Apostleship of Prayer History of the Apostleship of Prayer

John L. Vessels, SJ

Part Five
APOSTLES OF PRAYER

 As these seminarians were all catechists, they were all, in one way of another, involved in spreading Christ's mission and this they did in the villages around the seminary. The Apostleship of Prayer would never have really begun historically,  if they had not become apostles of prayer, if they had not gone out into the villages and gave the message of the Apostleship of Prayer to all these people in the villages - farmers, old people, young people, poor people. There were not many rich people among the Catholics of souther France in the rural areas at that time since this had been Hugenot territory. The message that the seminarians gave to the people was a simple message: You are precious to God just the way you are! No one so poor no one so old, so sick that he cannot offer his or her life to the Lord.
This became the exercise of their missionary vocation even while they were still seminarians: to go out and spread this message of self-value of everyone, their value to God. Once the people began to exercise these practices with their wills, with the simple little short but intense prayer of the will at the beginning of each day, giving themselves to the Lord, learning to come to the end of the day with a prayer of thanksgiving, looking back and remembering and reliving everything that God had done in them and with them that day both for their own benefit and through them for the benefit of others.
These missionaries of prayer, spreading this word, saw the value of a certain apostolic dimension of their own prayer life put into words, formulated into practices which they could teach others - children, old people, sick, prisioners. Each one of these scholastics went to a different sector of society, exercised a ministry to prisoners, a ministry to the sick, a ministry to the old, a ministry to the young, to the children, to the youth, to the business man, to fellow religious. All of these different ministries circulated around these four practices of offering and examen, eucharist and reconciliation.
Getting to know these people, these simple farmers of southern France and their families, these villagers, these small rural communities, the seminarians realized how much these people prayed for the missionaries and so they pointed out to the people that they, too  had a mission, not just to pray for the missionaries on the other side of the world, but to be missionaries, to do Mission in their own neighbourhoods, in their own communitiesand families, in the context of their own daily lives. The morning offering turned everying they did that day, everything they thought, everythinng they said, into instruments of building the Kingdom.
They were missionaries, they were fulfilling their mission each day. This was their mission: to wash those dirty clothes, to take care of those children, to cook those meals, to move those stones out of the fields. to plough those fields, to harvest that crop. Every single moment of their lives was as valuable and as useful to God for the building of his kingdom as that of any president or priest or king or bishop, or whoever, wherever.
So the people began to exercise these practices and grow in their own sense of importance to God. Not because of anything that they themselves were or were doing, or rather , nothing that they were doing had value of itself so much as the fact that because they were children of God and because God was pleased to accept their sacrifices and the offering of their activities. Their hearts and their minds were open to God, seeking each day to be guided more clearly and more authentically by him.

To be continued

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