Today I intend to reflect briefly on "the spirituality of evangelization." Actually, I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it sounded good when it popped into my aging brain the other day...so we'll see how it goes.
We always ask for God’s presence – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and we do so now, coming together in the certain hope God will inspire and guide us today. I'll begin with a prayer, one written by one of our 20th-century saints, Blessed Charles Foucauld. I'll talk about him in a moment, but first his prayer...
Abba, Father, I abandon myself into Your hands. Do with me what You will. Whatever You may do, I thank You. I am ready for all, I accept all.Let only Your will be done in me and in all Your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord.Into Your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to You with all the love of my heart.For, I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into Your hands without reserve and with boundless confidence.For You, Abba, are my Father. Amen.
Blessed Charles was a remarkable man. After a stint in the French Army, a dramatic conversion, and his ordination to the priesthood, he spent the remainder of his life as a Trappist monk in the Holy Land and finally as a hermit in the deserts of North Africa. It was there, on December 1, 1916, that he was martyred, killed by the Taureg people whom he loved. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. To our knowledge Charles never converted a single person during his lifetime, but in his death, God brought into being several religious orders devoted to his spirituality.
As you can see by his prayer, it's a spirituality of abandonment, the sort of spirituality not practiced much in today's world. We’ll come back to this later. First, let’s talk about evangelization. (I realize I addressed abandonment in an earlier reflection – Reflection #6: Abandonment – but not in relation to evangelization.)
The Gospels offer us two parallel paths: Jesus’ redemptive journey to the Cross and His glorious Resurrection; and the disciples’ journey to...well, to true discipleship. The call they received was unambiguous. It was a call to evangelization. Matthew and Mark both end their gospel accounts with the Risen Jesus' appearance to the apostles immediately before his Ascension [Mt 28:16-20; Mk 16:14-18]. Jesus' last words to the Apostles – His Great Commission – are a call to witness to His saving death and glorious resurrection and to proclaim the good news of salvation to all the world. God's love and gift of salvation are not just for a select few, or for a single nation, but for everyone -- for all who accept the Good News.
Here we introduce our first truth on evangelization: We are all called to do God’s work to evangelize the world.
Evangelization is the work of God given to the entire Church, not just of the apostles and their successors. Jesus calls all believers to this saving work -- to be heralds of the good news and ambassadors for Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. We have not been left alone in this task, for the risen Lord works in and through us by the power of his Holy Spirit. Where Jesus is, so too is the Spirit.
Evangelization, then, isn’t something we decide to do. Like all calls to ministry, the call to evangelize comes from God. We simply respond. Because it originates with God, it is God’s work, not ours, and all the glory must be His. How did the psalmist put it?
“Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory because of your mercy and faithfulness” [Ps 115:1].
It’s not our good news, but the Good News of Jesus Christ, for the Gospel reveals the “mercy and faithfulness” of God. And it reveals the power of God, the power to forgive sins, to heal, to deliver from evil and oppression, and to restore life. As evangelists, as witnesses, you and I must believe in the power of the gospel. It always boils down to faith, doesn’t it?
Understanding this we are better able to define our spirituality of evangelization, which is really a spirituality of thankfulness. Our prayer becomes one of gratitude, thanking God for calling us to this ministry of salvation. And because all true ministry is God's work, by its very nature it is beyond our capabilities. We can't do it alone.
This leads us to our second truth: We need God's help to accomplish His work, His ministry of evangelization.
What have we discovered so far? As ministers we’re called to do God's work, not ours, and we can't do it alone. This is harder to accept than you might think. So often we get very possessive of “our ministry” in the Church, forgetting that, like everything else in our lives, it all belongs to God. Do you ever get that way? Do you ever find yourself grasping a ministry as if it’s some cherished possession, forgetting that it belongs to God not to you? As St. Paul reminds us, all comes from God:
"What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?" [1 Cor 4;7]
God’s work must be done, but if we’re unresponsive or indifferent to God’s call, believe me, He will call someone else, and quite likely call them from their weakness. We are loved, brothers and sisters, but when it comes to God’s work in the world, we are not indispensable. It’s as if He’s reminding us, “You see. I found someone else. I found someone who didn’t resist my call, someone who’s willing to let me form them, to fill their emptiness with my love, someone with faith.”
...to fill their emptiness...There’s a wonderful Greek word, kenosis. We encounter it as a verb, ekenosen, in the midst of St. Paul’s beautiful hymn on the wonder of the Incarnation:
“...he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” [Phil 2:7].
In this emptying, Jesus Christ, the Son of God impoverished Himself by taking on our humanity. In the same way, as His disciples, we’re called to kenosis, to an emptying of self so that He may form us and fill us with His love.
You see, brothers and sisters, in His emptying Jesus takes all that is within Him and offers it to us. This is His gift to us. We need only accept it. But you and I cannot fully accept God’s love in our lives if our minds and hearts are filled with ourselves. We, too, must experience kenosis; we must first empty ourselves.
I abandon myself into Your hands. Do with me what You will.
Blessed Charles’ prayer of abandonment, this prayer of openness to God’s will – is this our prayer as evangelists? Or do we insist instead on telling God what He wants us to do.
And so we have our third truth: To accept fully God’s call to ministry, we must first empty ourselves of ourselves.
Kenosis, therefore, is fundamental to the work of evangelization and becomes an essential companion to God’s call. How does God call us, and speak to us? How can we hear His call? God speaks in silence, just as He did with Elijah on the mountainside [1 Kings 19:11-13]. There in the midst of all the noise and tumult and disruption of the world -- amidst wind, and quake, and fire -- God came to His prophet and spoke in a "still, small voice." God still speaks to us that way today. He comes to us in the silence.
Indeed, how blessed we are, for God has left us the gift of Himself in the Eucharist, the gift of His very Presence, so we can exclaim "Emmanuel" -- "God with us." The Eucharist means God in us, God with us, God increasingly giving himself to us.
We can escape all the noise and disruption of the world and kneel in His presence. In the silence of adoration, we can respond to God’s call as He waits for us in patient, expectant stillness. We too must be patient, waiting for God, just like the servant who waits patiently, watching for the signal from his master:
“Yes, like the eyes of servants on the hand of their masters, like the eyes of a maid on the hand of her mistress, so our eyes are on the Lord our God, till we are shown favor” [Ps 123:2].
We need, then, only respond in that silence, to that silence:
"Behold, I come to do your will, O God" [Heb. 10:7].
And of one thing we can be certain: God's will for us always includes His will for others, His will for the others in our lives, especially for those least brothers and sisters of the Lord. Listen again to Blessed Charles. Toward the end of his life, speaking of Jesus’ description of the last judgment in Matthew 25, he wrote:
"I think there is no passage of the Gospel that has made a deeper impression on me or changed my life more than this one: 'Whatever you do to one of these little ones, you do to me.' Just think, these are the words of Uncreated Truth, words from the mouth that said, 'This is my body... this is my blood...' How forcefully we are impelled to seek Jesus and love him in the 'little ones'."
That’s right, brothers and sisters, it is these least ones we are called to evangelize, for together with them we are the Body of Christ. Who are these “little ones”? Why, they’re all around us. I know you pray for them because you sometimes tell me about them...
Lord, that widow down the street who is so lonely. Send someone to give her company and fellowship, someone who will take the time to visit her.Dear Jesus, that troubled young boy, our dog groomer’s son. I know he has no father. Please ask someone to come into his life and help fill that need.And, Lord, that neighbor who fell and can no longer do the little household jobs he loved to do...Find someone who can help him until he’s back on his feet again.Oh, yes, and that young single mother who’s having such a hard time financially. Father, please provide for her need.
There are so many more opportunities that God places before us each and every day. I think you get my point. Will you visit the lonely neighbor, or spend some time with the boy who has no father figure in his life, or do an odd job or two for the neighbor who needs some help, or help the single mother financially?
For most of us evangelization is not preaching on the street corner. No, it’s more up-close and personal. It’s carrying the love of Jesus Christ to the individuals that God sends our way because of their need, their need for salvation. God will provide the opportunity to invite them to know Jesus Christ and His Church.
Indeed, that you recognize another’s need likely means you are the one God is asking to meet that need. God speaks to us through others in quiet, but insistent ways. He speaks and we respond in faith and thanksgiving: Father, let me always be thankful for everything and everybody you send into my life.
None of this is easy because God so often calls us from our weakness. Oh, yes, and true evangelization is rarely tax deductible. That’s because it’s always a spiritual challenge, one that calls us to give far more than we want to give in both time and effort and fortune.
This evangelization, this call to all disciples of Jesus Christ, is not voluntary. It’s a command, and to obey it leads to what can be a drastic change in your very way of life. With that in mind, I'll conclude by once again turning to the words of Blessed Charles:
"Our entire existence, our whole being must shout the Gospel from the rooftops. Our entire person must breathe Jesus, all our actions. Our whole life must cry out that we belong to Jesus, must reflect a Gospel way of living. Our whole being must be a living proclamation, a reflection of Jesus Christ."
We’ve just scratched the surface of the spirituality of evangelization, but I hope some little piece of this reflection might help you as you respond to God’s call.
since it was written and is published in Spanish. As described in the video (below) it sounds like an excellent book and I trust it will be translated into English soon. (As befitting someone who minored in German, my Spanish is pretty much limited to Hola and Adios.) The author, however, collaborates with an English-language website, 
.
is really a collection of the thoughts of the early Church Fathers on prayer and spirituality. It's a wonderful little book that need not be read from cover to cover. You can pick it up and put it down, reading only those entries or sections that appeal to you at the time. It also lends itself to profitable meditation.
, is a collection of reflections on the Psalms by saints of the early Church. These Psalms -- Aquilina selects just 34 for study -- have been prayed for as long as 3,000 years. Not only were they prayed by Christ Himself, but as Christians we believe they are all about Christ. Indeed, when meditating on the Psalms one can hear the very voice of Jesus Christ speaking to us. One wise man -- I have forgotten who -- once commented that if we lost all of Scripture, except the Psalms, we would still have enough, since the Psalms contain the entire History of Salvation. For those of you who pray daily the Church's prayer, the 
, these reflections provide some wonderful insights into the Psalms as they were understood and prayed in the early Church.
, in which the author explains the early Church's Eucharistic beliefs and practices, and does so using the words of the early Christians themselves. Just as it is today, the Mass, the Eucharistic Celebration, was at the very center of the early Church's worship and spiritual life. And since the Mass is our most perfect prayer, it's only fitting that I should include this book among those focusing on early Church prayer. Read it and come to understand the roots of our worship today. Every element of the Mass as we know it is no different from that which was celebrated at the very beginning of Christianity. It's all there: the altar, the priest, the chalice, the unleavened bread, the Sign of the Cross, as well as the parts of the Mass so familiar to us today. This is truly a wonderful book.
, and in it Wilken examines the evolution of Christian tradition in the early Church, examining the thinking of the early Fathers of the Church on a wide range of subjects. This is a remarkable book that should be read and studied by all those interested in early Christianity.