519. March 19, Solemnity of St Joseph (III)

Meditations no. 451 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

In the Work we form part of the family of Joseph.

Throughout my life, my dear children, I have always tried to pour into your hearts what God has been giving me. There is nothing in the spirit of Opus Dei that is not holy, because it is the work of divine Wisdom and not a human invention. Everything good that the Lord wished to place in your Father’s heart shines forth in this spirit. Anything bad you may see in my poor life is not the spirit of the Work but my personal wretchedness. Therefore, pray for me that I may be good and faithful.

Among the gifts the Lord wanted to give me is the devotion to the most blessed Trinity - the Trinity of heaven, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, one God; and the trinity of the Earth - Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I understand very well the unity and affection of the Holy Family. There were three hearts but only one love.

On this great feastday, while meditating on the figure of St Joseph, we are once again amazed when we consider the virtues of this just man, who was chosen by God from all eternity to be the head of the family of Nazareth. And it fills us with joy to discover, following the teachings of our founder, that we too form part of the Holy Family.

Last night, when I was already in bed, our Father said on one 19th of March, I invoked St Joseph many, many times in preparation for today’s feast. I understood very clearly that we really form part of his family. This is not a gratuitous affirmation. There are many reasons for saying so. First of all, because we are children of Mary, his spouse, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ and children of our Father in heaven. Then, because we form part of that family of which St Joseph has wanted to be the head. That is why we have called him our Father and Lord since the beginning of the Work. And not only that: I tell you that he is even more, because he is the Master of the interior life. And you and I need this interior life, in order to be faithful in our external activities.

The Holy Patriarch and the Tabernacles of our Centres.

In our history there are not lacking clear manifestations of the affection with which St Joseph has exercised his role as Father and Lord of the supernatural family we make up. His protection was especially decisive in the installation of the first Tabernacle of the Work.

Opus Dei has not made its way easily, our Father said on one occasion. Humanly speaking, everything has been very difficult. I did not want ecclesiastical approvals that would have distorted our legal path, a path which then did not exist…

We invoked St Joseph who acted as the Lord’s father. Years passed. Until 1933 we could not begin the first corporate work, the famous DYA academy. We gave classes in law and architecture (in Spanish: Derecho y Arquitectura). Hence the letters of the name DYA.

But in reality the name meant God and daring (in Spanish: Dios y Audacia). That was what we needed to break the legal moulds, which is what we did, and to provide a new channel for the yearning of the Christian soul that longed then, and longs now, to serve God wholeheartedly, with human limitations, but in the world, in ordinary professional work, without being a religious or being equated to religious.

Several years passed before I wrote the Work’s first regulations. I recall that I had a pile of notes that I took from our experience. Ever since the 2nd of October 1928 the will of God was clear, but it was put into practice little by little, year by year. I avoided the pitfall of first making a suit and then forcing the child to fit inside. On the contrary, with those notes of experience, I was taking the measurements of what would be the right suit. After a few years had passed, one day I asked Don Álvaro and a couple of your older brothers to help me put all that material in order. That is the way we wrote the first regulations in which we did not speak about vows or boots or half-boots or buttons, because it was not necessary then nor is it now.

In 1934, if I am not mistaken, we began the first student residence. At that time the atmosphere in my country was violently anticlerical. Government authorities persecuted the Church, and Communism, the denial of all freedoms, had got a foothold.

We had to have our Lord with us in the tabernacle. Now it is an easy matter to set up a tabernacle, but then it was very difficult. It was necessary to do many things; we had to show ourselves just like a sampler.

Do you know what the sampler was? Last century, when the young ladies graduated from finishing school knowing a smattering of French and how to play the piano, more or less, they also had to do some needlework on cloth. They sewed, embroidered; they knitted. They added letters, numbers, birds - all kinds of things! They also put their name and the date. I have seen my grandmother Florencia’s sampler because my sister Carmen kept it. For finishing schools, it was the equivalent of a degree.

We had to do something like that so the Church would look upon us affectionately and permit us to have the Blessed Sacrament at home.

In the bottom of my heart I already had this devotion to St Joseph that I have taught you. I thought of that other Joseph to whom the Egyptians had gone, following Pharaoh’s advice when they were hungering for good bread: Ite ad Ioseph (Gen 41: 55), go to Joseph. He will give you wheat. I began to ask St Joseph for the first tabernacle. And so did my children I then had at my side. While we prayed for this intention, I tried to find the necessary things: vestments, tabernacle and so forth. We had no money. When I could get twenty-five pesetas together, which then was a fair amount of money, it had to go to meet some other more pressing need.

I did manage to get some nuns, whom I love very much, to give me a tabernacle. I got the vestments somewhere else and finally the good bishop of Madrid gave us permission to have the Blessed Sacrament with us. Then, as a sign of gratitude, I had a small chain made for the tabernacle key with a little medal of St Joseph which had inscribed on the back the words, Ite ad Ioseph. So St Joseph is truly our Father and Lord because he has given us bread, the eucharistic bread, like a good father.

Let us give thanks to the Holy Patriarch for this manifestation of delicacy of his with the Work, the anniversary of which we will celebrate once again in a few days. - And let us ask him to teach us never to leave Jesus alone, who is really present in the Blessed Eucharist and is reserved in our Tabernacles. That, whether we are far away or close by, we may constantly accompany him.

Recourse to our Lady and St Joseph in order to improve our dealings with Jesus in the Tabernacle.

For other reasons too, St Joseph is the Father and Lord of Opus Dei. In addition to providing us with spiritual food, we are united to him by invoking him before that get-together which is our prayer. Also, when we renew our dedication and when we incorporate ourselves definitively into the Work, St Joseph is present.

In the beginning I made it a point to advance the fidelity because I needed you. I have never felt indispensable in any way. Some will recall that I said to them: ‘If I die, do you promise before God to carry on with the Work?’ I never thought that I was necessary because I am not. Any one of you is better than I, and can be a very good instrument. At that time the fidelity was done on the feast of St Joseph, associating the holy patriarch with the spiritual commitment to carry out the Work, convinced that it was the positive will of God.

Besides, after our Lady, St Joseph is the person who dealt most intimately with Jesus on earth. I enjoy so much those prayers to be said before and after Mass that the Church recommends for the priest’s piety. They recall that St Joseph cared for the Son of God just as our parents did for us.

Today is a good day to ask the Holy Patriarch to teach us to have a very refined relationship with Jesus Christ, and to pour ourselves out in details of affection with the One who always waits for us in the Tabernacle. In recent times, our founder said only a few months before his departure for the house of heaven, God has shown me more. He has shown me, piously, that in some ineffable way the Mother of God and the one who took the place of Jesus’ father on earth are close to the Tabernacle. If they looked after him so marvellously while he lived on earth, they will continue keeping him company in the same way in the Tabernacle, where Jesus is much more defenceless than in the cradle of Bethlehem. I thank them for that company, because I cannot separate the Blessed Host from the Holy Family, from that family of Nazareth which I love, which enthuses me and which is like the heart of the family of Opus Dei. I don’t like to separate them ever, and I ask the Blessed Virgin and St Joseph to put in my soul and in that of my children the refinement necessary to know how to be always united with Jesus.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, be the love of our life; may we be close to you not only in Nazareth, but in the Tabernacle, in all the Tabernacles of the world.

We finish our prayer with the resolution to continue our conversation with God throughout the day, taking advantage of the help of St Joseph in order to achieve it. In this way we follow the advice of our Father, living with Jesus, Mary and Joseph in that house and in that workshop of Nazareth; contemplating the death of the holy patriarch, who, according to tradition was accompanied by Jesus and Mary at that moment; and telling him that we love him very much, asking that he never leave us.