1818, November 1. The missionary community becomes a congregation of religious priests and brothers who make vows to live the evangelical counsels.
It is necessary that we understand, now more than ever before, the necessity of being perfect religious in order to be good missionaries. We need to be persuaded that the most efficient means of ensuring abundant harvest in souls is the holiness of our lives and the faithful practice of all the duties of our state.
Opening address to the 1850 General Chapter
O My God! Where this has led me this morning. Looking at my life, at my humanity. All that I have known, and even more that I have never known. I cannot say that I regret how my life has unfolded, and yet there is much I have never known.
I have spent a long time today (and for many days) looking at my vocation, as a single person who desires to live in community, in communion with others. With others who are single, married and religious, like minded, all following the same spirit, living out that same spirit, that charism. It has been done, not often, but it has been done. I ask why not?
Two hundred years ago, a hundred years ago, sixty years ago there was no electronic mail, no emails, no websites, no internet. However, our knowledge and experience as humans grew, we dared, we looked for new ways to do things, new ways of being. And so there were “advancements” in medicine and health care, in electronics and technology. Today we have email and blogs – all invisible and different and yet very real. Look at this blog which I am sure two hundred years ago would have seemed perhaps like “black magic”, something evil. Even the church, our Church which seems to have great difficulties in changing, opening up in so many ways uses technology, allows for it to be a part of their lives and how they go about living with God. As with medicine there was a need and so it became a part of our lives, intricately and intimately a part of our lives. And it is not bad.
So why do we need to struggle so much and so hard to have such huge separations in matters of gender, or sexuality, or simply how some of us feel called to live together in a specific manner.
My vocation – its not just a matter of giving up something (like religious life, or married life to a specific partner). It is, at least for me, a matter of being more than (not better than) the one or the other, living out whatever vow we have taken (and so of course recognizing private vows as well as religious and marriage vows). My vocation – how God has called me to live and given the gifts to live thus. I could take the word “religious” and change it to person (so not limiting it) to the quote above – even our understanding of the word missionary has changed over the years.
I wonder if there are others out there in the world who think and feel and desire to live as I do, dare I say it as an Oblate in a wider, fuller sense of the word. I want to pursue this, I need to pursue this. At the same time I feel as I have just begun a huge leap from a high cliff.