Lenten Letter--Obedience
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17 February 1988
To Each Confrere

My dear Confrere,

May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with us forever!

Perhaps you have had the experience during the course of your life of acting as a guide to a non-Christian who had strayed into one of our Churches. In any Catholic Church or Chapel the crucifix or cross holds a prominent place. How would you go about explaining the significance or the meaning of this most widely recognized of all our Christian symbols? Would you dare say to the tourist, coming from a country where the Gospel has not yet been preached, that the Man hanging on the cross, was in the process of learning obedience through one of the most painful of all forms of death, crucifixion? I hardly think so. Yet the author of the letter to the Hebrews did not hesitate to make the daring statement that "Christ learned obedience through what He suffered." (Heb 5:8). The mystery remains that, although Jesus Christ was God, He came to a new knowledge of the meaning of obedience through what He suffered.

I am sure that in your reflections and meditations on St. Paul's writings, you have been struck by the fact that he reserves his greatest wonder and admiration, not so much for the miracles that Our Lord did (if we exclude the Resurrection), as for the humility and obedience which He showed during His life, particularly in His sufferings and death. "He was," reflected St. Paul, "obedient until His death, even to that excruciating death on the Cross." (Phil 2:8).

Our Constitutions remind us of our own personal involvement in the "saving action of Christ Who became obedient unto death," (C. 36) and for that reason we will try under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to obey freely the Will of the Father as it is manifested to us in diverse ways. Our Constitutions also give importance to "open and responsible dialogue" (C. 37, p 1) in the process of discovering at community or personal level, the things that are pleasing to the Father.

The introduction of greater dialogue and consultation in the Church and in the Congregation has been inspired by the Spirit of God. However, dialogue and consultation must always be seen in the light of the mystery of Christ's obedience to the Father which is the great saving action in the world. Our obedience is a contribution to that saving action. Dialogue and consultation are but means to that end. They must not empty our vow of obedience of its reality which is, to quote our own Constitutions, "to participate in the mystery of the obedient Christ." (C. 37). The problem of living our vow of obedience (at times so painful) must not so absorb us as to blind our vision of its mystery.

Obedience for us is the highway to mission. "I did not come of My own will: it was He Who sent me." (Jn 8:42). Obedience and mission are inextricably bound together for us as they were for Jesus Christ. There can be no true authentic mission for any of us without obedience. It is for that reason that provincial and local community projects, as well as our individual apostolates, must not only be missionary in character, but be regularly authenticated by our Superiors in the light of our Constitutions and Statutes and in the light of the obedient Christ Who, as St. Vincent reminds us, is the Rule of the Mission.

The suffering which you, as an individual Confrere, may be presently bearing, I do not know nor can I imagine. Perhaps your greatest suffering does not come from the vow of obedience you have taken in the Congregation. The suffering you are enduring, mental or physical or spiritual, is an invitation to enter more deeply into Christ's experience of learning obedience through the things which He suffered. It is through reflection on the theology of the Cross that we will draw strength for a more perfect fulfillment of the Will of God in our lives. "Our perfect happiness," remarked St. Vincent, "consists in doing His Will in the true wisdom of desiring nothing other than that. God often wants to build lasting benefits on the patience of those who undertake them, and that is why He tries them in many ways....I ask Our Lord...to fill your hearts with faith, hope and love." (Coste IV, Eng. ed., ltr. 1435, pp. 290, 292).

In the love of Our Lord and of His Mother I remain, your devoted confrere.

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