255. Tenth Wednesday of Ordinary Time
Meditations no. 245 (unofficial computer-aided translation)
We have come to the Work to sanctify ourselves and do apostolate.
To this you have been called, that you may obtain a blessing, to be Godâs children and heirs to his glory with Jesus Christ. The Christians St Peter was writing to, men and women of the first century, were perfectly clear about this. From the moment when Jesus Christ said that he was the Way, the Truth and Life, and invited everyone to follow him, there burst forth in the souls of many faithful, right from the earliest times of the Churchâs life, the desire to make a reality of the search for the evangelical perfection which was practised by Christ himself as our model: the life of personal holiness and apostolic action.
And so the genuine spirituality of the Gospel started to produce abundant fruits of holiness in every sphere of the pagan society which the early Christians lived in. They were men and women who practised their faith sincerely, and as a result brought new members into the Church. They worked alongside everyone else, as citizens if they were citizens, and as slaves if they were slaves. They practised fraternity to an exquisite degree and dedicated themselves to God and to the spreading of the Good News, in the measure of the gifts they had each received. The result was that the whole of pagan society was Christianized.
Like the first Christians, we too have received Godâs call to cooperate with Christ in sanctifying people and institutions here on earth. God wants each of you, our Father tells us, to try to be holy in your own specific circumstances and position in life: Haec est enim voluntas Dei, sanctificatio vestra; this is Godâs will, your sanctification. A holiness that will often be hidden - without outward show - but one that is striven for every day, a heroic holiness: to co-redeem with Christ, to save souls with him, to put order with him into all human affairs.
God wishes to make use of your personal holiness, which you seek in accordance with the spirit of the Work, so that everyone can learn, in a simple and specific way, what you know very well: that all the faithful, incorporated into Christ by baptism, are called to seek the fullness of Christian life.
Personal sanctity in the first place: love for God and love for all souls for his sake. If we werenât trying to be closer to our Lord every day, our apostolic efforts would be in vain, and all our external works useless. And we are closer to God when we do all we can to give to each moment - even to apparently ordinary moments - the dynamic echo of eternity. Nothing is unimportant in Godâs eyes: everything is an opportunity for sanctity and apostolate. Everything - no matter how insignificant it may appear - has an eternal value. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
For our apostolate to be effective we need to obey.
In the Work, together with our vocation God has given us the means to reach our goal. When God our Lord raised up his Work within the Church on the second of October 1928, he gave us a specific aim, a definite spirit, and a way of doing apostolate which is proper to the Work.
The apostolate cannot be done in anarchy; it requires due order. There has to be order; if not, our Opus Dei could not be an instrument for serving souls, serving the Church, or being faithful to the Magisterium of the Roman Pontiff. And if the Work does not serve the Church it is no use. Thatâs what it was born for, thatâs what God wants it for!
In order to be useful, serve, I have often repeated, because a great part of our spirit is summed up in this phrase. Service to God, I will say again, service to his Holy Church and the Roman Pontiff; service to all souls; especially those whom God has placed beside us, giving them a vocation to the Work; or all those others who donât have a vocation but receive the influence of its example and doctrine, which is another sort of apostolic service. In this apostolic work we must exercise personal freedom, and let ourselves be guided by the Directors; otherwise we would not be performing any real service to the Church or souls. Order is needed, for as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us.
God arranged things so that the Directors should govern in his name, and that we should all be equally necessary. The eye cannot say to the hand, âI have no need of you,â nor again the head to the feet, âI have no need of you.â On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those parts of the body which we think less honourable we invest with the greater honour ⌠God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together.
Government and obedience, then, are not opposites; rather, they are mutually necessary signs of a single love and common action. When Jesus Christ was on the point of returning to his Father, he said to his disciples: If you love me, keep my commandments - if you love me, obey me. And our Father wrote to us: To form and govern is to love. In the Work it is love alone which identifies the wills of the person who commands and the person who obeys, and makes them one. Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor, Christâs love has brought us together in one.
I want you to meditate on everything I have written to you, and live it faithfully, our Father said, so that what was said of the first Christians can be said of you too. They all learnt what they ought to do, and not only learnt it but put it eagerly into practice. They practised it not only in the cities and marketplaces but on the mountain-tops -everywhere.
Government and obedience are rooted in fraternal love.
Brethren, let us each try to please God in our own place. From her very foundation, the Church has been given a hierarchy whose law is love: Mandatum novum do vobis: ut diligatis invicem. A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. And the primacy of Peter, right from the start, was a primacy of love. Jesus Christ himself made sure Peter realized that, one morning on the shore of Lake Tiberias. âSimon, son of John, do you love me more than these?â He answered, âYes, Lord, you know that I love you.â He said to him, âFeed my lambs.â In the Work too, government and obedience, any task, are always missions of service, and the joyous fruit of love. Our Father wrote: The Directors should get into the habit of raising their hearts to ask for grace frequently throughout the day; they should thank God every time they have sorted out some important matter with their local council; they should seek their own sanctification in all humility when they are giving advice to other people. They should feel themselves to be instruments in Godâs service; they should see themselves not as assuming a post but as shouldering a burden; they should see duties, not rights; and they should become all things to all people, convinced that the reason for their existence on earth is a joyous, voluntary and ready service to other people. Likewise, all tasks done in obedience are service, and a labour of love. Pope Paul the Sixth taught that law does not restrict freedom, it perfects it; it directs a personâs activity and develops the personality in some way. But disobedience dissipates a manâs energies and makes him a slave to his disordered tendencies.
If it is love that moves us both to command and to obey, we will never lose sight of the universality of the apostolate. I want to see no âcliquesâ within your work, our Father warned. -That would stunt the apostolates: for if the âcliqueâ managed, at last!, to get control of a universal undertaking⌠how quickly that universal undertaking itself would become a clique! Our charity, our love for the Work, will impel us to work responsibly, each in our allotted field of apostolate, without ever losing our universal outlook on the apostolate; because, as St Clement of Rome says, charity does not foster divisions, charity is not rebellious, charity does everything in harmony. In charity all those chosen by God are brought to perfection. Without charity nothing is pleasing to God. Our Father taught us that loving the unity of the Work is one of our ruling passions. Let us ask our Lady today to keep this universal view of the Work constantly before our eyes, and to keep us united, as she did the Apostles in Jerusalem, through charity and obedience.