A distinctive apostolic lifestyle
Our Directory begins with: ” Christ is my life”.
It ends with:
“I cannot love Jesus Christ without wanting everyone to love him,
and this is the apostolic character of my life”.
Apostles
Father d’Alzon bequeathed us this marvel of unified life that was his. Why an apostle? Because, seized by the love of Christ, he wanted to communicate his passion.
That’s where we have to start, that’s where we have to go back to when we talk about the apostolate. Evangelization, the name now given to the apostolate, is the way of saying and proving that happiness is called Jesus Christ.
Our Congregational documents tirelessly reiterate Fr. d’Alzon’s conviction that the love of Christ is the commandment of all things, and therefore of the apostolate.
With his taste for hard-hitting questions, Father d’Alzon forces us to verify the reality of our primordial attachment: “All the affections of my heart and all the powers of my being must tend towards him. Is he my all? Is my heart entirely free” (ES p. 20) If so, we can set sail on the high seas.
No amateur apostles
But without this anchoring and this fire, we risk the worst thing: being amateur apostles. There is, dare I say it, a professionalism to the apostolate, and by that I mean seriousness, competence, a power that can overcome failure and weariness. This seriousness stems from a single source: Jesus Christ, so beloved that we want everyone to love him. And to get there, we’ll learn what we need to learn (d’Alzon’s obsession with studies) and we’ll do what we need to do, i.e. the maximum. Father d’Alzon was by no means a minimalist.
Contemplative-active, the one never going without the other,
right down to the smallest detail of our lives.
This settles for us once and for all the balance between contemplation and action. There are no dosages, no balancing of priorities, no “or’s” but a solid “and’s”, from the earliest days when Father d’Alzon instilled in us his strong inclusion: we are contemplative-active, the one never going without the other, right down to the smallest detail of our lives.
The Assumptionist apostle is an arrow sprung from the bow of prayer. When he lags behind in piety (“Isn’t your piety selfish?” he asks mercilessly) or when he drowns in action, he abandons the primary truth of the Assumptionist apostolate: to love Jesus Christ enough to go and make him loved without ever letting go.
One could almost make it a law of physics: for Father d’Alzon, the strength of the apostolate is equivalent to the strength of our love for Christ.
Fr. ANDRÉ SEVE, AA.
