Marie- Gisèle in her office at Médecins du Monde

Summer camp, Marseilles

Accountant and Religious of the Sacred Heart

For the last two years I?ve been an accountant at Médecins du Monde. I live in a five-floor building in the 18^th arrondissement of Paris; the whole world is to be found coming and going within our walls.

How does a religious of the Sacred Heart come to be living here, in the midst of the secular professional world, where there is hardly any talk of God?

Before entering religious life, and also after making my first vows, I worked for a few years in an accountancy office, then in a firm at Grenoble. I was ready to change to a different profession if that was where the Lord was calling me. Something was echoing in my heart like an invitation, a promise to keep journeying ?from one camping-ground to the next?.

These last few years, after detours in Chile, then Rome, then Chad, I have come back to the French province with the desire to set off on the mission once again, but the right moment has not yet come. This desire is a hollow place inside me, a wound that leaves my heart amazingly open to everything.

That explains in part why I wanted to work in an international structure like Médecins du Monde, and asked to do so.

One day someone asked me: ?Where do you work?? ?At Médecins du Monde?, I replied. ?Are you a doctor?? ?No, I?m an accountant.? ?Oh!? The exclamation said it all.

Yes, I?m an accountant and a religious of the Sacred Heart, so are those two identities compatible? Is there anything apostolic about an accountant?s work?

During the first years of my religious life I tried to discern my professional life. Time is passing, and I realise that a professional job, i.e. being paid a salary in a firm or association, exercising my competency as an accountant, has been given to me as: a Call, a Conviction, an Adventure, an Opportunity.

A Call just to be present in a professional setting, exercising my profession as an accountant. To be a witness without explicitly talking about God?s love, being a silent heart, loving God in the turbulent world of work. I feel called to live in the attitude of heart spoken of in our Constitutions: ?Wherever we are sent, whatever our work may be, our lives will be inspired by the love of the Heart of Jesus and the desire of making Him known?? (#13).

A Conviction that my work in an accountancy office with the teams of Médecins du Monde contributes to the building of God?s Kingdom, and allows me to be both apostolic and an educator. In practice, it?s not just a matter of sitting in front of my computer screen: each file is coloured by the spirit in which I understand or manage my accountancy. I know that behind these figures and accounts, thousands of people are indirectly dependent on my work. Besides, we are trying to set up face-to-face communication with people in the field, and I admit that I prefer these contacts with our administrators to juggling with figures.

An Adventure ? a Challenge: Making figures and accounts more apostolic is an impossible mission! On the other hand, to give my work a dimension of service, adding greater creativity and giving a bit of humour to figures and accounts, there?s an adventure, a challenge that has always fascinated and excited me.
A challenge especially for community life, for my prayer-life and for other apostolic demands, for there are real tensions between the professional life I lead and the time I consecrate to the community and to my prayer-life. How can I find the right balance that will allow me to grow and blossom in both personal and spiritual maturity? There again, I have to keep on readjusting and trying to order and direct my priorities towards the Essential.

An Opportunity: I?m becoming aware of the importance of the right to work, not to be unemployed; I have first-hand experience of the inseparable relationship between work and dignity.
Among the employees of Médecins du Monde, it?s an opportunity to be a building-block in the construction of a better humanity.

An opportunity also to rub shoulders with everyday life, to share with others the tensions and advantages of the professional world.

To be able to exercise my calling and put my competence at the service of an international NGO is a wonderful opportunity. This work gives me an opening onto the world and a chance to discover other realities of life, other cultures, and meet more people. In that way, I rediscover my deepest self, which you can glimpse through this poem:

I am not from just one country.
I belong to the hearts of those I love.
I am not from just one sun.
I send out my branches to the hearts of those I meet.
I am not from just one land.
I send out my roots to the hearts of all the living.

So you see that even though accountancy is not exactly apostolic, it?s my job, and it has allowed me to be closer today to the heart of the world. My vocation as an rscj is nourished by this world of work, and it makes me grow more human.

So the answer to my earlier question is inevitably: Yes! My two identities of religious of the Sacred Heart and an accountant are ?accountably? compatible, but above all, the fact that I?m both is deeply in accord with my desire to follow Christ, and to discover and make known the love of Christ?s Heart.