Letter to Marie Madeleine part 3

Read part 1 here.

Read part 2 here.

It is emphasized that there are many different sides to you: religious sister, foundress of the FCJ society, foundress of several schools, but you were also a wife and then a widow, a daughter and a sister, even a mother.

In 1820 your mother died, and your father expected his widowed daughter to come home to take care of him. I can imagine it was very hard and heart breaking for you, who were ‘daddy’s girl’ to go against this expectation and follow what you thought to be God’s will, and I admire the courage it took to make this decision.

Today it is still difficult for many families to accept that their son or daughter is choosing religious life. The days that there was some prestige in having a priest or a sister in the family have long gone and most parents are convinced that marriage and having children are the best chance for happiness. They are also afraid to lose their children as they might move away and contact would be scarce. I got quite a bit of criticism myself, when I announced I would move to England in order to join the FCJ sisters. People asked me why I couldn’t become a ‘nun’ in Flanders and it was clear some felt I was ignoring my responsibility to take care of my father, who is also a widower. I feel children have some responsibility towards their parents but it can’t be expected of them to put their life on hold just because ‘something’ could happen to their parents.

Leaving your son, Eugene, however, is something of a different category. Parents can’t count on the fact that their children drop everything to take care of them, but my heart goes out to Eugene, who was only fifteen, when you founded the society and he had already lost his father and needed his mother. I can’t get the idea out of my head that you somehow abandoned him, but I don’t know exactly how you combined your religious journey while still being a mother to your son either. On the one hand there is the belief that what God wants, God gets, “that we must go straight to God without hesitation and by the shortest way” (const. 7), but on the other hand something in me questions whether it wouldn’t have been possible to wait a bit longer until Eugene was older. Every life choice has consequences, not just for oneself, but for those who are close to us too.

Despite this, I don’t question your personal relationship with Christ so if His will became clear to you, we ought to respect your choice to do his will fully. We can ask ourselves questions as ‘why me?’ or ‘why now?’, answering them with other questions: ‘if not I, then who?’ and ‘if not now, then when?’, over and over again. Maybe the question we ought to ask is not ‘why?’ but ‘how?’

Read part 4 here.