523. March 28, Priestly Ordination of Our Father (I)

Meditations no. 455 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

The readiness of our Father to fulfil the Will of God.

On the anniversary of the priestly ordination of our Father, we raise our thanksgiving to God for the divine call and for the generous correspondence of our founder.

Why did I become a priest?, he said once on the anniversary of his ordination. Because I believed it would be easier to fulfil a will of God that at that time I didn’t know. I had had inklings of it for some eight years, but I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t know until 1928. That is why I became a priest.

The priestly vocation of our Father is intimately bound up with his mission to be a founder. It was the way God had chosen from all eternity to make our founder the instrument which would give life to this universal family of children of God. God prepared him step by step for this mission.

I never thought of becoming a priest, or in dedicating myself to God. That problem had not occurred to me, because I thought it wasn’t for me. What is more, I was turned off by the thought of ever coming to the priesthood, so much so that I felt anticlerical. I loved priests very much, because the formation I had received at home was deeply religious. They had taught me to respect, to venerate the priesthood. But not for me: for others.

I remember how, during my secondary studies, we were studying Latin at school. I didn’t like it. In a foolish way - now I am very sorry for it! - I would say: Latin is for priests and monks… Do you see how far I was from becoming a priest?

Nevertheless, our Father commented, God went on preparing me, in spite of myself, with ordinary events and happenings seemingly without significance, and yet he used them to place within my soul a divine restlessness. And so I well understand that love, so human and yet so divine, of Theresa of the Child Jesus, whose heart is moved when, in turning the pages of a book, she comes across a picture of the wounded hand of the Redeemer. Things of this kind happened to me as well, and they stirred me and they led me to daily Communion, to purification, to Confession… and to penance.

One fine day I told my father that I wanted to be a priest: it was the only time I saw him cry. He had other plans in his mind but he did not object. He told me: My son, think it over carefully. A priest has to be a saint … It is very hard to have no house, no home, to have no love on earth. Think about it a bit more, but I will not oppose your decision. And he took me to speak to a friend of his who was a priest, the administrator of the Collegiate Church of Logroño.

That was not what God was asking of me, and I knew it: I did not want to be a priest just for the sake of being a priest, as they say in Spain. I felt a great veneration for the clergy, but I did not want to be a priest in that way.

On considering the life of our Father, identified in everything with the will of God, we renew our desire to imitate his availability without limits, so that God can do Opus Dei on earth through each one of us too.

His constant petition that God would show him his Will.

With the desire of preparing himself in the best possible way for whatever God was asking of him, our Father began his priestly studies.

Time passed, and many hard and. distressing things happened, which I will not tell you about, because they do not make me suffer, but you would be saddened by them. They were axe blows struck at the tree by God our Lord. From that tree, he was shaping a beam that would be used, in spite of its weakness, to do his Work Almost without realising it, I kept repeating: Domine, ut videam! Domine, ut sit! I did not know what it was he wanted, but I went on and on, without fully corresponding to God’s goodness, waiting for what I was later to receive: a succession of graces, one after another, which I did not know how to describe and I called them ‘operative’, because they so dominated my will that I hardly needed to make any effort. I carried on, without doing anything unusual, working with just average intensity… Those were the years in Saragossa.

In Saragossa, in St Charles’ Seminary, the interior life of our Father grew at pace with his ardent petitions to God and to the Mother of God. And I, half blind, always waiting for the reason. Why am I becoming a priest? God wants something; but what is it? And in a poor sort of Latin, using the words of the blind man at Jericho, I kept repeating: Domine, ut videam! (Cf. Luke18: 41) Ut sit! Ut sit! Lord, I don’t know what it is you want, but let it be done. Domina, ut sit!

The years passed, many years. And one afternoon, when I was in Rome, the Central Secretary of the women’s section came to me and said:

‘Father, we have received an image of Our Lady of Pilar which you used to have in Saragossa’

‘No; I don’t remember.’

‘Yes; yes; look There is something you wrote…’

It was such a poor image that it didn’t seem possible that it could ever have belonged to me.

But she insisted:

Yes, look … ’

She turned it upside down and on the bottom I had written with a nail: Domina, ut sit!, with an exclamation mark, as I always use when I write aspirations in Latin. Our Lady, may it be!

Very often, my sons, God humiliates me. Even though he often lets me see things very clearly, on many other occasions he takes away that clarity so that I don’t feel any security in myself. But then he comes and gives me a taste of honey. I have spoken to you often about those inklings, even though at times I was thinking: ‘Josemaría, you are deceitful, a liar…’ That image was the material proof of my prayer over many years, of what I had told you many times.

That prayer of our Father, prolonged untiringly for more than ten years, is both an example and a stimulus for us. It tells us that it is indispensable to use the supernatural means, with confidence in God and in the Blessed Virgin, in order to carry out the apostolic task which is entrusted to us in the Work.

Our founder always let himself be led by God.

And then came the 2nd of October 1928. I was doing a retreat during those days, because one had to do it, and it was then that Opus Dei appeared on earth. I can still hear the peal of bells of the parish of Our Lady of the Angels, ringing out on their Patron’s feast day. The Lord - ludens… omni tempore, ludens in orbe terrarum (Prov 8: 30-31) - plays with souls as a father with his little children, even though we may no longer be tiny toddlers. He saw how I offered resistance at first, and how what work I did was both enthusiastic and feeble, and he allowed me to have the apparent humility of thinking -without any foundation at all - that there might be institutions in the world which would be no different from what God had asked me for. It was an unreasonable cowardice, the cowardice of love of ease, and at the same time a confirmation that I was not interested in founding anything.

I was then no better than I am now; I was a poor man. When this happened, there could have been nothing coming from me, nothing that could seem even remotely mine. It was a loving gesture, a proof of God’s Love, which overflowed the ordinary channels of Providence - for there have been extraordinary interventions, when necessary, and if I were to say the contrary I would be lying. And I received them with trepidation. When this happened I immediately sensed the It is I. When I examined the facts coldly with my head, I saw nothing there that could be nervous excitement. It was a thing of God, and I would calmly go to my confessor, though still with a certain hesitation.

So that there could be no doubt that it was He who was carrying out his own work, our Lord added external things. I had written: “There will never be women in Opus Dei, no fear!” And a few days later… the 14th of February: so that it could be seen that this thing was not mine, but against my inclination and against my will.

I used to go to the house of an old lady of eighty, who came to me for Confession, to celebrate Mass in the small oratory she had. And it was there, in the Mass, after Communion, that the women’s section came to the world. When I had finished, I went straight to my confessor…

Those interventions of the Lord moved me, disturbed me, and led me - in spite of my four, perhaps six, courses on Sacred Scripture I had studied, having obtained the best marks - to be ignorant, at that moment, of what the Gospel says. My God, I would think, this is the devil! And on one occasion I went from St Isabel to my mother’s house, to see what was written in the Gospel. And I found everything checked exactly …

When I was consumed with worry, when during the Spanish civil war I was faced with the dilemma of whether or not I should cross over, from one side to the other, in the midst of persecution, fleeing from the communists, there came that other extraordinary proof -the wooden rose. There have been things like that. God has treated me as a forlorn child who has to be provided with tangible proofs, but in an ordinary way.

And so, in very ordinary ways, Jesus our Lord, the Father and the Holy Spirit, accompanied by the loving smile of the Mother of God, the Daughter of God, the Spouse of God, have led me along, treating me as I am: a poor man, a little donkey that God has wanted to take in hand: ut iumentum factus sum apud te, et ego semper tecum (Ps 72: 23).

We finish this time of prayer telling our Lord that, like our Father, we too want him to take us in his hand and lead us always forward along the path of the fulfilment of his most lovable Will that he has shown us so clearly: to do Opus Dei on earth, being ourselves Opus Dei.

And, for this, there is no better way than to have recourse to the intercession of Holy Mary, our Mother, who is also Queen of Opus Dei.