“Prayer should accompany the journey of missionaries so that the proclamation of the word will be effective through God's grace.”[1]
Having been sent on mission, missionaries dedicate their entire lives to witnessing the presence of the kingdom of God among the people to whom they are sent. Obviously, they follow the example of their master, Jesus, whose life was characterized by prayer. Everything he did was an act of prayer. Following that example, missionaries are called to live in an intimate relationship with God. That is why Saint Guido Maria Conforti told us, his sons, to have a Christ-centered spirituality. This spirituality is lived in our daily activities, but precisely in our moments of contemplation. My reflection is not intended to give a tool for how to live a contemplative life. To say that I want to suggest how to live a contemplative life at my level is to be pretentious. All I want to share is why we focus on contemplative life, or Christocentrism spirituality.
In Redemptoris Missio, Pope John Paul II quoted Pope Paul VI in his apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Nuntiandi” that “people today put more trust in witnesses than in teachers, in experience than in teaching, and in life and action than in theories.”[2] For him, we are called to be living testimonies to Christ in our lives before any kind of teaching. I can infer that the importance is not what we do as missionaries, but rather how we are. This experience that we share is drawn from the Lord through our prayer. Therefore, our life prayer can be considered a moment of re-cognition. It is in that moment that we discover who we are and the Person who sent us on a mission. On this score, we recognize our finitude and imperfection and try to rely on the One who is infinite and perfect. Our prayer life also helps us "to sustain our fidelity and our apostolic commitment.”[3] This reverberates what we follow in the footstep of our master, who considered his life as prayer.
The temptation in my contemplative life is to confine my prayer life to small moments already programmed for prayer or meditation. However, looking at Jesus’ example, I can deduce that my life should always be characterized by contemplation. If that is the consideration of my contemplation, all my life will be changed for the better. I will start to see, seek, and find God in everything that I do. I discover that Christ is the one doing the mission through me and recognize that I am just his instrument. This prevents me from bragging in my missionary life. Furthermore, it will help me to recognize Jesus, the master par excellence, who is working through me.
The idea of considering all my life as a contemplation is the grace that I have to ask for in my daily mission. From my point of view, I can deduce that we missionaries are so involved in what we do and sometimes forget the moment of contemplation. After having been on their mission, the disciples of Jesus came back to their master, happy to report what they had done. In one of his comments in Inquirer magazines, an SVD priest, Father Jerry Orbos, said that it is good for a missionary in the evening to find his time to tell his master that his mission is accomplished and ask for a grace to accomplish the one that he will receive the following day. That is why we have to consider that “Normal source of nourishment for our common missionary vocation consists in setting aside a substantial period of time for daily personal and community prayer.”[4]
In sum, the beauty of missionary life is seen in contemplation. The presence of Christ in our lives is so primordial that one cannot do mission well without it. As we are called to witness to the Lord in the world, we are called first of all to live that experience with Christ. Going to mission, we are asked to share the good news not by proselytism but by our own lives. The first way is to have a constant prayer life. When we feel that we have a lot of iron in the fire and can’t find time for ourselves, that is a good moment to go and pray. Our contemplation must be done not only when we have time but also when we are swamped. May God help us to always be close to him in our missionary lives.
Citation(s):
[1] Redemptoris Missio 78.
[2] Ibid, 42.
[3] Constitutions 43.
[4] Ratio Missionis Xaveriana, 27.
