514. Sixth Sunday of St Joseph

Meditations no. 445 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

St Joseph’s whole life had as its exclusive aim to serve God and man.

Joseph was one of the few craftsmen in Nazareth, if not the only one - a carpenter perhaps. But, as normally happens in villages, he must have felt called upon to turn his attention to other things: fixing a mill that was not working or, with the coming of winter, repairing the tiles of a roof. I am sure Joseph knew how to lend a hand in many difficulties, with work well done. His skilled work was in the service of others, to brighten the lives of other families in the town; and with a smile, a friendly word, a passing quip, he would restore confidence and happiness to those in danger of losing them.

The work at which he spent his life did not prevent the Holy Patriarch from dedicating all his efforts to looking after Jesus and Mary. There is a feature which was basic to St Joseph’s work and should be so for every Christian: the spirit of service, the desire to contribute to the well-being of other people. Joseph’s work was not self-centred, even though his active life made him a strong and forceful personality. When he worked, he was aware that he was carrying out God’s will; he was thinking of his people, of Jesus and Mary, and of everyone in Nazareth.

Work and rest, social relations and family life, were all closely united in the heart of Joseph, because his only aim was to second the plans of God in the place where divine Wisdom had put him. On this sixth Sunday of preparation for the feast of the Holy Patriarch, we go to his intercession so that he will help us to integrate all our activities into an ever deeper unity of life.

I assure you, my children, our founder said, that when a Christian carries out with love the most insignificant everyday action, that action overflows with the transcendence of God. That is why I have told you so often, and hammered away at it, that the Christian vocation consists in making heroic verse out of the prose of each day. Heaven and earth seem to merge, my children, on the horizon. But where they really meet is in your hearts, when you sanctify your everyday lives…

Heaven and earth came to be united in the heart of St Joseph. Heaven, because Jesus, the Son of God, was the centre of his whole life; and earth, because he spent all his days in an ordinary job, in common, everyday occupations. We want to imitate St Joseph, in order to make of our own ordinary life a continuous service to God. For this reason we ask God every day to supernaturalise our actions in a single movement of love. Direct, we beseech you, Lord - we pray in the Preces - our actions by your inspirations and further them with your assistance; that every word and work of ours may begin always from you and by you be likewise ended.

Unity of life, an essential characteristic of the spirit of Opus Dei.

The spiritual constitution of Opus Dei is reflected in the activities of its members especially in their unity of life, which is simple and strong, and which creates in their souls, as it were, a supernatural instinct and desire to purify all their actions, to raise them to the order of grace, to sanctify them and convert them into instruments of apostolate.

Our life is dedicated to the service of God and of souls. No aspect of our life should fail to receive the sanctifying influence of the vocation with which we have been called. On the contrary, our founder says, you must realise now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary, secular and civil activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.

I often said to the university students and workers who were with me in the thirties that they had to know how to materialize their spiritual lives. I wanted to warn them of the temptation, so common then and now, to lead a kind of double life: on the one hand, an inner life, a life related to God; and on the other, as something separate and distinct, their professional, social and family lives, made up of small earthly realities.

No, my children! We cannot lead a double life. We cannot be like schizophrenics, if we want to be Christians. There is only one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is that life which has to become, in both body and soul, holy and filled with God: we discover the invisible God in the most visible and material things.

Such was the professional work of St Joseph, which found in everything an opportunity and a reason to serve Jesus and Mary. Your ordinary professional work, our Father once explained, will provide the true, solid, noble material out of which you will build a truly Christian life. You will use your work to make fruitful the grace which comes to us from Christ.

Faith, hope and charity will come into play in your professional work done for God. The incidents, the problems, the friendships which your work brings with it, will give you food for prayer. The effort to improve your own daily occupation will give you the chance to experience the cross which is essential for a Christian. When you feel your weakness, the failures which arise even in human undertakings, you will gain in objectivity, in humility and in understanding for others. Successes and joys will prompt you to thanksgiving and to realize that you do not live for yourself, but for the service of others and of God.

The foundations of our unity of life.

To fulfil the will of God in work, to contemplate God in work, to work for the love of God and one’s neighbour, to convert work into a means of apostolate, to give divine value to the human: this is the simple and strong unity of life we must have and must teach others. There should be no isolated compartments in our lives, nor should we be able to distinguish, I insist, where prayer ends and where work begins, or where the limits of our apostolate are. Because apostolate is the Love for God which overflows, communicating itself to men. And contemplative interior life is a clamour for souls. And work is an effort which is sustained by self-denial, charity, obedience, understanding, patience and service to others.

We will achieve this unity of life, which is essential if we are to direct all things to God, if we do not separate action from contemplation, if the spirit of prayer informs our every activity. Someone who was not contemplative in practice, our Father warned, would be lacking the foundation of the spiritual life proper to the members of Opus Dei, and it would therefore be very difficult for him to persevere in the Work.

St Joseph’s life took on a new meaning through his constant relations with Mary and, later, with Jesus. When he spoke with them he was praying, because he was addressing himself to the Son of God and to the Mother of God. For this reason his ordinary work took on unsuspected horizons. We too should cultivate the spirit of prayer because, even though we live in the world and form part of the world, participating in all the concerns and jobs of society, our vocation is essentially contemplative. The unity of life of each member of the Work leads him or her to seek God at all times and in all things.

All of this requires interior silence, an habitual disposition of recollection of the soul. When I call you contemplatives, our founder once said, I understand that in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the crowd - because we are in the midst of the crowd and we are interested in all souls - in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the world, we know how to find the silence of a contemplative soul and to look on God as one looks on a Father, as one looks on a friend whom he loves dearly.

A very efficacious means to achieve this intimacy with God is the Norms of the plan of life. Far from being isolated moments of encounter with God, there is a perfect continuity in the Norms. They are related to one another; they are perfectly arranged. But do you know what the thread that ties them together is? Our contemplative vocation. A man who tries to live this, and who reaches a point at which for a long time he lives it almost without effort (even though it seems that there is no struggle, there is), this, then, is a man who lives the Life of God, who can say what I like so much to repeat: vivo autem iam non ego: vivit vero in me Christus (Gal 2: 20) - it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And to be Christ is to know you are a child of God.

With the intercession of Holy Mary and of St Joseph, if we are faithful we will come to have a contemplative life in the midst of all human activities - light, salt and leaven, through prayer, through mortification, through religious and professional culture - turning this great desire into a reality: the more immersed in the world we are, the more we must belong to God.