GOD’S MISSION HAS OUR OBLATE FAMILY (Constitution 5)

Posted on April 3, 2025 by franksantucci

We are a missionary Congregation (Constitution 5)

“As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21), said Jesus as he entrusted his disciples to God’s mission. God’s mission has a Church, and God’s mission has our Oblate Family. It is not that we own our mission, but that God has called us to be a part of God’s mission of salvation.

Jesus invites us to participate in his mission – his mission has the Oblate Family as part of it. In this sense we understand better Eugene’s description of us as “cooperators of the Savior” and “co-redeemers of the human race.” We are not doers of our mission, but we are instruments that God uses to join Jesus in his mission.
This Constitution invites us to rethink our missionary motivation: no matter how important or how insignificant we may think our actions to be, they make a difference because God is using us at home, at work, in every situation as religious, ordained, married or single missionaries.

Mother Teresa’s words capture the sense of our vocation as cooperators: “I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.”

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1 Response to GOD’S MISSION HAS OUR OBLATE FAMILY (Constitution 5)

  1. Eleanor Rabnett, Lay Oblate Associate says:
    April 3, 2025 at 15:02

    “God’s mission has our Oblate Family.” My response to this can be found in my oblation, the gift of myself to God and through God to all I meet, to all to whom I am sent…

    “Be in order to Do.” It is not I who am “doing” but rather God working through me. I think of Fr. Vincenzo Bordo, OMI in Seoul, South Korea who has spent the past thirty years of serving the poor in that capital city, the poor who the people of that city did not want to see. And Mother Teresa who allowed herself to be sent to the poorest of the poor – to love and serve those for whom were unseen and uncared for. Saints big and small.

    I have been sent to walk with a group of people that I have come to love in ways that I had not expected. They are some of the 2SLGBTQ+ people in the city that I live in (and beyond). I heard their pain during the first part of the synodal process and was unable to ignore them. I asked permission to start a small ministry and asked others that I knew to join me – it is called the 2SLGBTQ+ Spiritual Accompaniment Pathways ministry. It includes people from different parts of the city, people who I have come to love, walk and celebrate with… I feared saying this out loud only because I did and do not want to cause any harm to all of those I love, especially members of our Oblate Charismatic Family. It is not always safe to be a follower of Jesus who hangs on the cross for us, or to be like Eugene who dared to love the poor.

    It is much more than “not hating others”: it is who we are, daring to love and to offer ourselves so that God might use us. I am so grateful that God has sent me to be able to share in the Charism, to be a part of this Oblate Charismatic Family along becoming on with. Even the image at the top of this page is one of love, of being pilgrims of hope in communion. many. I am so grateful that God has sent me to be here with all of you. Together we become the face of our crucified and risen Saviour.

    Not what I expected to share this morning… but God is full of surprises!

    Reply

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