Many
contemplative people seem to be driven to a life of service. For example, as
Kimberly Hope Belcher notes in Give Us
This Day about the prophet Isaiah, “Isaiah’s vision of the Lord in the
temple was solitary, yet his encounter with the weight of God’s glory called
him into a painful life of service” (Isaiah 6: 1-8). Jesus himself led a life
of contemplation, often rising early to have time alone with his Father in
prayer, but he also engaged in a demanding ministry of prophecy, healing, and
teaching. St. Benedict spent years of solitude in a cave and yet ended up
founding cenobitic monasteries and writing a Rule about how to live in
community. What is it that impels contemplatives to serve people outside their
life of prayer?
An
encounter with the true God can lead to nothing but service to others because
God exists through relationship: Father and
Son and Holy Spirit. A relationship
with God cannot be exclusive but expands in ever widening circles. The energy
created between ourselves and the three persons of God is infectious and leads
to the desire to share it with other people. The most effective way to do that
is to meet them in their need and respond through acts of service—visible signs
of God’s love and compassion.
Like
many of the prophets, we often have doubts about whether we are capable of doing
the service God asks of us. These doubts are a waste of energy. In a sense,
when God brought us into being, we each became a word of God, and as God said
in Isaiah 55:11, “my word shall not return to be void, but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it.” Through our very being, we are part of
God’s plan. Because God’s ways are generally inscrutable to humans, there is no
point in judging whether we are being effective from our own standpoint. We are
simply asked to be faithful to the work we feel called to do.
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