Details of Life
“One of the marks of the greatness of the Rule is that it gives the reader the capacity to see the importance of the details of life while at the same time holding before our minds the vision of an entire life based on love of Christ and service of Christ, love of our brethren and service of our brethren.” Community of Love by John Main OSB
Fr. John goes on to say, “As oblates that is what you commit yourselves to. To consecrate your life and to make sacred every part of it by being wholly alive to everything you do throughout the day.”
This morning I took longer than usual to complete my journal entry. The reason for this was that before I started to write I gave extra time to reflecting on how faithful I been in keeping to the Lenten resolutions I had made just over three weeks ago. Not as well as I had hoped: room for improvement! So why, I asked myself, can I see my failures this morning yet missed them during previous examens? Clearly, I had been, to quote Julie Kalkowski , ‘seeing what I wanted to see and what I was expecting to see regardless of the details of what I had actually done.’
For the first time this Lent I was really seeing and in doing so had uncovered, acknowledged and brought into Christ’s wonderful and healing light, my blind spots, failings and the occasions where I had made poor choices. It did feel good! I ended by asking in prayer for the grace ‘to consecrate my life and make sacred every part of by being wholly alive to everything I do throughout the day’ beginning today! In the words of my parish priest, ‘Lent is the very special and precious time to welcome and accept this invaluable and consoling love of Jesus for us. It is the time to taste and experience that love which can reshape our lives, move us and guide us into making choices that reflect this love of Jesus.’
I am sure most of the oblates, if not all, who were fortunate enough to attend the National Oblate Retreat held last weekend at Douai Abbey will agree with me when I say our time together was blessed with many opportunities to experience ‘that love which can reshape lives’: Looking forward, another great opportunity will be the Benedictine Oblate Congress in Rome from 4th to 11th November, 2017 – more information about this, and previous Oblate Congresses, can be found on this website.
Coming together as members of one family in love, fellowship and prayer is so important. Add to this the opportunity to pray the Offices in Choir with our monastic brethren; lectio divina; Mass, table- fellowship and a good time for relaxation the heart sings, “It is good to be here!”
I would like to close by offering for your reflection the following words by Henri J. M. Nouwen.
Do we have a clear goal in life?…Without a clear goal, we will always be distracted and spend energy on secondary things. “Keep your eye on the prize,” Martin Luther King said to his people. What is our prize? It is, the divine life the eternal the life with and in God. Jesus proclaimed to us that goal, that heavenly prize. To Nicodemus he said: “This is how God loved the world: he gave his Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16)
Eileen Dutt
International Oblate Coordinator for
WCCM Benedictine Oblate Community
