179. Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (B)

Meditations no. 562 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

The Lord has called us to follow Him in the Work and we wish to respond to Him with freedom and total generosity.

THE READINGS of the Mass show how the Lord desires to count on the help of men and women to carry out his plans of salvation. Those whom he calls for a specific mission, he summons them personally and grants them all the graces necessary for the fulfilment of the task he entrusts to them.

This divine way of acting appears clearly in the story of the prophet Samuel. In gratitude for God’s mercy, which had granted him a son after years of barrenness, his mother Hannah took him to Shiloh to serve the Lord under Eli the priest. One night, Samuel was lying in the sanctuary of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called to him, “Samuel, Samuel!” He answered, “Here I am.” And he ran to Eli and said, “Here I am because you have called me.” But Eli answered him, “I have not called you. Go back to bed.”

Three times the same scene was repeated, and three times Samuel got up quickly and came to the call, thinking that it was the priest. Then Eli understood that it was the Lord who called the young man, and he said to him, “Go back to bed, and if they call you you will say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ Samuel went away and lay down in his room. The Lord came, came and called to him as before,”Samuel, Samuel!” Samuel answered, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

The willingness to listen to God’s voice and the promptness with which Samuel responds to the divine call is striking. Our Father, from the moment he began to feel the hints of his vocation, while still an adolescent, behaved in the same way. Before knowing what the Lord wanted from me - but knowing that he wanted something - I often expanded my heart and cried out that ignem veni mittere in terram, et quid volo nisi ut accendatur? (Lk 12:49). And I answered, also singing: ecce ego quia vocasti me! (1 Sam 3:5ff). My brother, then very young (…), learned those words without knowing what they meant, and from time to time (…) he would come and sing them, very badly sung! I had to throw him out: go away, go away! But I was very happy to hear them, because for me they were an incentive: that they are also so for you; that you are never extinguished; that you know that you are bearers of divine fire, of divine light, of the warmth of heaven, of the love of God, in all the environments of the earth. And this is at odds with the betrayals that we make to the Lord from time to time: small, of lovers, but betrayals, after all.

The story of Samuel’s vocation can move us today to renew our complete and joyful yes to the vocation we have received. That great servant of God, St. Josemaría commented, in the midst of human weakness, answered: ecce ego, quia vocasti me! (1 Sam 3:6). Lord, here I am, because you have called me … , and without knowing what I was calling him to. You and I now know perfectly well what God is calling us to: to be saints. What a good time … for you to decide to reach the concrete supernatural end that interests you personally! What a good preparation if you and I say, without the noise of words, in a conversation like that of the son with his father, of the lover with the beloved, of the soul with God: ecce ego, quia vocasti me … ! (Ibid.). Lord, here I am; Lord, give me light; Lord, that I may see; Lord, I want: cleansing, make me a good instrument of yours, which I gave to you, with a commitment of love.

Every day we must respond to the vocation with more love, thus preparing the way for others.

The responsorial psalm puts on our lips the prayer of Jesus Christ when, entering the world through the Incarnation, he says to the Father who sends him: “Here I am, Lord, to do your will.”

We must rejuvenate the personal call to holiness, feel it always alive in our souls. Vocation is not an isolated event, which happened once in our lives; our encounter with Christ was not something accidental, which fades in the memory of the years that have passed. The Lord constantly knocks at the doors of our hearts: ecce sto ad ostium et pulso, he tells us; see that I am at your door and knock. He has taken possession of our whole life and expects us to renew our response every day. Let us not think that we have already come long enough, “let us not stop at what we would have reached; on the contrary, it must help us to walk better”, explains Saint Augustine. “You see that we are wayfarers and you say: what is walking? I will say it very briefly: to walk is to progress (…). Examine yourself and never be satisfied with what you are, if you want to reach what you are not yet. For where you considered yourself satisfied, there you stopped. If you said, ‘Enough is enough!’ you perished. Always grow, always progress, always advance.”

We have given our whole life to God, we have responded to the Lord: ecce ego quia vocasti me! (1 Sam 3:6). We must go forward every hour, every minute, because the Lord is waiting for us at every moment, even in the smallest daily things, and he is waiting for us to help us to win. We have a great, divine path that the Lord has given me and that I have pointed out to you; and it is so wide and so beautiful that we can walk it freely, as we want (…). Each of my children follows his own path, as I do mine; but all of them, within this marvellous road of the same divine vocation.

Let us listen to what our Father is now repeating to us from Heaven. I would like you to think a little about our call, with great peace and with great serenity, and that, with supernatural means, you provide the human means to respond and be faithful (…). There are struggles in our hearts, there are victories and defeats, feelings that lower us, and also pushes that lift us up. Thus, my children, by providing the means, we must walk the very free path of children of God in his Opus Dei (…).

Do you know what happens to a road on which one does not walk? There are Brazilians here. Perhaps you know what I was once told about a certain road in your land, laid out with the most modern means, which was disappearing as the jungle invaded it. If there had been-as perhaps there will be now-a lot of flow of cars, of trucks. … , the jungle would not have won.

I have said that our path is very wide, and that each one of us has, within it, his own path; that we are not equal because God made us unequal. The Lord is very generous, like a father with his children. But he does not want us to be identical: he wants some to be tall, others short; some blond, others dark; some aquiline, others flat: everything! Therefore the path of each one is personal: within the spirit and the general path of the Work, we all have our own path.

If you do not step on it every day, if you do not strive to comply with the Norms along the entire route, the path will be erased and you will find yourself afterwards not knowing where to go. I would like this to be our resolution today: when you say your personal prayer at any time of the day - today, tomorrow, after - think of that personality that the Work not only respects, but wants to foster in each one. And then think about the commitment, also personal, that each one of you and I - I as well as you - have before God: to see that our path is not erased. In this way we will not only succeed in not getting each one of us strayed; but the main road will be well flattened, well prepared, well cleaned. The jungle will not be able to defeat us.

I also want you to draw a conclusion: … no one in Opus Dei can neglect to keep the road clean. And to have it clear, you have to step on it, you have to walk along it. We all have the same duty, the same obligation.

Vocation introduces us to intimacy with Christ and impels us to a constant apostolate.

VOCATION, an intimate life of union with Christ, impels us to do the apostolate. It is the teaching that the Gospel of the Mass offers us.

One day John the Baptist was on the banks of the Jordan, with two of his disciples. Seeing Jesus passing by, he said: “This is the Lamb of God.” The two disciples, hearing him speak like this, followed Jesus. A divine adventure began that would last until the end of time, because even now Jesus goes out in search of men and women and calls them to continue their mission throughout the earth. Among these people we find the children of God in Opus Dei.

St. John, who tells us about this event, was one of the first two disciples who set out in pursuit of Jesus. After remembering the exact time of the call-it was about four o’clock in the afternoon, he says-he says that Andrew, who was the other who had followed Jesus, first met his brother Simon, and said to him, “We have found the Messiah (which means Christ). And he brought him to Jesus.

When a soul has heard the voice of Jesus, who calls him to take part in the redemptive longings of his Heart, he cannot remain indifferent. “When someone experiences great joy, he feels the impulse to communicate it to the people with whom he is associated. It is all the more so when it is a question of the supernatural life that Jesus brought to earth. This is a joy that cannot be hidden, because the Christian vocation carries with it, by its very nature, the need to carry out the apostolate. The joy of having been saved by God does not fit into a single heart.”

The great novelty of Christianity consists in knowing that God loves us with the love of a Father. For this reason, the Gospel is good news, news that fills us with joy. “The Greek world, especially,” Benedict XVI preached, “perceived this novelty; they felt this joy deeply, because it was not clear to them whether there was a good God, or an evil God, or simply a God. The religion of that time spoke to them of many divinities; for this reason, they felt surrounded by divinities very different from each other, opposed to each other, so that they had to fear that, if they did something in favor of one divinity, the other might be offended or avenged.

“Thus they lived in a world of fear, surrounded by dangerous demons, never knowing how to save themselves from these opposing forces. It was a world of fear, a dark world. And now they heard it said: ‘Rejoice; those demons are nothing; there is a true God, and this true God is good, he loves us, he knows us, he is with us to the point that he has become flesh.’ This is the great joy that Christianity proclaims. To know this God is truly the ‘good news’, a word of redemption.

“Perhaps we Catholics, who have always known this, are no longer surprised; we no longer perceive this liberating joy with force. But if we look at today’s world, where God is absent, we must see that he too is dominated by fears, by uncertainties: is it a good thing to be a man or not? Is it a good thing to live or not? Is it really a good thing to exist, or is it all negative? And in reality they live in a dark world, they need anesthesia to be able to live (…).

“This joy that we have received cannot be kept only for ourselves. Joy must always be shared. A joy must be communicated. Mary immediately ran to communicate her joy to her cousin Elizabeth. And since she was taken up into heaven, she distributes joys throughout the world; she has become the great Comforter, our Mother, who communicates joy, trust, goodness, and invites us to distribute joy ourselves.”

We ended the prayer by considering some words of our Father in the Forge. You wrote: “I hear you crying out, my King, with a loud voice, which still vibrates: ‘ignem veni mittere in terram, et quid volo nisi ut accendatur?’” - I have come to bring fire to the earth, and what do I want, but that it burns?”

Then you added: “Lord, I answer you-all of me-with my senses and powers: ‘ecce ego quia vocasti me!’ -here I am because you have called me!”

“Let this answer of yours be a daily reality.