166. Seventh Thursday of Easter

Meditations no. 212 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Cooperating with God in extending his kingdom.

Send forth your Spirit, Lord, and renew the face of the earth. The Holy Spirit renews the face of the earth, bringing about a second creation, and restoring the original order established by God, which had been undermined by man’s sin.

This renewal is brought about in Christ, the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things were created in heaven and on earth … For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

God could have renewed the earth through his own power alone. Instead, he gave the earth to the children of men, and decreed that this task should be carried out with the cooperation of those who form part of his Mystical Body. Jesus has wanted everyone to cooperate freely in the work of redemption. He has not failed. His doctrine and life are effective in the world at all times. The redemption carried out by him is sufficient and more than sufficient.

God does not want slaves, but children. He respects our freedom. The work of salvation is still going on, and each one of us has a part in it. It is Christ’s will, St Paul tells us in impressive words, that we should fulfil in our flesh, in our life, what is lacking in his Passion, pro corpore eius, quod est Ecclesia, for the good of his body which is the Church.

As proof of the supernatural effectiveness he wishes to bestow on us, our Lord has sent the Holy Spirit into our souls. He has done this as a guarantee of his assistance in the task of spreading the kingdom of God. It is worth while putting our lives on the line, giving ourselves completely, so as to answer to the love and the confidence that God has placed in us. It is worthwhile, above all, to decide to take our Christian life seriously. When we recite the Creed, we state that we believe in God the Father Almighty, in his Son Jesus Christ, who died and rose again, and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life. We affirm that the Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, is the body of Christ, enlivened by the Holy Spirit. We rejoice in the forgiveness of sins and in the hope of the resurrection. But do those words penetrate to the depths of our own heart? Or do they remain only on our lips? The divine message of victory, the joy and the peace of Pentecost, should be the unshakeable foundation for every Christian’s way of thinking and acting and living.

We must spend our whole life serving souls.

The task of cooperating actively in the redeeming mission of Christ belongs to all the members of the Church. Every generation of Christians needs to redeem, to sanctify its own time. In order to do this, it must understand and share the desires of other men -one’s equals - in order to make known to them, with a gift of tongues, how they are to correspond to the action of the Holy Spirit, to that permanent outflow of rich treasures that comes from our Lord’s heart. We Christians are called upon to announce, in our own time, to this world to which we belong and in which we live, the message - old and at the same time new - of the Gospel.

It is not true that everyone today - in general - is closed or indifferent to what our Christian faith teaches about man’s being and destiny. It is not true that men in our time are turned only toward the things of this earth and have forgotten to look up to heaven. There is no lack of narrow ideologies, it is true, or of persons who maintain them. But in our time we find both great desires and base attitudes, heroism and cowardice, zeal and disenchantment: men who dream of a new world, more just and more human, and others who, discouraged perhaps by the failure of their youthful idealism, hide themselves in the selfishness of seeking only their security or remaining immersed in their errors.

To all these men and women, wherever they may be, in their more exalted moments or in their crises and defeats, we have to bring the solemn and unequivocal message of St Peter in the days that followed Pentecost: Jesus is the cornerstone, the redeemer, the hope of our lives. For there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.

For us, because of our divine calling to be apostles, the apostolate is such an engrossing occupation that our whole life must be oriented towards the salvation of souls. For us, personal sanctity and apostolate are inseparable. The double purpose of our vocation -ascetical and apostolic - is so intrinsically and harmoniously united to the lay character of Opus Dei that it gives rise to a simple and strong unity of life -ascetical, apostolic, and professional - and refashions our whole existence into a life of prayer, sacrifice, and service, with a filial devotion to the Blessed Trinity: the Father, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ, perfectus Deus, perfectus Homo (perfect God and perfect man); a tender and solid devotion for the Blessed Virgin, our Mother; and a measureless love for the Holy Church, the Vicar of Christ, and all souls.

To be effective, we need to be faithful to the spirit of the Work.

We know that God will always be there to help us to live the vocation to which he has called us. And this assurance fills us with confidence when we are trying to bring the souls around us closer to him. He has chosen us as his instruments precisely for this task.

In addition to confidence in God and abandonment into his hands, we have to make a serious effort to live as he wishes us to, with the spirit he wants for us. We must make use of the particular means which the spirit of the Work provides us with to do apostolate, in the firm conviction that these means come from God and have a supernatural effectiveness, unattainable by human effort. You and I are working effectively under the command of a King, Jesus Christ, and are seeking to recruit soldiers who will enlist in the army of our God. Therefore we must necessarily use divine means.

Only then will we be able to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit and cooperate with him in renewing the face of the earth. All that is good comes from the Lord, St Bernard says. Without him you could undertake and complete not just very little, but absolutely nothing.

Thanks to this docility to the specific apostolic means which God has wanted for his children in Opus Dei, today the Work has the fragrance of a field ripe for harvest. Given the abundant fruit of our apostolates, we do not need faith to realize that God has blessed our Work bountifully, our Father wrote in 1959. For many years now, in a prayer of thanksgiving to God, I have serenaded the Work with this couplet from a poem of my native land: Little bud, oh little bud, / you will soon become a rose; / the time’s already drawing near, / to tell you something. My sons, today you have in your hands some beautiful roses, splendid ones, although they also have thorns. Now is the time to be vigilant and zealous, in order to reap the harvest which has been won with so great an effort, and present it to Jesus Christ and his Holy Church.

Our Mother in heaven cooperated faithfully with our Lord, and was especially united with him in the redemption. She was docile in all that God asked of her. Let us ask her for the supernatural outlook we need in order to be filled with confidence in the apostolic means that God desires for our Work.