Do you believe that God is the Lord of history? Tags: Opus Dei Peter Berglar, a German Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, was also a well-known biographer of key historical characters: men and women who lived in times of change and realized the fact. Towards the end of his life he wrote the biographies of three Saints who were charismatic figures in the Chuch: St Peter, St Thomas More, and St Josemaria. In the following passage Berglar relates how he met Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei. I never met Msgr. Josemaria Escriva during his lifetime, nor did I have any correspondence with him. Nevertheless I feel I can rightly speak of a “meeting”, and indeed one which (apart from my marriage) I consider the most important in my whole life. In 1962 I was given a copy of The Way. This collection of “maxims of a Spanish priest, who also founded some institution or other”, in the words of the person who gave it to me, after a rapid flick-though, went to gather dust on my bookshelf next to Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections. In the winter of 1973-4 a student came to my office wanting to ask me about various things arising from my lectures. Finally – I’d already got to my feet at the end of the session – he asked me a question I found disconcerting: “Professor, do you believe that God is the Lord of history?” Back home that evening I mentioned this student and his “unconventional question” to my wife. I couldn’t have imagined that I had had a first contact with the spirit of Josemaria Escriva through that student, who was, as I later learnt, a “son” of his – a member of Opus Dei. Some months later this same student asked me if we could continue the conversation, and I invited him and a friend of his to my house. I have to say that I took the opportunity to talk at length to these “friendly people, who radiate an indescribable cheerfulness,” as I said to my wife later on. I should now add, in the knowledge that I talked too much that day, “patient people,” who taught me a silent lesson on the human basis of all Christian apostolate. In October 1974 I accepted an invitation to take part in a symposium in Rome. When I told some friends about it I learnt that this activity was being organized by some priests of Opus Dei. I could see that most of my friends, like myself, knew little or nothing about Opus Dei, but that even so some of them were prejudiced against it. This vague tone perplexed me, but I confess that my wife and I set off for Rome with the resolution of “when in Rome, doing as the Romans do”. During those days in Rome I met some people who had lived with the Founder for a long time; but, contrary to my normal behaviour, I did not accost anyone with questions about Opus Dei, and no-one tried to bring the conversation deliberately around to that topic. I realise now that this was a new stage of my “meeting without meeting” with Josemaria Escriva. I was getting to know him little by little through his children, without knowing the “theory” of his message. As I go over those days in my memory, I see in them a perfect example of a phrase he often used to repeat: “Hiding and disappearing, so that only Jesus may shine out.” I think that this “hiding” was providential in my case. As a historian and writer by profession, I am accustomed to pinpointing a precise “object” and then analyzing it. To give a comparison, it was as if some good person did a great favour to someone who was asleep and dreaming – a favour that, if he were awake, he would not have accepted, because in his cowardice or laziness he would have shut the door on it – and, little by little, on opening his eyes, he began to realise the fact of the gift and its value, weighing it in his hands, and also began to be grateful to his benefactor. There is not much I can say about this “nocturnal” part of my encounter with Josemaria Escriva: only how much I was struck later when I heard that he had prayed for me from the very moment when one of the participants in the symposium spoke to him of me. The “day-time”, conscious part of it consisted simply in the realization that during those days I had made some true friends, and that I was a changed person when I returned to Germany. Since my conversion to Catholicism three decades earlier, the faith and the Church had taken root in the depths of my being, though I still looked on both of them as a fund of wealth at my personal disposal. At the age of fifty-five, with a patient wife, grown-up children, a string of grand-children and a house in the country, my compass was pointing towards Hölderlin’s evening fantasy: “Old age is full of peace and tranquillity…” In my dreams I yearned for the “masterpiece”, my intellectual apogee. But around me were so many people, so many “obstacles” to a well-deserved peace… When I got back from Rome all that had changed. I remember how, in the lectures I gave in three cities shortly after my return, I saw my audiences “in a different light”: perhaps because of my desire to make the people who listened to me share in the affectionate attention of which I myself had been the object in Rome. On June 30, 1975 (Josemaria Escriva had died four days before) my wife and I saw him and heard him for the first time, in a filmed gathering with a group of families. From that moment, my “understanding”, which had lagged behind my heart, began to make up for lost time. http://www.josemariaescriva.info/article/do-you-believe-that-god-is-the-lord-of-history3f