In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask you for pardon of my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Mother Immaculate, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
Well, in this meditation, we continue our prayer about that great text of St. Josemaria, Passionately Loving the World. And perhaps we can bring- we can begin the meditation by going to the intercession of St. Josemaria and asking him to intercede for us before the Lord so that we can understand the beauty of what he outlines in this homily which he gave in 1967. It is a text that he put a lot of work into, he prepared it very carefully. I remember somebody who was in Rome at that time with him making that very point, that the Founder of the Work put a great effort into that homily. And there is no doubt that it expresses in a very beautiful and clear way the essence of the spirit of Opus Dei, of finding the Lord and loving the Lord and serving the Lord in and through the ordinary– especially through daily, everyday work.
So, it is that homily, Passionately Loving the World, is a very precious and beautiful presentation of the spirit of Opus Dei. And here in this period of prayer, we could, each one of us in our own way, guided by the Holy Spirit, in the intimacy of our own dialogue with the Lord, we could pray about what does it mean to passionately love the world? Does it make sense to love the world? Sometimes that might sound a bit strange because, in a certain spiritual sense, the world is worldliness, it can be a negative thing, it it can have a negative connotation. And to be worldly is not good. In other words, to put our heart or desire in just the purely material is- is a poor kind of existence, it's a misdirected life. But that's not what the Founder of the Work means when he talks about passionately loving the world. It's about passionately loving creation, passionately loving God's handiwork. You might say God's work of art, which is the cosmos, which is all that exists. Lord Jesus, help me to understand what it means to love the world and to love the word passionately.
Why should we love the world? On what basis? Well, perhaps in a nutshell, we could say that we can and should love the world passionately because God passionately loves the world. God loves his world- God loves this world, our world. This world is an object of God's particular love, of God’s particular delight and his enthusiasm, also his compassion. In a word, his love. We see this at the very beginning of the- of the Bible in the account of creation, there is like a refrain that is repeated over and over again, “And God saw that it was good.” At the different stages of the creation of the world, in the seas, the plants, the animals, the sky, “and God saw that it was good, and God saw that it was good.” Your world, Lord, is basically good. It's basically beautiful, and you love it, you love it.
For example, we could read a few verses and meditate on them from the first chapter of Genesis: “God said- God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place. Let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land, Earth, and waters that were gathered together he called seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, ‘Let the Earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind upon the Earth.' And it was so. And God saw that it was good.”
This repeated phrase that you, Lord, you are a happy God, you love your creation, you affirm and rejoice in its goodness. In fact, it is quite often pointed out that there's a slight change later on in the account of creation in this first chapter of Genesis and it's a slight but significant change. That is to say, after the creation of man and woman, of human beings, the refrain, if you like, changes to, “and God saw that it was very good, God saw that it was very good.” And surely that's significant too, that within creation, you, Lord, have a particular love for humankind, for human beings– “God saw that it was very good.”
So, when we look at creation, when we look at the cosmos, when we experience our own interaction with the world, our work, our family life, our hobbies- I don't know, our recreation, our sport, everything– all of that can be truly a language of love because the world in itself is God's language of love with us. It's his first way of communicating with us. You could say, the word creation is the very first word that you, Lord, addressed to us.
Sometimes when we study in theology or in the catechesis, we study revelation. How does God reveal himself to us? How can we know what God is like? Well, the first form of revelation is what is sometimes called natural revelation. By looking at creation, by just experiencing life as it is given to us, we touch God. Your first words to us, Lord, are not Holy Scripture, they’re not prophetic articles. They are the plants, the fields, the air, the seas– creation already speaks to us. It's already a language of love on God's part. And therefore, when the Founder of the Work encourages us to sanctify the ordinary and to make our work holy and to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into whatever our task, our profession, our work or vocation might be, we're simply entering into that language of love which is creation, which is material reality, which is the gifts of God that we find all about us in ordinary life.
So, this call which we hear very strongly in the homily, Passionately Loving the World, the call to sanctify the ordinary and to make our work holy has a deep theological basis. It has several, you might say, theological roots and the first one is that of creation itself where you, Lord, made creation to be beautiful, to be good, to be something wonderful and pleasing to yourself.
That's why our engagement with the world is always something positive. For example, in this homily, Passionately Loving the World, St. Josemaria says, “Take your activity as citizens, for instance. A person who knows that the world – and not just the Church – is the place where he finds Christ, loves that world. He endeavors to be properly trained, intellectually and professionally. He makes up his own mind, in full freedom, about the problems of the environment in which he moves, and he takes his own decisions in consequence.” This is ordinary life as a citizen, as a human being, as a worker. We responsibly engage with the world. Whatever we do, that can be part of the language of love which is creation. In fact, when we- you and I try and carry out our daily tasks, all we're doing really is responding to Our Lord's invitation, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and conquer it.” At the very moment of creating the world and creating human beings, we’re given the privilege and the charge, you might say, to engage with that creation and make it bear fruit and make it beautiful- make it beautiful. So yes, Lord, you are a happy God and you want us to- to engage with the world, to love the world in a passionate way because you love the world passionately.
There is in the prophecy of Nehemiah, in the book of Nehemiah, a very interesting little episode where the people of Israel have returned from exile and they're kind of feeling battered, they’re- they're at a low ebb and they lack motivation. They don't really want to rebuild the people or rebuild their- their faith. And the Lord sends his prophet Nehemiah and also the priest, Ezra, to- to try and encourage the people. And they say to the people these words, “The joy of the Lord is your strength. The joy of the Lord is your strength.” And sometimes we all need this encouragement. We need to remember how much the Lord loves the world and how much the Lord loves us. And from that we can draw the energy we need to go forward and to go maybe deeper in our- in our life of work, to improve how we work, because like God's holy people, the people of Israel, there are times we can feel a bit discouraged because the world is not perfect, what it- is inherently and basically good and beautiful. The world has suffered the wounds of sin, Original Sin and our own personal sins, and that is reflected in the world in different ways. It’s- it's not a perfect world, there’s a lot of chaos in the world, a chaos that comes ultimately from evil, from sin. And we experience that all the time in our day to day lives. Sometimes, you might say, it's just the physical evil of being tired or being bored or finding a particular task or job an uphill battle. And then maybe we can remember this joy of the Lord which will be our strength that you Lord, you love the world so much, and you love each one of us so much that at any moment, even if we don't feel great, or that we're lacking in motivation, we can look to you and that way we put one foot in front of the other and we can go forward. We can go forward with your grace, with your help.
Passionately Loving the World– so, that's the title of the homily we're praying about. You could say it's also a description of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Our Lord, you, Lord Jesus, here we are in a time of prayer, you passionately love the world. You don't love the world in a half-hearted way. You give your very self for the world, you give your very self for the world. Even this world which is- which is battered, which is not perfect. It’s basically good but it has its wounds.
When we meditate from time to time on the parable of the Good Samaritan, we see this very kind and generous Samaritan who picks up the Jewish man who has been badly beaten up and is lying at the side of the road. And in that parable of Our Lord we see, of course, an image of Christian charity, a call to- to love of others, especially of those who are needy. So, it's a good moral lesson for us, we could say, that parable. But ultimately, of course, the Good Samaritan is you yourself, Lord. You are the ultimate Good Samaritan and we, all of us, are the ones who are a bit battered, who are wounded, who need help, who need care because we- we are wounded by sin. That's an experience we have all the time in our flesh and in our soul. That why we're basically good and we're basically desiring beauty and goodness and truth we don't always manage it because we're somehow weakened. And the great news is that we have a Savior, a loving Savior. We have the ultimate Good Samaritan who is Christ, who comes into the world precisely to take up all that is ours– all our activity, including all our sufferings and our limitations and all our good points as well– Our Lord takes them all up in his love and redeems them. He wins them back, he saves them.
So, when we think about offering our work to God, we realize that God loves the world so much that he gave his only son. We passionately love the world and our work and all that is truly human and around us. Why? Because you, Lord Jesus Christ, passionately love the world. In fact, it's for this very reason that you became incarnate, that you became man.
We might remember that- that catechetical conversation, if we can call it, between Jesus and Nicodemus. In the middle of the night, Nicodemus goes to visit Our Lord and very carefully, he's a bit nervous, but he wants to hear from Our Lord. He visits Jesus by night and Our Lord explains the essence of the gospel to him. And he says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” God so loved the world. So, you and I, we’re also called to love the world and to give ourselves for the world. And maybe in our prayer right now we could turn to the Lord Jesus and ask for the grace of seeing the world and seeing the whole of creation through his eyes and of loving the world and loving the whole of creation with his heart. Lord, help me to recognize you also in creation. Help me to love the world with your love.
There is, we might say, another deep connection between the world and work and just human reality, material reality, with Our Lord Jesus Christ. And that is also rooted in the mystery of creation. Sometimes, when you and I maybe need to make something, we draw a plan out first of all. We do a kind of a drawing or a draft plan. Or, if we were to paint a picture, maybe on tracing paper, we’d put the outline of the painting, or something like that. We'd have some kind of scheme or form. And in a certain sense, it's a poor metaphor, perhaps, but in a certain sense, you could say the form, or the scheme behind creation is Jesus, is the Lord. If we were to look at the very first chapter of the Gospel of John, the famous prologue to the Gospel of John, when we have those unforgettable words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. All things were made through him.” That's quite something. And that is something that the Church has meditated on for a long time, that the whole of creation is made through Christ, through the Word.
In creation, we see you, Lord Jesus Christ– we touch you, you touch us. And therefore, material reality and all that that implies, be it the world of technology or farming or politics or teaching or carpentry or healthcare– whatever it might be, all of that, somehow, is the presence of the person of Christ, the mystery of Christ in his creation. It's a great mystery but it's also a great truth. In this sense, we understand how we’re- we're called to be contemplatives.
There's a lovely poem by the poet Joseph Mary Plunkett which expresses very well this presence of Christ in creation. It's called I See His Blood Upon the Rose and it goes like this. I'm going to read the poem slowly because in itself, in reality, it is a prayer:
I see his blood upon the rose.
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.
I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice–and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.
All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.
Well there, that is the Catholic soul. That is, Joseph Mary Plunkett recognizing the living Christ in creation, in the ordinary, in the cosmos.
So, we think of maybe what is the central affirmation of St. Josemaria in Passionately Loving the World: “There is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary circumstances, and it's up to each one of us to discover it.” What is this something holy? In fact, it’s not some thing, ultimately, it's some one. It is the one, it is the Living Christ. It is God himself. We ask our Blessed Lady, Mary, and we ask St. Josemaria to intercede for us that we may always discover and rediscover the immense grandeur of what is ordinary.
I give you thanks, my God, for the good resolutions, affections and inspirations you have communicated to me in this time of prayer. I ask you for help to put them into effect. My Mother Immaculate, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.