OBLATE SISTERS OF
CHRIST PRIEST
Contemplative Life
ENGLISH
Normally, people are likely to understand active religious life; however, when it comes to contemplative life many people have qualms and prejudices that do not allow them to understand this type of life. There are many people who consider it as an unproductive and non-sense life and they think that it is not useful at all to pray all the time. People do not understand why cloistered nuns never go out from their convents and they receive just a few visits, including their own families.
For me it was also difficult to understand this type of life but, reading Saint Therese of Jesus Child, I learnt the real sense of contemplation. She said that everybody has its own role within the Church. For her, the Church is the Mystic Body. Priests, missionaries, laics, consecrated laics, members of active religious orders are like the extremities of the Body, those who move and carry out Church’s activities. She described contemplation life as “love within Church”. The contemplative nuns are continuously pumping love to breath life to the rest of the Church. Contemplative nuns reach the whole world with their prayer; their framework of action has no limits. Without them, the rest of us would be nothing. Because, ¿Can the hands move if heart does not beat anymore?
Saint Therese of Jesus Child wanted to be everything: priest, missionary, nun… and she found that the only way to be everything is contemplation, because with her prayer she shall reach all the Church. Contemplative nuns are like the seed that needs to be buried for the plant to be born; like the salt that needs to dilute in order to give flavour. In the same way, through contemplative life, persons who have given their lives in a radical manner, hide, disappear, dumfound themselves in order to give life to the rest of the Church.
Jesus became “small”, He became a man and was born in extreme poverty. Later on, He wanted to stay with us forever in the tabernacle. In the same way, contemplative souls want to participate of Christ’s oblation through their hidden lives in the monastery, hidden in Jesus’ heart. And their prayer gives life to the whole Church, because prayer can do everything.
The Oblate Sisters of Christ Priest, within this contemplative vocation, have an especial charisma, the charisma embroidered by their founders with their own lives. The Oblate offers her life, hides in her cell, in the cloister, in order to give life to the whole Church, but especially to the priests. The Oblate gives herself for the priests in order for them to be saints. She joins Jesus’ prayer: “I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.” (Jn 17, 15-17). And following Jesus’ words, the Oblate Sisters of Christ Priest are in earth the interrupted prolongation of the priestly prayer “not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me after their word… so that they may all be one”. (Jn 17, 19-21).
