleine’s conversion was a re-creation of her entire self that continued throughout her life. Now she would put down her roots in heaven, she said, where “the life we seek with our Father introduces us to a continuously renewed youth.” She believed that what she heard at Mass or read in Scripture was intended to become a part of that re-creation and to remain with her always. One can never be so busy or preoccupied, and one’s time can never be so obligated to the demands of others, she asserted, as to leave no room for the word of God, which “will always be able to make space [in us] for itself.”

“Lord, teach us precisely where . . . the peculiar ball of our obedience takes place.” In 1933, the site of that “peculiar ball” for Madeleine became Ivry, a suburb of Paris, France. She was offered a house, rent-free, in exchange for service to the community there. Madeleine and two other women moved into the house and dedicated themselves to living closely with the poor and unbelieving residents of Ivry. If it seemed a curious place—Ivry was the hub of French communism at a time when animosity between Catholics and Communists was great—it was a perfect place for one who knew, through personal experience, the great sorrow of living without God.

Over the next thirty years, the group of three women grew to fifteen who served in small teams in different places. Even as she directed them, Madeleine relied on their support to persevere amid the turmoil that overwhelmed France before, during, and after World War II. Madeleine was called upon to coordinate public health and social programs in Ivry, and to administer soup kitchens, clothing drives, and emergency aid desperately needed during wartime bombings. She trod the streets like an “old soldier,” according to one acquaintance. She aimed “to carry the Lord God everywhere,” to everyone whom God had placed in her path.

Madeleine’s “dance” called for nimble and intricate steps between the Church and Communists, and around the Nazis who occupied Paris during World War II. It required quick stepping through poverty and frustration, depression and discouragement. Through it all, she talked with and listened attentively to neighbors in the streets. On buses and subway cars, she offered a smile (or her seat) to someone whose face sagged with sadness or fatigue. The door of her home was open to all: she shared food, music, and companionship with anyone who came to visit. “To be a good dancer, with [God] as with anyone else, . . . we only need to follow, to be cheerful, to be light, and above all not to be stiff.”

“Teach us every day to dress our human condition, in the dancing gown you love to have us wear.” Even though the reality of life in Ivry was far different from the glamour of a formal ball, Madeleine sought to dress herself as if for one. She clothed her thin, frail frame in joy, that she might make joy seem possible to those who were flagging under shortages of food and coal, of goods and employment. She strove to wear a gown of happiness, ornamented by the honor of doing God’s will. Most of all, she cloaked herself in the gospel, trying to “bring God to the flesh . . . [and] put him where we are: in our social circle, our city, our country, the Church.”

Madeleine Delbrêl lived her mission energetically and intentionally, but also with humor and practical wisdom. “My God, if you are everywhere, why then am I somewhere else so frequently?” she wrote. “Strategy is one thing—God’s ways are another,” she jotted down on an evening she thought had been “marred by failure.” “Beware of wasting time feeling sorry for yourself,” she chided herself on a day when she was feeling exceptionally unhappy. And “When you long for the desert, remember that God prefers people,” she noted while struggling to say the Rosary on a crowded bus.

Dancing in the Arms of Grace. Madeleine used her many natural gifts—intelligence, friendliness, wit, and a striking organizational ability—to carry out the “essential work of Christ and of every Christian who lives in him.” What was that work? “To give eternal life to people who do not have it or who no longer have it.” Her natural gifts were animated through her daily connection with God in prayer, her deep immersion into Scripture and the sacraments, and her passion to love anyone God put in her path.

Her mission in the streets entailed caring for the suffering. She knew firsthand years of violence and foreign invasion, hunger and scarcity, discouragement, frustration, and exhaustion. But she was dancing with God, not fighting evil. She was surrounding poverty, hunger, scarcity, indifference to God, and rank atheism with life, “since that is what [evil] is not.”

Madeleine Delbrêl was dancing with the One who, in her own words, makes us live our lives

like an endless celebration, where our meeting with [him] is constantly new,
Like a ball,
Like a dance,
In the arms of [his] grace,
In the universal music of love.

Madeleine died unexpectedly in 1964, sitting at her desk. Crowds packed the church for her funeral, while everyone involved in the local Communist government stood outside in silent tribute to her.

Let us pray with her, “Lord, ask us to dance.”

Ann Bottenhorn is a longtime contributor to The Word Among Us.