Notas sobre las Obras de San Josémaria Escriva

 

 

 NOTAS SOBRE LAS OBRAS DE SAN JOSÉMARIA ESCRIVA

Saint Josemaria Escriva is known for his pithy sayings, often memorable, showing spiritual insight and sometimes piercing the soul of the reader.

“Many who would willingly let themselves be nailed to a Cross before the astonished gaze of a thousand onlookers cannot bear with a Christian spirit the pinpricks of each day! Think, then, which is the more heroic.”

—The Way, 204

“It is inevitable that you should feel the rub of other people’s characters against your own. After all, you are not a gold coin that everyone likes.

“Besides, without that friction produced by contact with others, how would you ever lose those corners, those edges and projections — the imperfections and defects — of your character, and acquire the smooth and regular finish, the firm flexibility of charity, of perfection?

“If your character and the characters of those who live with you were soft and sweet like sponge-cake you would never become a saint.”

—The Way, 20

Citing everyday metaphors— for example, “pinpricks,” or the polishing action a coin undergoes—he reminds his readers that following Christ entails undertaking small sacrifices and enduring mundane crosses, including the inevitable trial of dealing with those whom we find disagreeable.

He offers terse advice, pointedly helpful, for those experiencing difficulties in prayer.

“You say that you don’t know how to pray? Put yourself in the presence of God, and once you have said, ‘Lord, I don't know how to pray!’ rest assured that you have begun to do so.”

—The Way, 90

His vision is sacramental, in this respect, characteristically Catholic.

“I often said to the university students and workers who were with me in the thirties that they had to know how to ‘materialise’ their spiritual life. I wanted to keep them from the temptation, so common then and now, of living a kind of double life. On one side, an interior life, a life of relation with God; and on the other, a separate and distinct professional, social and family life, full of small earthly realities.

“No! We cannot lead a double life. We cannot be like schizophrenics, if we want to be Christians. There is just one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is this life which has to become, in both soul and body, holy and filled with God. We discover the invisible God in the most visible and material things.

“There is no other way. Either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or else we shall never find Him.”

—“Passionately Loving the World,” Conversations, 114

He recapitulates our understanding that the sacraments belong to the very foundation of our spiritual life.

“Anyone who wants to fight has to use the available means, which have not changed in twenty centuries of Christianity. They are prayer, mortification and frequent use of the sacraments. Since mortification is also prayer — prayer of the senses — we can sum up these means in two words: prayer and sacraments.

“…If the sacraments are abandoned, genuine Christian life disappears. Yet we should realize that particularly today there are many people who seem to forget about the sacraments and who even scorn this redeeming flow of Christ's grace. It is painful to have to speak of this sore in a so-called Christian society, but we must do so for it will encourage us to approach these sources of sanctification more gratefully and more lovingly.”

—“Interior Struggle,” Christ Is Passing By, 78

“Struggle”—his preferential term for asceticism—is a principal motif of his bold spirituality.

“Interior struggle,” he counsels, is advisedly conducted by paying heed to countless inconsiderable matters, couching his advice in metaphor.

“That supernatural mode of conduct is a truly military tactic.

“You carry on the war — the daily struggles of your interior — far from the main walls of your fortress.

“And the enemy meets you there: in your small mortifications, your customary prayer, your methodical work, your plan of life: and with difficulty will he come close to the easily-scaled battlements of your castle. And if he does come, he comes exhausted.”

—The Way, 307

Altogether, his work will maintain itself, to good effect, in history.