Reflections about Contemplative Apostolic Life – Calling within a Calling

 Part One:  The Intuition for an Oblate House of Prayer

Although the intuition for a contemplative house of prayer had been sensed for several years and considered by Provincial Council, it was first discussed by the former St Mary’s Province at the annual summer Congress in 1994.  Of the many observations, both affirming and less than affirming of this new ministry, one Oblate remarked:  “Oblates are apostolic.  They aren’t contemplative.  If you want this kind of life, join the Trappists.”

More than a few times since, I have wished that I had done so!!   Ironically, it was the prospect of becoming a Trappist that I most feared after going to novitiate in 1964 at St Norbert, Manitoba, a short walk from the then Trappist monastery.  I found myself there many times during that year, almost as a moth to a gas light.  Increasingly I prayed that God would not call me to be a monk, and tried making a deal that I would become an Oblate if God would leave me alone in this both attraction to, and fear of, monastic life.

Father Alfred Hubenig in “Eugene de Mazenod:  Living in the Spirit’s Fire” (Novalis, 1995) makes this comment:  “Even after ordination Eugene was still not sure what direction the Lord wanted his priesthood to take.  He even contemplated monastic life, setting up a Trappist-like regimen with Brother Maur while living with his grandmother on the rue Papassaudi in Aix.”

Father Al then goes on to quote from the “Oblate Prayerbook“, p. 20:  “In his first years as a priest Father de Mazenod struggled to find a balance between contemplation and action in his life.  At first he tried to remain faithful to the schedule of a good seminarian.  Then he gave himself over to frenzied apostolic activity ….As he grew in the Lord, his attitude became simpler;  the question was less a problem of balance and more a challenge to ‘cooperate with all his heart with God’s will’.”  Furthermore, it is likely more than coincidental that de Mazenod had his heart set on purchasing the former monastery of the Minim Friars, and “by some kind of skullduggery, (was) tricked out of it” (his words) by the nuns of the Blessed Sacrament.  Abbe de Mazenod settled for part of another former contemplative Carmelite convent for the first home of five members of his fledgling community.

For many years, I have been stirred whenever hearing or reading of the inner struggle of the Founder, the creative tension between a calling to be contemplative, even monastic,  or to be apostolic.  Only in time did I begin to realize that being apostolic and contemplative are not opposites;  the monastic and apostolic ways of life may be on opposite ends of the spectrum, and both can be profoundly contemplative.  Although  the apostolic, contemplative and eremitical  are overlapping but distinct ways of life –– nevertheless apostolic missionary life calls for being contemplative every bit as much as could a calling to be monastic.

I think that Saint Eugene was at heart a contemplative apostolic missionary, no less contemplative than any Trappist foundation.  I think it to be equally true that the apostolic life itself as a calling contains a profound contemplative orientation.  I have become more convinced over the years that the founding charism of each religious institute or society has a contemplative core, that the unique charism of each apostolic institute or society is imbued with a contemplative thrust from the beginning.  From time to time, this contemplative origin of a particular community may emerge in distinctively contemplative ministries, such as a house of prayer.

Part two is to follow at another time – an Oblate house of prayer striving to be a contemplatively-based apostolic ministry.

By Glenn Zimmer, OMI