Contemplative Life - Soul of the Mission (part ll)

On a visit to a Monastery St. John Paul ll said to the nuns: "One day the Church, in the name of Christ, took possession of all your powers of living and loving. It was your contemplative profession. Renew it often! And, following the example of the saints, sacrifice yourselves ever more and ever better, without demanding to know what use God is making of your cooperation.”

It is a beautiful image for the heart of the Church ~ following Christ more closely ~ stripped of everything on the Cross, with a return to the origins that bring us to an interior renewal from which the external one follows. It could not be the other way around. Between the contemplatives and the missionaries, there is a very close affinity.

We missionaries experience the response from contemplatives as always far beyond expectations ~ they live thinking, praying and suffering for the spread of the Kingdom of God and for the most needy and persecuted of the missions, since they are, as St. John Paul ll said, "... generous souls, willing and always serene victims for the Mission, and the Church.