Professional vocation. A key aspect of the call to holiness, in the teachings of St. Josemaría

Alvaro 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 a triangle on the blackboard and wrote the following three phrases on each side: "you love if you serve," "you serve if you are worthy," "you are worthy if you love."

These three phrases, seemingly so simple, contain a very relevant truth about the meaning of human work that I would like to recall in this presentation, and which constitutes the essence of the message of Opus Dei.

"You love if you serve."

To love someone is to procure their good by rendering them a service to the extent of their needs and our possibilities. And, since professional work is our daily way of serving, "work is our daily way of loving, of living charity".

It is a distortion of Christianity to reduce charity to charitable practices (giving alms, working in a soup kitchen, teaching catechism...), and even worse, to reduce them to practices within church walls. 

For a Christian in the midst of the world, the daily place for practicing charity is professional work.

Therefore, the more technically skilled we are (as doctors, teachers, engineers, police officers, etc.), the better we can serve others. 

And since the means by which God wants his message to reach all people is the same as the message itself (charity), work done out of love for the person being served is an excellent form of evangelization.

Ultimately, the value of any work is measured by the service it renders to others. Work well done is service well done to another person. No one is a good professional regardless of the service they render to others. That is why one cannot be a good professional and a bad person, nor can one be a good person and a bad professional. In fact, the service provided is part of the definition of a profession, 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, someone who makes excellent shoes and then burns them is not a shoemaker, nor is someone who gives "excellent" speeches to a non-existent audience a speaker. Without good service, there is no good work; and without service, there is no work at all.

Morality is not a requirement extrinsic to the profession, like a series of additions that make the profession itself more meritorious, but rather "morality helps to define the profession". And the first "deontological" rule of any profession or trade is the requirement to know well the "technical" rules of that profession or trade. 

"You serve if you are worthy,"

You are worthy if you are competent in your profession, if you are well prepared, if you study to improve your craft, if you are up to date with the latest techniques; you are worthy if you are punctual, if you listen to your colleagues, your clients, your patients, your students... Goodwill is not enough to serve well; constant work, study, and technical competence are required. If you are a doctor and you are a bad doctor, you are a bad person. And the same is true if you are a student but you don't study; you are a bad person. Our whole life must be a renewed effort to serve others better every day, and this requires professional competence. 

Furthermore, the quality of work reshapes the moral personality of the individual in a virtuous circle (or vicious, depending on how you work). In this way, each worker can understand their work as a true “work of art”, which they perform every day, “on others, on the world, and on themselves”.

"You are worthy if you love."

Ultimately, a man's worth is determined by the depth of his love. St Josemaría often said that each person is worth what they love. 

Man was created to love. And if he does not love, if he closes himself off, he betrays his vocation, God's call to unite with Him, in Himself, and in others. Jesus Christ revealed to us how the examination of the final judgment will determine the eternal destiny of each one of us: "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger..." (Matthew 25:35-36).

Scott Hahn, in his magnificent book “Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei”, explains that it is not that God made man and woman for work, but that "he made work for the sake of man and woman, because only through work could they become truly godlike”. With grace, which makes us like God, we were given the gift of work, so that we might serve men as God serves them. All work is, at the same time a service to men, an act of worship to God 

«All the works of men are done as though on an altar, and each one of you, in that union of contemplative souls which is your day, in some way says ‘his Mass,’ which lasts twenty-four hours, in expectation of the Mass to follow, which will last another twenty-four hours, and so on until the end of our lives»..

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 insights that St. Josemaría received, on October 6, 1966, during the celebration of Holy Mass, he experienced very vividly the effort of Holy Mass, through which God made him see that Mass is truly hard work, and that work is a Mass.  

«At my age, sixty-five, I have made a marvelous discovery. I am always very happy to celebrate Holy Mass, but yesterday it cost me a tremendous amount of work. What an effort! I saw that the Mass is truly Opus Dei, real work, as the first Mass was real work for Jesus. I saw that the role of the priest in celebrating Mass involves working to produce the Eucharist; that one undergoes pain, and joy, and tiredness. I felt in my flesh the exhaustion of a divine work»..

And Ernesto Juliá comments that, with this, God showed St. Josemaría, so that he could teach it to everyone, 

«That the Work will be accomplished to the extent that work becomes Mass, and that Mass will be fulfilled 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 the life of Christ was work».

«This is the doctrine that Josemaría Escrivá must remind us of within the Church. The difficulty that now arises [in understanding Opus Dei] “will also serve to help the Church understand itself better” and to see itself in all its fullness, overcoming the inertia of centuries of a way of looking at holiness, which is that the 'fullness of union with God' includes the reality of work. The spiritual life of the Christian is a 'Mass', 'a work of God', since the Mass is the whole 'work' of Christ presented to God the Father for the redemption of the world». .

Scott Hahn, commenting on this same point, writes in the aforementioned book: 

«We work so that we might worship more perfectly. We worship as we work. When the first Christians cast about for a word to describe their worship, they chose “leitourgia”, a word that, like the Hebrew “'abodah”, could indicate ritual worship but could also mean "public work," as in the labor of street sweepers or the men who lit the streetlamps at night. The meaning is evident to those who know the biblical languages, whether or not they are steeped in the Catholic liturgical tradition».

St. Josemaría often spoke of the "unity of life" of Christians, referring precisely to this achievement of making one's “entire” life (most of the time we spend on earth is spent working) an act of worship to God. In one of St. Josemaría's most famous writings, considered

«God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary, secular and civil activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.. (...)

There is no other way, my daughters and sons: either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or we shall never find him. (...).

(...) Heaven and earth seem to merge, my children, on the horizon. But where they really meet is in your hearts, when you sanctify your everyday lives...». .

Conclusions (some, among many others):

Professional work is an important part of the vocation to holiness.

This is an idea that St. Josemaría repeats on many occasions. To be unfaithful to our professional obligations, to our service to others, is a way of being unfaithful to Christianity.

When I was studying law at a public university in Madrid, which had a chapel and an elderly and very pious chaplain, he once stopped me in the hallway of the faculty and said to me, more or less (not verbatim, but almost): "Diego, you know what? I'm 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 of that sin before."

Professional work, by bringing us into 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 care for; a teacher (in a public or private school, Catholic or not, it doesn't matter) has classrooms full of students to teach; a bus driver has his bus full of passengers to serve; a flight attendant, a musician, a movie actor, a circus clown, a police officer, a miner, a soldier, a sailor, a housewife... they all have their activities full of people to serve, and all are 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 “activities”, he could not answer, because the fruits of the Work are 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. Thirty-nine years is barely a beginning for an institution. Our aim is to collaborate with all other Christians in the great mission of being witnesses of Christ's Gospel, to recall that it can vivify any human situation. The task that awaits us is immense. It is a sea without shores, for as long as there are men on earth, no matter how much the techniques of production may change, they will have some type of work that can be offered to God and sanctified. With God's grace, Opus Dei wants to teach them how to make their work an act of service to all men of every condition, race and religion. Serving men in this way, 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.

It is necessary to educate Christians from childhood about the evangelical relevance of their professional work. 

Young people need to understand that professional success is measured by the service they provide to others, and that good service requires good training. They are not trained to excel, but to serve.

This spirit is not only that of Opus Dei, but also the heritage of the universal Church.

The Work—as Paul VI emphasized in a handwritten letter dated October 1, 1964, addressed to St. Josemaría—was born in our time «as a powerful expression of the perennial youth of the Church». The Church is continually renewing itself. At times it seems like a ship about to sink, but always, in every period of history, it is revitalized by the Holy Spirit who guides it.

Persecution will be constant

Opus Dei is persecuted, and it will continue to be so for as long as the devil remains at large. Throughout history, the more faithful Christians are to the Gospel, the more they will be persecuted. When they hear criticism of Opus Dei, some sceptics say: 'Where there's smoke, there's fire'. To which we Christians might respond, at least in our hearts: Jesus Christ was God, and they crucified him; What a great success! It was precisely at the moment of his crucifixion, when his enemies thought they had won, that Jesus definitively triumphed over evil, 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, told them:

«What can worry us on earth? Nothing! And what power do those people have? Before the power of God who is with us, it is nothing! And the Saracen hatred of these ecclesiastics and those whom they manipulate like puppets, what can they do against God who is with us? Nothing! They are on high and we are in the valley, they have power and we do not, but what does it matter if God is with us? Nothing! So, the important thing is that God is with us. And then, peace and serenity». .

Instaurare Omnia in Christo

Instaurare omnia in Christo, says St. Paul to the Ephesians, and St. Josemaría adds: «renew the world in the spirit of Jesus Christ, place Christ at the height and in the heart of all things». 

The world is waiting for the fullness of its form, which will be given by the reign of Christ. Everything is prepared for that end.

It is not in vain that the seal of the work is the cross within the world.

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:

"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".

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 have to always work to the best of our ability, because if work is our offering to God, we have to place on the altar a job well done, like Jesus Christ in his workshop and on the cross. "Bene omnia fecit," said St. Josemaría, paraphrasing the Gospel of Mark, and added: "He has done everything admirably well: the great wonders and the small, everyday things that dazzled no one, but which Christ accomplished with the fullness of one 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 through the small, the ordinary, the love you have for Jesus Christ".

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. 

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At the end of the conference, the author projected this short video: