Those of us who are members of Madonna House make promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience. So ours is a vocation of total self-gift, like that of marriage and priesthood, and like that of monks and nuns and friars. But it’s also sort of its own distinctive thing. Let me explain.
Catherine, Our Foundress
The woman who started Madonna House—Catherine de Hueck Doherty— was a refugee, fleeing Russia during the Communist revolution. She almost didn’t survive that ordeal. But she did at last make it to Toronto, where she began to work several jobs. After arriving at a point of financial security, she sensed a call from Christ to live among the poor in Toronto and to live in poverty herself, devoted to prayer and living by begging and distributing most of what she begged to her neighbors. From the beginning, her vision of living in the hood of Toronto was to live a Nazareth life in that context—that is, to live with Jesus as Mary and Joseph lived with Jesus in Nazareth. Her aim was to simply try to be a good neighbor, to develop friendships with her neighbors. Eventually, people joined Catherine in this work, and formed a community. That was in the early 1930s. Over time, this community that grew up around Catherine evolved into what is today Madonna House, whose headquarters are in the rural Ontario village of Combermere.
Life with Mary
Catherine’s life when she started her apostolate in Toronto and the life of the apostolate as it has continued since is something she conceived of from the beginning as a Nazareth life, following the template of Mary and Joseph. And so, Catherine meditated much upon the figures of Mary and Joseph. What she said of Mary and Joseph very much gets to the heart of the Madonna House spirit and what Madonna House is up to. Once, in describing her own thoughts on Mary, Catherine reflected:
The first image that comes to mind is that of a very little girl. She comes from a small town or village… I see her little hands as they become accustomed to labour. She learns to weave, cook, sweep, spin. She does so many things that fourteen-year-old girls of today cannot do. I see her as being very simple and unobtrusive, melting into the group of which she belongs, unobserved… Then I think of how she must have played as all children played: jumping, dancing, running through the fields; and I feel as if I could celebrate with her. She was attentive to all the feasts of the synagogue, to the Psalms, to all the things of God. I asked myself, ‘How attentive? And it came to me that her attentiveness was fantastic; it was an all-absorbing activity. She drank deeply of the Psalms. She was enraptured of the Scriptures reading the Scriptures that we now know refer to her. She did not know that they were going to be applied to her, yet in some way she must have absorbed them deeply and ‘kept them all in her heart.’
Aspects of Life in Combermere
Our Guests and the Work
Catherine’s meditation on Our Lady’s life as a young girl in Nazareth gives us a glimpse of something of the spirit of our life in Combermere. In Combermere, around 150 members live in close quarters with one another, both men and women. Some of the men are priests, though most of the men are laymen and remain so. The men and women have separate dormitories and much of the work through the day is separate, though not always. There is an intensively shared life between the men and the women, living in a healthy communal context of chaste, celibate love.
We receive as guests many young men and women throughout the year, who come to share in our life for a week, or even up to a year. There is plenty of work to do—like the work that Catherine envisions Our Lady having done in Nazareth, and like the work that Joseph likewise would have done, if Mary and Joseph had set up shop in a rural village in a place like rural Ontario. There is plenty of sweeping, mopping, canning, and cooking. Both men and women take part in the gardening work. A lot of the men guests spend their days working alongside the men of the community, splitting firewood, stacking firewood, making kindling, taking care of the animals on the farm, or collecting maple sap—many healthy, basic, human tasks that get us back in touch with the basics of human living.
The Liturgical Rhythm
A key aspect of the life in Combermere, into which the guests who come to stay with us enter, is the rich liturgical rhythm, culminating in the Mass each day. The rhythm of our life through the day and through the year is to a great extent framed and oriented toward the liturgy. We have rich traditions that draw out the mysteries of Lent and Easter, of Advent and Christmas, and other aspects of the Church calendar. Without even trying, a guest at MH is able to simply enter into the steam of the Church’s liturgical life, in a manner that is integrated with a day of work, a shared communal life, a life of service, punctuated with times of liturgical prayer, as well as times to chat, times to play games, times to just chill out with a cup of maple tea or coffee.
Arts and Crafts
Our foundress Catherine very much saw arts and crafts as a key part of her vision for Madonna House. Hence, members of MH and the guests have many arts and crafts projects on the go—from painting to weaving to spinning wool to egg-dying to making wood prints and birch bark card-making and… well, you name it, we’re likely to have that craft on the go in Combermere. This is all a part of the Catholic tradition’s eye for beauty and a Catholic affirmation of the goodness of material creation.
Restoration of the whole person—particularly our sexuality
All of this was seen by Catherine and still seen today by Madonna House’s members as a part of the restoration of the whole person—mind, body, heart, soul, and spirit. By throwing our bodies into manual labor, by depending upon one another as we serve one another in various ways, by engaging our minds, by learning to deal with one another when we come into conflict—all of this is a part of how we come to know who we are and what we’re made for. In today’s age of heightened confusion surrounding sexuality, we’re seeing at MH that Catherine’s vision for the restoration of the whole person very much meets a dire need for young men and women today to develop an integrated sense of the meaning of their bodies, the meaning of their own sexuality, a sense of their own identity in relation to their bodies and in relation to those with whom they are living, in relation to both men and women. So many of the guests just prior to their departure from Combermere express their gratitude for an opportunity to learn the meaning of their femininity or their masculinity. And what they learn about the meaning of femininity and masculinity isn’t so much something they could articulate by way of a definition or by way of a conceptual outline, but rather by way of a heightened intuitive sense and recognition of the variety of ways in which the mystery of masculinity and feminity expresses itself as men and women maneuver through life together in relation to one another in a complementary and fruitful manner. This heightened sense and perception takes place, I think, through the subtle ways in which Madonna House implicitly bows with reverence to the mystery of sexual difference in the course of our day-to-day lives.
Recreation
An additional aspect of life in Combermere which contributes to the restoration of the whole person is the emphasis that Catherine and MH as a whole places on having fun together—recreation—in the form of board games, card games, chit-chatting over a cup of tea or coffee, playing hockey on our pond, soccer, volley ball, cross country skiing, etc. This looks beyond the utilitarian goals of mere productivity, and places a priority on just being together.
A Community of Love
And to what end are we playing games, to what end are we “just being” together, to what end are we laboring together, praying together? We are doing these things to form a community of love. This is our calling. And we believe that by forming a community of love, we play our small part in witnessing to Christ’s Kingdom. Our guests play an integral role in this community of love, and having spent time in Combermere, these guests often go on to find themselves equipped to contribute to the building up of a community of love elsewhere—in those varied contexts into which Christ’s leads them.
Our Message, Our Mission:
The Restoration of All things to Christ
A big part of what we’re up to is seeking to restore all things to Christ. And we operate with the conviction that the tasks of splitting firewood, stacking firewood, mopping floors, harvesting vegetables, and shoveling cow manure are among the tasks that are to be restored to Christ and that themselves contribute to the restoration of all things to Christ. All truly human activity, we believe, is to be restored to Christ. That’s a big part of what we seek to communicate to those whom we encounter—that their tasks, in whatever situation God has placed them or will place them, are tasks that are to be united to Christ and restored to him, as an offering to him and from him for the salvation of the world.
An Affirmation of all truly human activity—especially cultivating a household and a family
A key aspect of our message to those who are not members of Madonna House is that whatever activities you are tasked with—in your families and in your work place— these are apostolic tasks, tasks proper to the baptized, tasks that are priestly, royal, and prophetic. Its all-too easy to think of priests, nuns, monks, friars, or members of MH as the only full-time professional religious folk, and that they are the only ones who are able to do religious stuff full time, while the rest of the Catholic world can only do religious stuff part time. ‘Not so!,’ Madonna House emphatically insists. Whatever your duties are in your life are sacred tasks, united to the offering of the mass, to be offered, by way of every Catholic’s baptismal priesthood and participation in the Eucharist, to the offering of Christ himself.
This is part of why we have a family camp in Combermere every summer, where Catholic families come to spend time with us and with one another. They come and are reminded of the import of what they do. They are exhorted to keep at it, to continue to do the important things they are already doing in their own formation of a community of love.
Mission Houses
Another key aspect of our Madonna House life and mission is our mission houses. For the past year, I’ve been at our mission house in inner city Edmonton, Alberta, where we live among the homeless population and, striving to live as good neighbors, develop friendships with the materially poor among whom we dwell and with whom we share our lives. Our mission houses maintain the same spirit and fundamental mission as that of our main center in Combermere, but with a fewer number of people. We have had our house in Edmonton, Alberta, since 1955. We went there in response to the invitation of the bishop, as is the case of all our houses. We plant houses if we are able, in response to a bishop’s invitation. We thus seek to live out our spirit with a variety of tasks in a variety of contexts— some rural, some urban. Our conviction is that by injecting into these contexts the Nazareth ethos that we cultivate in Combermere, we do our part in building the Kingdom of God.
Again, it is important to emphasize that Madonna House has a message of affirmation to keep at precisely the tasks God has already given for you to do, in the precisely the contexts in which God has placed you.
We do not recruit members. A few of the folks who come to visit us end up perceiving a call a call from God to join MH. That’s what happened to me. But most people who come are called by God to go forth from Madonna House into another missional context. Our habit of receiving guests does not have as its goal a recruitment of members. We are primarily seeking to offer Combermere as a launch pad, from which young adults can go forth into their vocational contexts, further equipped to make a total offering of their lives. We only desire to play a role in equipping those whom God sends our way. Our life by its nature equips our guests to make of their own contexts a mission field, to make of their work and their homes an altar upon which to place the offering of their lives.
The Little Mandate
Arise – go! Sell all you possess.
Give it directly, personally to the poor.
Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me,
going to the poor, being poor,
being one with them, one with Me.
Little – be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.
Preach the Gospel with your life – without compromise!
Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.
Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.
Love…love…love, never counting the cost.
Go into the marketplace and stay with Me.
Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.
Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet.
Go without fears into the depths of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.
Pray always. I will be your rest.
