311. Sixteenth Friday of Ordinary Time
Meditations no. 289 (unofficial computer-aided translation)
Opus Deiās Statutes give us a very clear route to follow.
The Book of Exodus tells how Moses received the Law for the people of Israel. These ten commandments are valid for all peoples and times. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Keeping the law is the way to paradise; and setting it aside is certain estrangement from God.
We too have heard Jesusā word. It awoke in our souls a thirst for God, and Jesus himself became for us the way, the truth and the life. We are at his service and our lives are geared to the fulfilment of his will. And for us in Opus Dei, the Will of God is also expressed in the legal provisions which our Father set down for us at Godās behest. It is a sign of how much God loves us that we should have a clearly visible path to walk by: our own Law. God willed that it should contain everything required for our holiness and fruitfulness.
This Law represents for us the explicit Will of God, and it has been approved by the Church. It marks out for us the path to follow in every circumstance. In it we can recognize our spirit, a source of holy and fruitful work. The road is well marked out for us, carved in the living rock, we might say.
On another occasion our Founder asserted that in our Law, everything is so divinely fashioned that I assure you it is not my doing. It belongs to Him! Love it! Venerate it! It is the means God our Lord provides us with to travel along the road without fear of losing our way. If we are to follow it we need to know it well; and so the first thing is to study the Catechism of the Work, which is an explanation of the Statutes of the Prelature, in order to help the faithful of Opus Dei attain a good grasp of its particular law and spirit.
In his foreword to the Catechism, our Father wrote: In this little book you will find the why and wherefore of your life as a son of God. Read it lovingly. Strive to know it well. Learn it by heart, and you will always have, in your mind, in your heart and along your way, a clear vision.
We follow the Statutes by carrying out faithfully what we are asked by the Directors.
Our vocation opens for us a path which is given a definite reality, once and for all, in our Statutes. It is one thing to know it and desire to practise it, but another thing to imbue heart, soul and behaviour with the spirit of the Work. But it is only in this way that our actions will have a divine dimension: only in this way will our lives be holy and fruitful, never short of the optimism, drive and happiness which express our response to Godās grace.
Let no one leave this wide road, was our Fatherās wish. Take the middle, the left or the right, the very edge, but donāt end up in the ditch.
The spirit of the Work is made explicit in these dispositions, which represent the lifestyle God wants the members of the Work to have. Their loving fulfilment is a practical matter for every day, reflected in the way we respond to grace, obey our Directors, and follow the spirit of the Work. It is not an academic question, something just to be studied. No: we are asked to follow in our Fatherās footsteps, just as our older brothers and sisters did. There will always be room for improvement, since our Lord tells us: He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.
Aspire to have no more than one right: that of fulfilling your duty, our Father advised. The ready fulfilment of these duties leads us to holiness. These obligations come to us through what we are told or asked by our Directors, who give us individual and personalized ways of living out the spirit of the Work. In this God-given spirit nothing is insignificant, and so even the slightest details of the Statutes should be regarded by the faithful of the Work as a guaranteed path to holiness, and should therefore be looked upon as holy, inviolable and perpetual.
Our responsibility in handing on the spirit of the Work in its entirety.
The Statutes of Opus Dei are stable and unchanging. It could never happen that some contrary custom or habit might supplant anything in the Statutes or spirit of Opus Dei. The Directors in particular are obliged to foster the fulfilment of the spirit and law of the Work and prudently and effectively to ensure its implementation, in such a way that no contrary custom may ever arise or any of its precepts be left unfulfilled. Not only the Directors: all of us have the duty and the honour of living out this spirit and passing it on to others, as reliable links in an everlasting chain.
The spirit of the Work, like life itself, is full of nuances which have to be passed on faithfully. A set of laws would be a dead thing if it were not backed up by the commitment of those who put those laws into practice. It is not simply a matter of following instructions, or of automatically applying rules. In the Work our whole existence ought to reflect a way of living on earth which leads us to heaven.
One essential aspect of this loyalty to the spirit and Statutes of the Work is our union with the Father. He is the Prelate, endowed with ordinary power of jurisdiction over the whole Prelature. Our union and obedience ought to be affectionate and filial, and full of gratitude for his watchfulness over us as our Good Shepherd. With the grace of God, we respond to that watchfulness by trying to make sure that, in our thoughts and desires, we remain on his wavelength, and that pride of place is given in our prayers to the Father and his intentions.
Our Father, referring to his successor, said the following words - and the point will always hold: When I die, my children, love the Father very much no matter who he is, even though it may occur to you that he is not holy enough or intelligent enough, or a thousand other things which may cross your mind and which you must reject promptly because you are wrong. Love him very much, my children! Kiss the ground he walks on, and donāt omit that small daily mortification, or the prayer for the head of the Work, said with love. Love him very much, my children, for itās very hard to carry this load!
Our Blessed Lady - Regina Operis Dei - gathers this Work of hers under her mantle. We can ask her to make us faithful to our spirit and to the Statutes that express it, so that we, and all our brothers and sisters down the years, may fulfil that desire of our Founder: to do Opus Dei on earth, being yourself Opus Dei.