Vigils Reading – Weekday

THE SAINT AND THE MISSION
An excerpt from “The World of Prayer” by Adrienne von Speyr4

A saint’s standing before God with a community within is no plain and simple fact. The saints can be in God’s presence in such a personal way that, involuntarily or even voluntarily, they forget their mission. And between these two poles there is a whole spectrum. It may happen involuntarily when God alone wishes it so because he wants to have his saint to himself. It happens voluntarily when the saint feels it right on this occasion to be alone in God’s presence, leaving the particular mission out of focus in the background.

There is another extreme in relation to these two forms of prayer, namely, the prayer of those saints who never appear before God except in the very midst of their mission, whether because God wills it so or because the saint will not have it otherwise. Here too there are gradations. One is inclined to a certain suspicion of those who always do everything completely deliberately and of their own free will, choosing whether to go before God with or without the mission entrusted to them, whereas there can be no grounds for suspicion in the case of the saint who, involuntarily and only as God requires, is always standing before God in one sense or another. In general, however, there is an alternation: There are times and moments in which the saint is more important to God than the individual mission, and others when the mission itself is the most important thing.

If the saints themselves make no choice, God can work in them or in their mission or in both, within the relationship he chooses. But if the saint and the mission constitute a single unity as willed by God, God’s shaping influence on the one will always benefit the other. It can happen, then, that when a particular mission begins to make itself felt it brings difficulties for the saint in standing before God in prayer. But these difficulties and their mastery contribute to the saint’s fruitfulness. They never take the form of insuperable obstacles but of a gain at a higher level, be it a deeper insight or a better adaptation to God’s will or a closer integration of saint and mission. Mission here always means an embodiment of the community. It is what, in the saint, is of and for the community: the seed of community, a task within the community, a fruit entrusted to the community. This fruit is greater than the I; it is the Thou, in all its manifold forms, which has been entrusted to the I. Ultimately this multiplicity belongs to the Church and indeed can be the Church.

4
The World of Prayer, Adrienne von Speyr, Ignatius: San Francisco 1985. pp.255-256.