Vigils reading

SAINT AND MISSION

From “The World of Prayer” by Adrienne von Speyr

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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.