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What is the
Contemplative Religious Life?
Sadly, due to our utilitarian society,
many people view the contemplative life as a
waste of time, talent, and opportunity.
Even those within the fold of the Church
may see contemplation as a stagnant
state of banal existence. Yet, for
those who have tasted either
contemplation or the actual
contemplative religious life, they
understand the mystery of this sublime
activity of progress toward God.
Pope Paul VI explains
it in this way: "The
concentration of the regard of one's
heart on God, which we define as
contemplation, becomes the highest and
fullest activity of the spirit, the
activity which today, also, can and must
order the immense pyramid of human
activities." |
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In
a particular way the contemplative life – which
presents Christ on the mountain
– is a participation in the relationship of
Christ with the Father, in his times of solitude
and prayer, it is a ‘being driven into the
desert, a being called apart in order to live
the sentiments of the Son in the face of the
Father; to enter within his silence, within his
struggle, within his exultation, within his
docile and loving oblation.” (from Verbi Sponsa) |
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"Contemplative Religious spend a
major portion of their day in prayer, separating
themselves from the world in order to offer their
prayers and sacrifices for the needs of the Church and
the world. They combine prayer with manual labor of
various types, often in farming, crafts, or similar
works. Contemplative women are called nuns and the men,
monks." - from USCCB |
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Three Basic
Characteristics of Contemplatives:
1.) Unwavering Faith 2.) Unquenchable Desire to Lead a God-Centered Life 3.) A Tenacity to Depend on an All-Loving Provident God |
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Contemplation is a
gift from God; it is a state of prayer and union
with God; the close sharing between friends.
Contemplation is being alone with Him Whom we
know loves us, seeking Him Whom my soul loves,
handing myself over to God as an offering to be
purified and transformed.
A contemplative must
understand what it means to bear the world
within her...in the Heart of Christ...as
a mother bears within her the child to whom she
is giving life.
The following was said of
St. Therese, who was a contemplative Carmelite
nun in the late 1800's (and the same should be
able to be said of every Contemplative): In
Therese was found a living synthesis
of such opposite extremes as humility
and boldness, freedom and discipline, joy and
suffering, duty and love, strength and
tenderness, grace and nature, wisdom and folly,
wealth and poverty, community and individualism.
The vocation of the
contemplative religious is in the
missionary heart of the Church, where
they work through ‘constant prayer, the oblation
of self and the offering of the sacrifice of
praise.’ There is an intimate
connection between prayer and the spreading of
the Kingdom of God, between prayer and the
conversion of hearts, between prayer and the
fruitful reception of the salvific and elevating
message of the Gospel. |
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What is Contemplation? |
Many Contemplative Orders are
Enclosed, or Cloistered. What
does it mean to be cloistered? Typically,
the Sisters or Monks of Cloistered Monasteries only
leave the confines of their enclosure for such necessary
business as doctors, voting, etc. Otherwise, they
remain within the enclosure, in a spirit of silence,
prayer, and reparation.
Saint Clare was a cloistered nun of
the 12th century. Her enclosed life was described
in the following manner: “For Clare the cloister was
far from being a means to flee creatures. Rather, it
was the only indispensable means by which the silent
Word ascending from the cloister attained to God without
passing through any intermediary and reach Him in
purity, untainted by human interests, to praise Him, and
to speak to Him of man. In the cloister, St. Clare
gathered into God all creatures beyond the walls of San
Damiano. Much more she gathered the whole universe into
God. Precisely because she was woman separated from the
world in the mystery of God, NOT FOR HERSELF, but for
the salvation of the world: Clare was closer to
mankind. Perhaps no one is closer to man than those who
like her, live a life of prayer in a cloister where the
anxieties of all men, the distress of the afflicted, and
the pain of suffering are always present and shared in
the Agony of Christ." |
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The most essential aspect of the contemplative
life: kneeling to hold the world before the
Most High, and the Most High before the world! |
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