April 4, 2009 – Cincinnati, Ohio

My actors and I are staying with the Little Sisters of the Poor in Cincinnati, where we performed last night.  We travel to many of the Little Sisters’ homes all over the country, and are very blessed to be doing so.  The Little Sisters of the Poor are amazing women – they care for the elderly and infirm in nursing homes all over the world, and they do so with love, compassion and a super-abundance of hospitality.  Their foundress, Blessed Jeanne Jugan, started the order in 1839 by taking in a poor dying woman off the street. Jeanne carried her into her own home and gave up her own bed to her, as she nursed her and filled her final days with love.  Jeanne Jugan will be canonized October 11th in Rome, and this Little Saint of the Poor will no doubt continue to inspire the other Little Saints who follow her.

We have now been to at least half a dozen Little Sisters of the Poor homes in the United States, from San Francisco to the Bronx, and each home is immaculately clean, and each Little Sister is filled with kindness and compassion.  They take a fourth vow, in addition to poverty, chastity and obedience – and that vow is hospitality, which they fulfill not only in their welcoming care for the aged, but also in their kindness to ragged itinerant actors and playwrights such as myself.

Speaking of play writing, it is now my task to write the story of Jeanne Jugan in dramatic form, so that we can produce it and tour with it next fall.  We’ve already booked several performances, and the only thing left to do now is write it!  In preparation for this, I’ve been researching Blessed Jeanne in many ways, as the Little Sisters have been giving me a number of resources – biographies, videos, even comic books – to look at.  But so far the most unusual thing I’ve seen was a DVD of a performance of a French play called Across the Shores of Misery, which was written in 1979 and performed in 1982 at Jeanne’s beatification.

The play was … interesting.  Imagine Jacques Brell is Alive and Well and Living in Paris meets hagiography.  Try combining the style of Ionesco with the story of a saint.  The staging was unusual – long before Jeanne’s appearance, we have mocking dialogues between soldiers of the French Revolution and a character called The Fool; we have long but somehow compelling scenes of a school marm drilling her pupils on historic dates and chastising them for confusing military victories with defeats; we have scenes of begging masses juxtaposed with waltzing aristocrats.  Much of the innovative style worked, and much did not.  By the end it became clear that the spirit of the age had infected this work to the point where Jeanne Jugan was being portrayed as a proto-Marxist, a liberation theologian whose prime legacy was to be the coming political revolution, the uprising of the masses, the turning over of the tables in the temple.

And yet this is not what Blessed Jeanne was about, or what the Little Sisters are about today.  And this made me think.  Surely we all exist in a political world, and it is up to us to work to form a world that is socially just – but there comes a time when a line is crossed and the Love that is at the heart of Social Justice is pushed aside by the Power that one needs in the political realm to bring such Justice to bear.   Across the Shores of Misery makes the life of Blessed Jeanne Jugan about power, not about love.

But the Little Sisters are, from a political point of view, powerless.  They are already having trouble in Canada, where the government wants to impose upon them their own political vision, a vision which sees the dying elderly as mere liabilities, which is moving toward euthanasia and the killing of the unwanted.  As for politics, a political revolution in Canada, or anywhere in the West, would be a good thing if it could purge out the culture of death.

But the revolution has already begun.  It began 2,000 years ago.  It began not so much in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, but in 1839 with the carrying of a homeless paralyzed dying woman into a house where she could be cared for.  It continues today, in home after home where the Little Sisters of the Poor in quiet patience show love to those who are poor as they are poor, in food markets where the Little Sisters beg for food to feed their guests, in the loving way these little saints welcome all those who come to them.

The Little Sisters are revolutionaries, but they seek not power.  They seek first the Kingdom of God, and all else is being added to them.  If you doubt me, just visit a Little Sisters home near you and look in the faces of the elderly under their care, look in the faces of the Sisters themselves, and look at the power not of the world, but look at the power of a Love that made the world.