No fear!

José Miguel Cejas

Tags: February 14, Opus Dei, Women

From October 2, 1928 onwards St Josemaria’s life had only one meaning: to fulfil God’s Will, to be a faithful instrument to open up the path to holiness in the middle of the world that God had entrusted to him. It was a path to holiness for ordinary Christians, through their work. “The divine pathways of the earth have been opened up,” he would say. And he explained: “Ordinary Christians. Leavened dough. Ours is ordinary life, naturalness. Means: daily work. Everyone a Saint!”

He thought that this path to holiness was only for men. “There will never be women in Opus Dei. No fear!” he wrote at the beginning of February 1930. And yet on February 14, while he was celebrating Mass, he discovered another defining aspect of what God wanted. Contrary to what he first thought, God did want there to be women in Opus Dei.

It was as though that first light he had received less than a year and a half before, on October 2, 1928, was so powerful, so blinding, that he was too dazzled to see some of the defining features of God’s Work. Now that his eyes had become accustomed to the light, God was showing him unsuspected new angles.

On that February 14, 1930, God made him feel the same as a parent who hadn’t expected to have another child, and yet God sends one. “And from then on,” he said to his daughters in Opus Dei, “I feel obliged to love you more: I look on you as a mother looks at her youngest child.”

This is characteristic of God’s way of acting: he usually makes his Will known to us little by little, often wrapped in darkness, so that we can exercise the virtue of faith. First he shows us one aspect of what he wants, and then another; and then another. It shows God’s profound wisdom and his patience with human beings. “If, in 1928, I had known what awaited me,” said St Josemaria years later, “I would have died. But God our Lord treated me like a child: he didn’t load the whole burden onto me all at once, but led me onward little by little…”

(Extract translated from: José Miguel Cejas, Vida del Beato Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, Madrid: Rialp, 1992.)