We are members of the prophetic Church. While recognizing our own need for conversion, we bear witness to God’s holiness and justice. We announce the liberating presence of Jesus Christ and the new world born in his resurrection.
(Constitution 9)
The heart of our spirituality, the focus of our charism and the source of our mission is expressed in our Rule as: “Through the eyes of our crucified Saviour we see the world which he redeemed with his blood, desiring that those in whom he continues to suffer will know also the power of his resurrection”(C 4).
Constitution 9 reflects our founding vision and impels us to do exactly this as Fr. Fernand Jetté, our Superior General from 1974 to 1986, wrote:
… everyone recognizes that it is necessary for a missionary Congregation dedicated to evangelizing the poor to open itself to this new dimension and to commit itself, clearly and according to its proper vocation, to the struggle for justice and the defense of human rights. That is the sense of the present article, an important article that is not without its elán (ed. animating force).
In fact, the prophetism that it asks for, even though it may bear in a special way on social justice, is much more vast than the sole defense of human rights.
It expresses a reality that lies at the very heart of the religious life, the latter’s basic prophetism, namely, contesting the world, that is to say, the world filled with ambiguity and marked by sin in which we live, a world to be contested with God’s justice and holiness.
If lived the way it ought to be, that is to say, radically, the religious life is, by its very existence and the practice of the vows, both an absolute contestation, often silent, of everything that is worldly in the world and in the Church, as well as the proclamation of a new world born of Christ’s resurrection.
(The Apostolic Man, p. 99)
In the fullness of time, in the fullness of God’s presence, in the fullness of these living expressions of the charism that are shared with all of us… This morning I am struck again how our lives as many members of our Oblate Charismatic Family on a journey of hope in communion, each of our beings unique, as we make up a new vision of life.
Imagine what it is like to stand before a huge work of art or giant tapestry and as we draw closer to it we see that the art is made up of smaller images which contain smaller images, each one unique until we are unable to recognize anything that is in front of us. And so we back away until we are able to see what is before us.
I think for a moment of Dali’s painting of Jesus on the Cross looking down upon us and the world. Able to recognize each of us. It is in others that we find ourselves – just as did Albert Lacombe OMI, Blessed Joseph Gerard OMI and Kaye Cronin HOMI.
The Charism and it’s living expression is like that experience. Each constitution being a part of something that is so much greater than just a few words and each morning being struck by the way in which they are all a part of a greater whole.
Today as we reflect on Constitution 9 we recognize the fullness of Constitution 4 as an integral part of the other and I find myself thinking of the 22nd General Chapter, Pilgrims of Jetté when he spoke of each article (Rule) being an animating force within the others…