"Work is essential in human life and is the path to sanctification."Marriage and the family in the thought of St. JosemaríaSt. Josemaría Escrivá's legacy lives onAlvaro D'Ors, one of the most prestigious professors of Roman law, in the last class he gave to his students at the University of Navarra, drew on the blackboard a triangle, and wrote on each side the following three phrases: "amas si sirves", "sirves si vales", "vales si amas".
These three sentences, apparently so simple, contain a very relevant truth about the meaning of human work, which I intend to recall in this paper, and which constitutes the essence of the message of Opus Dei.
"You love if you serve."
To love someone is to procure his good by rendering him some service to the extent of his needs and our possibilities. Y professional work is our daily way of servicethat is, to love.
It is a deformation of Christianity to reduce charity only to charitable practices (giving alms, attending a soup kitchen, giving catechesis...), and worse still, to reduce them to practices within the ecclesiastical precincts.
For a Christian in the midst of the world, the daily place for the practice of charity is professional work.
Therefore, the more technically trained we are (as doctors, teachers, engineers, policemen...) the better we can serve others.
And living charity, through work well done, is the principal evangelizing manifestation. Therefore, work done out of love for the person it serves is an excellent form of evangelization, because it is the ordinary way of living charity.
At its core, the value of any job is measured by the service it provides to others. A job well done is a service well done to someone else. No one is a good professional regardless of the service he or she renders to others. Therefore, one cannot be a good professional and a bad person; nor can one be a good person and a bad professional. In fact, the definition of profession includes the service rendered, and when it does not serve anyone, it is not that one is a bad professional, it is that one is not even a professional. For example, a shoemaker is not a shoemaker who makes excellent shoes and then burns them, nor is a speaker who gives "excellent" speeches to a non-existent audience. Without good service, there is no good work; and without service there is no work at all.
Morale is not a requirement extrinsic to the profession, as a series of additions that make the profession itself more meritorious, but rather morale helps define the profession. And the first rule deontological of any profession or trade is the requirement to have a good knowledge of the rules and regulations of techniques of such profession or trade.
"You serve if you're worth it."
You serve if you are worth, that is, if you are competent in your profession, if you are well prepared, if you study to perform your profession better and better, if you are up to date with the latest techniques; you serve if you are punctual, if you listen to your colleagues, your clients, your patients, your students... To serve well, good will is not enough, you need constant work, study, technical competence. If you are a doctor and you are a bad doctor, you are a bad person. And the same if one is a student, but does not study, he is a bad person. Our whole life must be a renewed effort to serve others better every day, and this requires professional competence.
In addition, the quality of the work reconfigures the moral personality of the subject, in a virtuous circle (or vicious, depending on the work). In this way, each worker will be able to understand his work as a true work of art, which he performs every day, on others, on the world and on oneself.
"You're worth it if you love."
In the end, each man is worth what his love is worth. St. Josemaría often said that everyone is worth what his or her heart is worth.
Man was created to love. And if he does not love, if he closes in on himself, he betrays his vocation, the call of God to unite with Him, in Himself, and in others. Jesus Christ revealed to us what the examination of the final judgment that will determine the eternal fate of each of us will be like: "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to me". (Matthew 25:35-36)
Scott Hahn, in his magnificent book Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Deiexplains that it was not that God made man and woman for work, but that "he made work for man and woman, because only through work could they be made like God". With grace, which makes us like God, we were given the gift of work, so that we might serve men as God serves them. The Lord did not leave the world incomplete because of a factory defect, but for man to complete it. serving and their brothers and sisters. Achieving the perfection of Creation by herself is not the purpose of work, but for the service it renders to man and to God. To work is to love our brothers, and in them, God. All work is, at the same time that a service to men, an act of adoration to God.
"All the works of men are done as on an altar, and each of you, in that union of contemplative souls which is your day, says in some way your Mass, which lasts twenty-four hours, in expectation of the next Mass, which will last another twenty-four hours, and so on until the end of our life.".
God associates man with his creative work in the service of man, but he also associates him with the redemptive work of his Son Jesus Christ. Among the many extraordinary lights that St. Josemaría received, on October 6, 1966, during the celebration of Holy Mass, he experienced very vividly the effort of the Holy Mass, through which God made him see that the Mass is true hard work, and that work is a Mass.
"In my sixty-fifth year, I have made a wonderful discovery. I love to celebrate Holy Mass, but yesterday it took me a tremendous effort. What an effort! I saw that the Mass is truly Opus Dei, work, as it was work for Jesus Christ in his first Mass: the Cross. I saw that the office of the priest, the celebration of the Holy Mass, is work to make the Eucharist; that one experiences pain, joy and fatigue. I felt in my flesh the exhaustion of a divine work" "I have never found the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice so difficult as on that day, when I felt that the Mass is also Opus Dei. It gave me a lot of joy, but I was left crumbs (...) This can only be seen when God wants to give it"..
Ernesto Juliá commented that God made St. Josemaría see this, so that he could teach it to everyone,
"That the Work will be realized to the extent that work becomes Mass, and that the Mass will be fully realized to the extent that it becomes work in the life of Josemaría Escrivá and in the life of each one of those called to the Work, just as Christ's life was work".
"This is the doctrine that Josemaría Escrivá must remember in the bosom of the Church. The difficulty that now arises [in understanding the Opus Dei] will also help the Church to understand itself betterThe spiritual life of the Christian is a 'Mass,' 'a work of God,' for the Mass is the whole 'work' of Christ presented to God the Father for the redemption of the world. The spiritual life of the Christian is a 'Mass', 'a work of God', for the Mass is all the 'work' of Christ presented to God the Father for the redemption of the world." .
Scott Hahn, commenting on this, writes in the aforementioned book:
We work so that we can worship more perfectly. We worship as we work. When the early Christians searched for a word to describe their worship they chose leitourgia. a word which, like the Hebrew word ábodah could indicate ritual worship, but it could also mean 'public service', such as the work of the street sweepers, or the men who light the street lamps at nightfall. The meaning becomes evident to those who know the biblical languages, whether or not they are familiar with the tradition of the Catholic liturgy.
St. Josemaría often spoke of the "unity of life" of the Christian to refer precisely to this achievement that all life (most of our time in life is spent at work) is an act of adoration of God. In one of St. Josemaría's most famous writings, considered by many to be the Magna Charta of Opus Dei's spirituality, we can read:
"God calls you to at your service in and from the civil, material, secular tasks of human life: in a laboratory, in a laboratory, in a laboratory, in a laboratory, in a laboratory, in a laboratory, in a laboratory, in a laboratory, in a laboratory, in a laboratory.óin a hospital, in the barracks, in theátedra universitaria, in the fáIn the factory, in the workshop, in the field, in the family home and in the entire immense panorama of work, God awaits us every day.ía. Know this well: there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most difficult situations.áThe most common problems, which it is up to each and every one of you to discover.
I used to tell those university students and workers who came to me in the 1930s that they had to know how to materialize the spiritual life. I wanted to keep them away from the temptation, so frequent then and now, to lead a double life: the interior life, the life of relationship with God, on the one hand; and on the other, distinct and separate, the family, professional and social life, full of small earthly realities.
No, my children! That there cannot be a double life, that we cannot be like schizophrenics, if we want to be Christians: that there is only one life, made of flesh and spirit, and that is the one that has to be –in the soul and in the body– God is holy and full of God: this invisible God, we find him in the most sacred things of the world.áand materials.
There is no other way, my children: either we know how to find the Lord in our ordinary life, or we will never find him. That is why I can tell you that our age needs to give back to matter and to situations that seem more vulgar their noble and original meaning, to place them at the service of the Kingdom of God, to spiritualize them, making of them the means and occasion of our continuous encounter with Jesus Christ.
(...) On the horizon line, my children, heaven and earth seem to meet. But no, where they really come together is in your hearts, when you live your ordinary life in holiness...". .
Conclusions (some, among many others):
Professional work is part, and an important part, of the vocation to holiness itself.
This is an idea that repeats St. Josemaría on many occasions. Being unfaithful to our professional obligations, of service to others, is a way of being unfaithful to Christianity.
When I was studying law at a public university in Madrid, which had an oratory and a religious chaplain, elderly and very pious, he once stopped me in the corridor of the faculty and said to me, more or less (not literally, but almost): "Diego, do you know something? I am beginning to understand you. Today one of the boys who comes from an Opus Dei school confessed to me; he accused himself of 'not studying'. I had never heard that sin before.
Professional work, by placing us in relationship with others, already shows us the sense of mission of our faith.
Faith is practiced not only by going to church, but also, and much more frequently, by going to work. When I give talks on the Christian apostolate, I often repeat that our "apostolic activities" are always full of people, because, for example, a doctor always has a hospital (public or private, Catholic or not, it doesn't matter) full of patients to attend to; a teacher (in a public or private school, Catholic or not, it doesn't matter) has his classrooms full of students to teach; a driver has his bus full of passengers to serve; a stewardess, a musician, a movie actor, a circus clown, a policeman, a miner, a soldier, a sailor, a housewife..... They all have their activities full of people to serve, and they are all apostolic activities, and if they are good professionals, they are all full of people. When St. Josemaría was asked for statistics on the apostolic fruits of Opus Dei, he could not answer, because the work of the Work is countless. When St. Josemaría was asked in 1967, "How do you see the future of Opus Dei in the years to come," he replied:
"Opus Dei is still very young (...) The work that awaits us is enormous. It is a sea without shores, because as long as there are men on earth, no matter how much the technical forms of production change, they will have a work that they can offer to God, that they can sanctify. With the grace of God, the Work wants to teach them to make that work a service to all men of any condition, race, religion. By thus serving men, they will serve God". .
And all this does not mean "instrumentalizing" work in order to "evangelize" but rather giving work its deepest meaning, as our principal work of service and, therefore, of love.
Christians need to be educated from childhood about the evangelical relevance of their professional work.
Young people must be made to understand that professional success is measured by the service they provide to others, and for it to be a good service, they need to be well trained. They are not trained to stand out, but to serve.
This spirit is not only Opus Dei's, but the patrimony of the universal Church,
The Work, as Paul VI emphasized in a handwritten letter addressed to St. Josemaría on October 1, 1964, was born in our time "as a vigorous expression of the perennial youthfulness of the Church. The Church is continually renewing herself, and at times she seems like a ship about to be shipwrecked, but always, in every epoch of history, she is revitalized by the Holy Spirit who guides her.
Persecution will be constant
Opus Dei is persecuted, and will be so as long as the devil is at large, just as Christians of all times have been and will be persecuted, and the more they are persecuted, the more faithful they are to the Gospel. "When the river flows, it carries water", say some skeptics in the face of criticism against the Work. And we Christians respond, at least in our inner self: Jesus Christ was God, and... they crucified him. Look at the success. And precisely on the cross, when they thought they had won, Jesus triumphed definitively over evil, over the devil and death.
At a time when there were people, also within the hierarchy, who wanted to harm Opus Dei, St. Josemaría, a few months before his death in 1975, in a meditation addressed to some of his sons, said to them:
"What can we be concerned about on earth? Nothing! And what is the power of those people? Before the power of God who is with us, it is nothing! And the Saracen hatred of these ecclesiastics and of those whom they handle like monkeys, what can it do against God who is with us? Nothing! And they have the heights and we are in the valley, they have the power and we do not, what does it matter if God is with us! Nothing! Then, the important thing is that God is with us. And then, peace, serenity". .
Instaurare Omnia in Christo
Instaurare omnia in ChristoSt. Paul says to those in Ephesus, and St. Josemaría adds: renew the world in espíJesus Christ, place Christ on high and at the entrance of the world.ñof all things.
The world is waiting for the fullness of its form, which will be given by the reign of Christ. Everything is in place for that end.
It is not in vain that the seal of the work is the cross within the world.
"At the moment of raising the Sacred Host, without losing the proper recollection, without being distracted - I had just made in mente the offering of Merciful Love -, there came to my mind, with extraordinary force and clarity, that of Scripture: 'et si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad me ipsum' (Ioann. 12, 32). Ordinarily, before the supernatural, I am afraid. Then comes the 'ne timeas', it is Me. And I understood that it will be the men and women of God who will raise the Cross with the doctrines of Christ above the pinnacle of all human activity... And I saw the Lord triumph, drawing all things to Himself".
On the other hand, God made St. Josemaría see with an extraordinary light the attractive force of the cross if we Christians imprint it in the midst of the world. It was on August 7, 1931, barely two years after God had made him see Opus Dei. What did St. Josemaría see? He himself tells us:
Magnanimity
With this mentality, we Christians must go through the world convinced that we are the strength of God, the salt of the earth, the light of the world.
When, in the 1950s, two young professionals were traveling by train to Galicia (a region in northwestern Spain) to spread Opus Dei there, another passenger approached them and asked: "Are you from the Navy" (because Galicia is home to the Spanish Naval Academy). And one of them, without flinching, answered: "No. We are from the one that is going to happen".
Opus Dei teaches much more than work ethics; it is a theology, a metaphysics of work.
From what we have seen, the spirituality spread by Opus Dei is not a simple "work ethic," as Max Weber said about Calvinist ethics. It is a true "theology of work," a metaphysics of work.
We must work with perfection
It goes without saying that we must always work to the best of our ability, because if work is our offering to God, we must place on the altar a job well done, like Jesus Christ in his workshop and on the cross. "Bene omnia fecitSt. Josemaría said, paraphrasing the Gospel of Mark, and he added: He has done everything admirably well: the great wonders, and the small, everyday things, which dazzled no one, but which Christ performed for the world.ó with the fullness of him who is perfectus Deus, perfectus homo, perfect God and perfect man..
Taking care of the little things
Convince yourselves that ordinarily you will not find room for dazzling feats, among other reasons, because they do not usually present themselves. On the other hand, you will not lack occasions to demonstrate your love for Jesus Christ through the small and ordinary things.
This is not elitism
Opus Dei has sometimes been accused of targeting the best professionals. This is not true. It is addressed to everyone. But whoever learns this spirituality, becomes better every day. Whoever does not want to better himself every day, will not understand this spirit. This eagerness to excel does not consist in standing out from others, but from oneself.
Professor of Law. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.
