22 November 1991
Fianarantsoa, Madagascar

My dear Confreres,

The two passages to which we have just listened, could be described as a study in contrasts that meet at a focal point. In the first reading from Maccabees we were given a description of the spirit of joy and exultation after the victory won by Judas. The reading pulsates with a sense of enthusiasm and of hope. The Israelites had found a new sense of purpose in their lives which generated a deep sense of gratitude to God. All that culminates in the dedication of the Temple. Perhaps you noticed that the word joy occurs no less than four times in that first reading. In the second reading there is a marked contrast. Jesus discovers that the Temple is being profaned. There is buying and selling. There is, quite clearly, a loss of a sense of direction, a loss of a sense of purpose, a loss of vision, and the mood is not of joy, but of anger. The focal point for these two events is the same: the Temple. It was into this same Temple, where Judas and his men had rejoiced, that Jesus and His disciples entered and found the scene that is described in this evening's Gospel. There is a time difference of some one hundred seventy or one hundred eighty years.

What, you might say, had happened in the meantime that there should have been such a loss of vision? Nothing very dramatic. The years had passed; the Romans had annexed Judea, but they respected the religious convictions of the people. There seemed to have been an imperceptible contraction of vision. The sense of genuine religion had weakened, or rather, had been warped. Our Lord reminded the woman at the well that a time would come when people would worship God in spirit and in truth. It would seem that many who entered the Temple in Our Lord's day worshiped God with their lips, but their hearts were far from Him.

If we are to maintain vision in our lives; if we are not to be men who worship God with our hearts and not only with our lips, we must give attention to our mental prayer. To give attention to mental prayer means being ready to waste time, so to speak, in prayer. By wasting time in prayer I mean being ready to set aside time from work and vocal prayer. It means being ready to sit still in the presence of God, allowing His presence to seep into us and quietly challenge us. The psalmist had the correct idea when he exhorted us to "be still and know that I am God." (Ps 46:11). It is through such prayer that we slowly make Jesus Christ increasingly a point of reference in our lives, for decisions great and small. I like very much what Pope John Paul II has written in his encyclical: The missionary must be a `contemplative in action'. He finds answers to problems in the light of God's word and in personal and community prayer. My contact with representatives of the non-Christian spiritual traditions, particularly those of Asia, has confirmed me in the view that the future of mission depends to a great extent on contemplation. Unless the missionary is a contemplative he cannot proclaim Christ in a credible way. He is a witness to the experience of God, and must be able to say with the Apostles: `that which we have looked upon...concerning the word of life, ...we proclaim also to you.' (1 Jn 1:1-3) (Redemptoris Missio: p91).

It is in our own Constitutions that the way to becoming a contemplative in action is indicated: "Through the intimate union of prayer and apostolate a missioner becomes a contemplative in action and an apostle in prayer." (C. 42).