Last week, I had the joy of celebrating the Eucharist and conducting the ensuing Eucharistic adoration at the Benedictine monastery in Mdina. The experience was unique. The great inner peace we all felt helped me to appreciate the charismatic presence of contemplative life.

In his book Evil and suffering, the French Christian philosopher Louis Lavelle wrote that presence is “the discovery of one’s own being through contact with another”. Contemplative life heralds a powerful healing spiritual reality, which the present frustrating state of affairs is direly craving for. Contemplative life is that infinite richness which resurrects our shattered temporality from its existential helplessness. It is a privileged vehicle through which the sacred presence enters empathically into the distorted and fragmented experience of whatever is human in order to heal it by making it one with its divine nature. The divine presence ties the contemplative person with it in an interdependence of persons who constitute the Body of Christ. No wonder then that the Vatican II Decree on the missionary activity of the Church, ‘Ad Gentes’, said: “…the contemplative life belongs to the fullness of the Church’s presence” (§ 18). Contemplative life is surely a crucial spiritual pillar of the Church!

What is the relationship between contemplative life and the Church?

What is the bottom line between the two? Or, rather, what is the common denominator without which both the Church and contemplative life simply cease to exist? It is the virtue of love. That love which Saint Paul speaks highly of and praises so much in the 13th chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. But why is this kind of love so special?

Here we are not talking about an erotic kind of love. In other words, a love that only seeks to fulfil its desires. On the contrary, here we are dealing with a love that is totally interested in the wellbeing of the beloved. In Pope Benedict XVI’s view, as found in his first encyclical on Christian love, ‘Deus Caritas est’, it is a love that is fully expressed “as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God” (§ 6). Jesus himself not only spoke of it but also lived what he said till the end by giving himself for us and our salvation. He told us: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Luke 17:33).

Saint Paul shows how the Christian, therefore the contemplative, ought to lose his and her temporal life in order to preserve it for eternal life. “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Cor 13:4-8).

It was the same love that animated the silent holy life of Blessed Adeodata Pisani OSB, whose remains are venerated in the main chapel of the Benedictine monastery where I celebrated the Eucharist a week ago. Blessed Adeodata was certainly a catalyst in the renewal of religious life in this highly esteemed monastery.

Blessed John Paul II’s comments are worth reflecting on. “Prayer, obedience, service of her Sisters and maturity in performing her assigned tasks: these were the elements of Maria Adeodata’s silent, holy life. Hidden in the heart of the Church, she sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching (cf. Lk 10:39), savouring the things that last forever (cf. Col 3:2). Through her prayer, work and love, she became a well-spring of that spiritual and missionary fruitfulness without which the Church cannot preach the Gospel as Christ commands, for mission and contemplation require each other absolutely (cf. Novo Millennio Ineunte, 16)”.

Are you interested in embracing the Benedictine contemplative life?

Why not talk to the Mother Abbess of Saint Peter’s Monastery in Mdina?

Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap

SAN GWANN