Rev. James J. Wheeler, S. J.
Apostolic Director
Society of Our Lady of Guadalupe
January, 1998
This is the letter I sent to Ginny and Maria before our meeting in Houston in February 1998.
Dear Maria and Ginny:
We have all come a long way to get where we are today. Conflicts, fears, depressions, have all been the source of our growth. And as we have gone on, each one of us has found and can testify to the deepening presence of Jesus in our lives. One of the things that has been such a consolation through periods of deep darkness has been the slow and sure knowledge that I am growing in Him and with Him. And as I look at you and the other prayer center directors, I sense quite deeply, that you and they have also grown in a remarkable way.
It is this growth in Jesus that is the hall mark of my life and, as far as I know, the signature upon which your life is founded. To enter, every day, more deeply in relationship to Him, and to know, in the darkness or in the light, in depression, survival, and recovery, that He is growing so much larger and wider and deeper in my life. And to my joy, the impossible has occurred, that my ego is, at times, growing smaller is one of great joy.
In this way God has allowed us all to grow bigger. Prayer Centers, through the wind and snow and sleet of our ups and downs, have nevertheless, grown in size and in effectiveness. God has allowed us to utilize ministries that have spread across our countries, the United States and Mexico, and to many other parts of the world.
And yet, now, I suspect, that we are facing the fact, like the Baptist, we are called to enter into our own smallness.
For the ministry is the creation of the Spirit in Christ, and, we, though we have been called to found and fortify it, now found ourselves in a position to limit that founding to the extent of our lives and our mental and physical capacity to continue. I am sixty one, two directors are in their seventies, the rest of the directors of the present prayer centers are in their fifties or sixties.
The question remains: is the call we have to end, with great gratitude for the work we have done, at the point in which we wither die or no longer have the capacity to continue the work?
We have led many people to consecrate their lives to Christ. With others we have led them into that place where we have consoled them but let them know that the deepest place of spiritual growth and psychological healing, indeed, of true wholeness is found at the foot of His cross. The way to the full reality of ourselves, of God and of others, is through the cross rather than avoiding it and medicating our pain with a variety of addictions.
So our call had been to let people see that the profound call into the crucified and resurrected Jesus whom we love is not to stay on the level of an initial euphoria, or to let our lives be fudged over by a series of warm fuzzies, but to enter more deeply into the reality of God and ourselves as He sees us and we are in ourselves. In that difficult and often terrifying journey, we make our way into the fullness of the humanity of the sorrowing Jesus so that, through the participation in His sorrow, we can live in the joy and laughter of his infallible resurrection in our lives.
I feel, then, that there is a call within me to begin to provide for the extension of the ministry beyond my lifetime or the time when I am no longer capable of carrying on the work. My question to you is the same as the one that I put to myself. Do you feel the ministry is to continue past the time of your own capacity to lead and to nurture it?
If the answer is no, then there is not much to do but to sustain, as best as we can, the ministry in which we now find ourselves. If, as some of you have indicated to me, the answer is yes, then I think it involves some deep thought and prayer as to the way we are to go.
Let me give some thoughts as to the way we might go to prepare a proposal. We have ourselves been called into a lifetime of commitment and service. At time has gone on we have learned that our call is to give ourselves more completely to Christ. We have found the way through the School to provide the foundation for that consecration, to let it fully live in our lives. As each one of us has pursued that consecration, we have found many other helps along the way such as the devotion to Divine Mercy or the codependency, focusing and addiction programs in Mexico.
As we have pursued the path on which God is calling us, we have entered into a deeper and deeper consecration and inner and outer relationship to Jesus. Out of the depth of that relationship we have asked others to follow a similar path into a relationship to God.
Out of that consecration and that formation and that service small communities of people who want to form a prayer center to others have emerged.
The time has come, it seems to me, to acknowledge the way that God has called us to see that others are being called in the same way and to open the path for many other lay people to follow that road. We are called to give the opportunity to many others to give their life to God, to serve God, to serve Christ in their spouses and in their families and to develop fully their gifts and skills in a life of ministry.
In that call we are asking God to bring forth the fullness of potential for lay people who wish to serve the Church. Jesus is calling us to open the narrow gate to Him to many others and to widen the possibility in the life of lay people to serve Him completely and totally.
The door that Vatican II offered lo lay people is slowly widening. We want to open it wider but we also want to open it deeper. We want to let people know that the full life of loving Jesus, abandoning oneself to the Father and serving the Church through the gifts of the Holy Spirit is open to them.
And we want to open that possibility of commitment, consecration and service to those, who, through their commitment of the life of the prayer center want to find a possibility and a way of living out their consecration to God. That possibility is open, to those who desire it, by making yearly commitments to the prayer center, perhaps a three or five year commitment and then a full and permanent commitment of the rest of their lives.
We want to open the possibility of aharing with the brothers and sisters who live a consecrated celibate ife, the possibility of deep consecration and sacrifice so ordinarily present in lay life, but now, with the advent of Vatican II brought to a new and different kind of consecration, and yet a form of consecration that, in some sense, equals celibate consecration. It cannot equal the consecration of strict celibacy, poverty and obedience, that is the celibate commitment. But it is equal in the total commitment of one´s life to God the Father through Jesus Christ. And it must be understood that even though marriage of the single life does not have the sacrifice initially and continually given in celibate life, it has, in its living out, a deepening sacrifice and a strong cross. To enter into explicit consecration is to give one´s life over to Christ in the way He intended for all no matter what their call may be.
Thus the act of consecration, of giving our lives entirely over to Jesus Christ, a commitment and consecration that is made in the School, finds its formation in the School, and if the person so chooses, a further formation in the School of Spiritual Direction, and from that point on beginning a life of service for others in the prayer center. The fulfillment of the life of a person can be a desire, over a period of time, to give one´s own life over to God. That commitment would be fulfilled in serving God first, in relation to one´s spouse, to one´s family, and then, in a life of service to the people of God, to the Church and in the prayer center.
Directors referred to in this document:
Maria Esther Barnetche
Sacred Heart Prayer Center
Mexico City
Ginny Antaya
Mercy of God Prayer Center
Austin, Texas, U.S.A
Rev. James J. Wheeler, S.J.
Apostolic Director
Society of Our Lady of Guadalupe
March 1998
To the directors of the Prayer Centers
Dear friends:
Last year Our Lady invited me to take a pilgrimage to Fatima. It was a long and difficult pilgrimage but also a wonderful time of personal union with God. Many graces seemed to flow from my harried time in Fatima.
During the time in Fatima, Our Lady asked me to do two things: one was, in the next year, to have a meeting with Maria and Ginny. So, as the year went on I arranged that we should meet at Maria´s father apartment in Houston from February 24th to 26th.
Gloria Guerra, from the Mexico Center was there for surgery and for a further meeting with Maria in Washington. So we invited her to join us.
As the time for the meeting approached, I began to pray about the agenda for the meeting. As you know, I have mentioned, many times, the question of whether our ministry is to continue beyond us. It also occurred to me that this was an important question, since two of our prayer center directors are in their seventies, and the rest in their sixties or late fifties.
But the important thing was what was happening in my prayer. Whereas I had halted at simply asking the question of succession and others carrying on the work of the prayer centers, because I did not feel the permission to go on, I now felt the Lord was actively requesting that I bring the whole possibility of the continuance of the prayer centers ahead and begin to discuss it as a distinct possibility.
The flow of grace was there to begin discussing the prayer centers as a distinct society of committed people who would consecrate themselves wholly to God in Jesus Christ and through His mother Mary. And the possibility came into being that the consecration of some there would be a specified commitment of a year, three years, and finally, of a permanent commitment to a society of people. Their consecration would be made to God through Jesus and Mary but would include the various commitments to, what I would call, at this point, the Society of Prayer Centers.
As our discussions began we all began to warm to the subject of a deeper commitment first to God, and then, after formation in the prayer centers, a time of service in the prayer centers and, possibly, in some cases, a permanent commitment.
There was a general agreement on what had already been written (the letter to Maria and Ginny included in this document) and we began to venture into other areas where we might decide to set down precepts of a constitution, precepts gained from a quarter century of ministry and from our own prayer life that might be the foundation of a society that includes lay people and religious, but sets down the guidelines and the directions for a lay commitment and a lay consecration of their lives to God.
To this proposal, which we shall bring to the board in April, we began to add the sections on humility, the Eucharist, and the Blessed Sacrament.
Towards the end of our meeting we had a powerful session. We received the Scripture 1st Chronicles 28. This is the story of God´s promise to David that he would build the temple. Because David was a man of war, he could not build the temple, but his son Solomon was to build the temple. In that temple would be housed the ark of covenant.
We began to feel a confirmation that we were being handed a similar mandate by God, that He was calling us to build a structure, a temple, to which future generations might pass to worship God, to experience His consolation, His formation, His healing and His direction.
In the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, the new Ark of the Covenant, a new people would be formed to proclaim His Word, lo live out the life of Christ within us, to bring consolation to the spiritually and psychologically and physically suffering and in need.
Ginny told us of a vision she had some time ago which seemed pertinent. She was in a desert. As she stayed in a certain place, a group of people appeared on the horizon. They were walking towards her and they were carrying something. As they came close she recognized that they were the Jewish people who were carrying the Ark of the Covenant. They passed over her and continued on their journey across the desert carrying the Ark.
It seemed to us that the vision applied to us. We were the people who were now carrying the Blessed Sacrament across the desert. We were a people joined together in the venture and we were a people who were to carry the Ark of the Sacrament in our hearts and from that we would be formed as a people.
Ginny also mentioned that she thought that the Ark of the Covenant also applied to Mary, the Mother of Jesus.
In the litany of Our Lady, Mary is called the Ark f the Covenant because she bore Jesus in her womb. Mary was carrying Jesus in her womb but she also carries us in her womb. Mary was carrying Jesus in her womb but she also carries us in her womb. She is the one who is forming us a s a people and she also places us, in Ginny´s words, under her mantle. Ginny thought that the society might be named after Mary, perhaps Our Lady, Queen of Peace. That name had come up previously and Marie thought that the name would provide a difficulty in Mexico because of the association with Medugorge.
To all of us there is a special devotion and a special consecration to Our Lady. She is the one under whose mantle we have been protected and the prayer centers have been allowed to grow. So, at this time, as we become aware of the Lord´s desire to keep us going in the future, we especially place that desire and that initiative in the hands of Mary, our Protector.
It is through her that the full vision of Jesus in our regard will be fulfilled. If Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the one whom we adore, mary is the principal adorer of Jesus and she will write on our hearts the desires of God and, through her intercession, we will fulfill them.
If we are commited people, and are gradually become people in which consecration to Jesus and Mary and commitment to the prayer centers is possible, then it is aldo possible consider terms of office and the possibility of succession. In facing, as we are, the age of our directors, we all agreed to propose this initiative to the Board.
We wish to start, in prayer centers where this is possible, the consideration of terms of office and the succession of those who are directors or hold other posts of importance and consequence in the prayer centers.
This also involves a consideration of the office of Apostolic Director. Since I am sixty one (I know you can´t believe it) it is time to consider a successor and how we would go about choosing a successor. We discussed this and thought at first that another priest might be the person to take the job. But another priest might mean someone not familiar with our programs or the way of life that we are presently forming. It might mean that a lay person familiar with the society would be the Apostolic Director and a priest would be found to be the Spiritual Director.
If God is calling us to continue the prayer centers, then this would seem the logical way to do it.
So I ask of all of you to consider these ideas and to pray and fast about them. In all these years, we have search for the will of God and Jesus and Mary have led us in a most extraordinary way. Let us, by prayer and fasting, seek the will of God at this crucial juncture in our journeys. Let us open our hearts more fully and generously to Jesus and Mary and see where that opening to deeper love leads us.
Directors referred to in this document:
Maria Esther Barnetche
Sacred Heart Prayer Center
Mexico City
Ginny Antaya
Mercy of God Prayer Center
Austin, Texas, U.S.A
October 2003