Michael McCabe SMA views missionary work as an extension of contemplation and as participation in a dialogue already established between God and his people.
This universal outreach of God’s mission (through his Word and his Spirit) is the context in which we have to situate the mission of the Church. The Church, and all who belong to it, are called to participate in a project that comes from God and belongs to God. Our mission, then, does not take over from this divine mission. We are called and sent rather to further it and contribute to its fulfilment. Moreover, in participating in God’s mission, we never start from scratch. We encounter human beings and a world in which God’s Spirit is already operative. This realization sets mission in a whole new perspective and takes a great deal of the anxiety and aggressivity out of it. We are not the sole bearers of an exclusive salvation to people devoid of any saving relationship with God. God is present everywhere before us and salvifically active in ways unknown to us. Our task, then, is to discover and strengthen that presence and action.
Mission as contemplation
When we recognise that our mission is not a matter of taking over from, but of participating in God’s mission, we are brought to see our primary challenge as essentially one of contemplation. Mission is an encounter with a mystery: the mystery of a missionary God whose love embraces the world and all its inhabitants; the mystery of the Spirit’s power present in unexpected places and unsuspected ways; the mystery of people’s participation in the paschal mystery in ways we have neither known or imagined. To encounter this mystery we need to look, to contemplate, to discern, to listen, to learn, to respond, to collaborate.
Our first task as missionaries is to seek out and discern where and how God’s Spirit is present and active among those to whom we are sent, and this is essentially a contemplative exercise. Only a contemplative spirit will enable us not to impose our own agendas on the already existing dialogue between God and people, but rather to enter into this dialogue with the heart and mind of Christ and thus discover God’s agenda. Only in prayer can we learn to respect the freedom of God who is present and active among people before our arrival, and to respect the freedom of the people who are responsible to God in their own way.
Contemplation and mission separation
The modem missionary movement was marked by a tragic separation between contemplation and mission. It has been said, jokingly perhaps, that missionaries asked the contemplatives to do the praying for them while they got on with the task of preaching the Gospel and establishing the Church. But prayer is an intrinsic not an extrinsic, dimension of mission. It is only in prayerful contemplation that missionaries are able to attune themselves to God’s missionary agenda. Apart from prayer, there is a grave risk that missionaries become propagators of a Gospel that is not of Christ and builders of a Kingdom that has nothing to do with the Reign of God. God’s missionary agenda can only be gleaned from profound listening to the Spirit who has plumbed the depth of God and knows God’s ways. This is the point St Paul is making when he says that “we teach, not in the way in which philosophy is taught, but in the way the Spirit teaches us: we teach spiritual things spiritually” (I Cor. 2:10-13).
‘A crucified mind’
A contemporary Japanese missiologist, Kosuke Koyoma, has accused Western missionaries of distorting the Gospel of Christ with their ‘crusading mind’ and their ‘teacher complex” and he urges missionaries to develop what he calls a ‘crucified mind’? It is, for Koyoma, “a mind of self-denial based on Christ’s self-denial. It is that mind that does not seek profit for itself. It is the mind happy in becoming (the) refuse of humanity since it will bring increase to others.” I would agree with Koyoma and add that without a profound life of prayer we can never hope to develop the crucified mind of Christ.
Unity of contemplation and mission
The most urgent need in mission today is to recapture something of that unity of contemplation and apostolic action that marked the monastic missionary movement of the middle ages. In the judgement of Bosch, “it was because of monasticism that so much authentic Christianity evolved in the course of Europe’s dark ages and beyond. In the midst of a world ruled by the love of self, the monastic communities were a visible sign and preliminary realization of a world ruled by the love of God.”
The greatest occupational hazard for missionaries, especially those from the West, is that of becoming embroiled in structures and their efficient organization. Commitment to structures, to their maintenance and development, tends to make the missionaries into rather preoccupied and pushy activists with little time for people and even less time for prayer. Such commitment, too, can block rather than facilitate the action of God’s Spirit in the lives of the missionaries themselves as well as in the lives of those they serve. A more contemplative style of missionary presence, issuing in patience, endurance, self-limitation, and even withdrawal, at times, is needed today more than ever. Such an approach will create the time and the space to allow the seed of God’s Word” to grow in its own soil, obeying its own embryonic urges and shaping its own blades of new life.”
“If we were more sensitive to
other’s beliefs
More friendly to their notion of
God
By now the world would be following Jesus Christ.”
This article first appeared in IMU Report (May-July, 2001), a publication of Irish Missionary Union.
