“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”
Ebeneezer Scrooge, Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Shortly after St. Jeanne Jugan opened her third Home in Dinan, France in August of 1846, she was visited by an English tourist who later wrote an article about the encounter in the English press. Novelist Charles Dickens wrote after meeting Jeanne Jugan, that “there is in this woman something so calm, and so holy, that in seeing her I know myself to be in the presence of a superior being. Her words went straight to my heart, so that my eyes, I know not how, filled with tears.”
Perhaps it is best summed by present day author George Weigel, “To enter a house of the Little Sisters of the Poor today is to recapture what Dickens experienced. Elderly men and women with no one else to care for them are given exquisite attention; the dignity of every Resident is honored, no matter how difficult that dignity may be to discern amidst the trials of senility and disease. The Little Sisters of the Poor and their Residents are living reminders that there are no disposable human beings; that everyone is a someone for whom the Son of God entered the world, suffered and died; and that we read others out of the human family at our moral and political peril.”
The Spirit of Jeanne Jugan lives through us today as we strive to keep Christmas in the hearts of our elderly Residents 365 days a year.
Photos from 2014 “Christmas with Jeanne Jugan Dinner”
A Dickens Christmas