550. June 26, St Josemaría Escrivá

Meditations no. 628 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

We thank God for the life of St. Josemaría, chosen in the Church to proclaim the universal call to holiness.

PRAISE the Saint who showed us the ways, opened the way for us and facilitated the entrance to the life hidden in Christ, to contemplation in the midst of the din of the world.

Today, June 26, is the dies natalis of our Founder. It is a day of joy for the whole Church, especially for those of us who are children of the prayer and sacrifice of St. Josemaría and have been called by the Lord to follow him on the path that-as his faithful instrument-he opened on earth. It is also a day of joy “for the people around the world who fill large urban temples and small rural churches throughout the world to give thanks to God, who is always admirable in his saints (Ps 67:6 [Vg]), for having granted us this friend and protector.”

On a date like today, Father Josemaría recalled that “St. Josemaría is and will always be a figure very close to us. Not only because of his personality of great historical significance, but because we regularly have recourse to his intercession in the various daily needs, even in the smallest ones. We have experienced his fatherhood, we know that he listens to us, accompanies us, sustains us. He is truly a familiar figure (…). Some of us have known him personally; but I think that we all turn to him in the intimacy of our souls, where the Lord grants him to be present to help us walk the path of holiness and apostolic commitment.

» Gratias tibi, Deus, gratias tibi! Our gratitude today acquires a very particular intensity. We give thanks, in the first place, to the Most Holy Trinity, who has given to the world and to the Church this holy, joyful servant full of apostolic zeal. We thank the Virgin Mary, because all graces come to us through her maternal mediation. Finally, thanks to St. Josemaría for his fidelity, for his complete dedication to the mission that God assigned to him from eternity: to open in the world a path of sanctification in professional work and in the fulfillment of the ordinary duties of the Christian, as recited in the prayer with which millions of people invoke his intercession. A path that can be traveled-in fact, they already do-by countless men and women of the most diverse conditions.”

Our Father’s ecclesial mission has been to “revive in Christians, with new strength and new forms, the awareness of the universal call to holiness and to the apostolate.” Pope Benedict XVI explicitly pointed this out in the Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini, when he wrote that “every saint is like a ray of light that comes from the Word of God”; and, specifically, referring to our Father, whom he lists among the great saints in the history of the Church, he affirms that this divine light is shown “in St. Josemaría Escrivá and his preaching on the universal call to holiness.”

This is the doctrine that is reflected in the texts of the Mass. From the Collect, the liturgy invites us to consider the most appropriate starting point for any reflection on the figure of our Founder: O God, who raised up St. Josemaría, a priest, in the Church to proclaim the universal vocation to holiness and the apostolate.

“God created our Father precisely with a view to the fulfilment of this mission, to which he responded with the most faithful and unconditional dedication to the graces and charisms received. Every man and woman who comes into the world is called to carry out a mission that only they can fulfil. No one has before him a life without end: all are precious in the presence of the Lord, who arranges circumstances in the most suitable way and bestows on each soul the graces necessary to rise to the task assigned to it.”

We turn to St. Josemaría and thank him for his fidelity to the mission received from God. You showed us the path of the ordinary to imitate the example of Christ, transmitting to us, obedient to the Light, that light that you clearly saw. Help us, Father, to follow faithfully in your footsteps, fulfilling the commission that the Lord has entrusted to us.

Divine sonship in Christ enables us to make our work holy and pleasing to God, under the impulse of the Holy Spirit.

To respond to the graces we continually receive, we turn to God, the source of holiness, invoking the help of St. Josemaría. Grant us, through his intercession and his example, that in the exercise of ordinary work we may be configured to your Son Jesus Christ and serve the work of Redemption with ardent love.

Configuration to Christ is the work of the Holy Spirit, whom we have all received in Baptism and Confirmation, and who in so many ways sends us his graces to identify us more and more with Jesus. This is the amazing truth that we are reminded of in the second reading: those who are guided by the Spirit of God are children of God. An essential truth of the Christian faith, which was one of the axes of our Father’s preaching from the foundation of Opus Dei.

“The awareness of divine filiation in Christ impelled St. Josemaría to communicate this great news to all the people he met on his earthly journey, encouraging them to walk the paths of holiness. Because, as the Apostle continues, the Spirit himself bears witness together with our spirit that we are children of God. And if we are children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, co-heirs of Christ; provided that we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified with Him (Rom 8:16-17).

“These reflections,” Father explains, “move us to raise our gratitude to God, also for having given to the Church the life of St. Josemaría, an instrument he has used to revive in many souls the awareness of divine filiation.”

Today’s feast, by reminding us that the Christian vocation to holiness is based on divine sonship, “invites us to consider the framework in which this call is framed: normal daily life and, in particular, professional work and family life, which fill most of our days.

“Work is certainly an activity aimed at providing for personal and family economic needs; but, as St. Josemaría has taught us, work must be much more, because it is born of love, it manifests love, it is ordered to love (Christ Is Passing By, no. 48).”

In fact, after having created our first parents, God took man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work and keep him. Meditating on this passage of Genesis, our Founder was filled with joy and gratitude, because work, he wrote, is man’s initial vocation, it is a blessing from God, and those who consider it a punishment are unfortunately mistaken.

“Work, then, is not a punishment - the command to work is prior to original sin - but a task entrusted to all men so that they may cooperate with God in the orderly development of material creation. Meditating on this teaching of Sacred Scripture, the Founder of Opus Dei saw - with light received from the Lord - the great value of work as a means of holiness and apostolate.”

During a conference on the teachings of St. Josemaría, the future Pope Benedict XVI underscored the remarkable contribution made by our Father to the solemn proclamation of the universal call to holiness, made at the Second Vatican Council. He dwelt on the contemplative spirit that must inform any activity and explained that “holiness is reached, under the action of the Holy Spirit, through daily life. Holiness consists in this: in living daily life with our gaze fixed on God; in shaping our actions in the light of the Gospel and the spirit of faith. A whole theological understanding of the world and of history,” he added, “derives from this nucleus,” as so many of St. Josemaría’s texts “testify, in a precise and incisive way.”

Let us turn to our Father: May the married as well as the celibate, the elderly and the young, make their work a holy reality every day. In this way, always seeking Christ, found and loved above all, may they attain the crown, which is the prize of life.

Holiness must overflow in apostolic zeal: to cast the nets of Christ into the sea of the world.

If we seek to identify ourselves with Christ, the consequence is clear: we must collaborate with Him to bring to all men and women the fruits of His Redemption. This is what the Collect invites us to ask for: that we may serve the work of Redemption with ardent love.

Jesus Christ, in order to save us, wanted to ascend the Cross; and the prayer over the offerings indicates the way in which we can collaborate in the extension of the Kingdom of Christ: by carrying out all our tasks in close union with the Holy Mass. Thanks to the Eucharist, we are able to cry out, with the Apostles: possumus! For this reason, the Church invites us to pray in this way: Receive, Holy Father, these gifts, which we offer you in the commemoration of St. Josemaría, so that, through the sacrifice of Christ offered on the altar of the Cross, which is made present in the sacrament, you may want to sanctify all our actions.

“The call to collaborate in the Church’s salvific mission is inseparable from the vocation to holiness. Even now, as in Jesus’ time, the crowd is hungry to hear the word of God. It is the scene that we have once again relived in the Gospel. The Lord has boarded Peter’s boat to address his word to the multitude; he makes use of the material collaboration of Simon and the other disciples to make his message go further. It is a first way of participating in his evangelizing mission: to provide the Church with the material means she needs to work more effectively at the service of souls.

“But this commitment is not enough. The Lord also asks us to collaborate personally in the apostolate, each one according to the situation in which he finds himself and according to his possibilities. The miraculous catch is also a sign of the apostolic efficacy of obedience to the Master’s word. After having taught the crowd, Jesus turns to Peter and the other disciples, saying to them: put out into the deep, and cast your nets for the catch (Lk 5:4). Simon obeys the Lord’s command, despite the recent negative experience, and then the miracle takes place: they caught a great number of fish (Ibid., 6).”

There is a great need in the world for women and men seriously committed to the task of bringing souls to the feet of Christ, like the first Twelve. “Today too the Church and the successors of the Apostles are told to enter the sea of history and cast their nets, to win men and women for the Gospel, for God, for Christ, for true life,” said Pope Benedict XVI at the beginning of his Pontificate. And he added: “We men and women live alienated, in the salty waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness, without light. The net of the Gospel rescues us from the waters of death and leads us to the radiance of God’s light, in true life. This is indeed the case: in the mission of fisher of men, following Christ, it is necessary to take men out of the salt sea of all alienations and bring them to the earth of life, to the light of God. That is true: we exist to teach God to men. And only where God is seen does life really begin. Only when we find the living God in Christ do we know what life is.”

St. Josemaría invited us to ask ourselves every day: what have I done today to bring some people closer to Our Lord? And Father comments: “Many times it will be a guiding conversation, an invitation to approach the sacrament of Penance, a piece of advice that helps us to better understand some aspect of Christian life. And always, the generous offer of prayer and mortification, of a job well done; these are the most important means that we must use to achieve our apostolic objectives.”

Through the intercession of St. Josemaría, we ask the Lord that at all times we may be salt that preserves from corruption, a light that illuminates the hearts of men, a living leaven that brings the living Bread to all work. And to Holy Mary we say: Pray for us, O holy Virgin, blessed Mother of God, You who prepare and preserve in our lives a safe path.