Same house, different stories

The third and final episode of The good spirit, The new documentary series about Opus Dei leaves a question that doesn't disappear with the credits: how can some people call "family" what others remember as a place of suffering?

The temptation is to resolve this contradiction immediately: to decide that one of the two experiences explains what is really happening inside and that the other is wrong. But having suffered doesn't allow us to tell someone who has found a home that their experience was fictitious; nor does having been happy allow us to explain from the outside the pain of someone who left wounded. A personal experience can be true without becoming the measure of all others.

I am a numerary member of Opus Dei and a theologian. I write in my own name, not on commission or as a spokesperson. I know from the inside a life I love, but I cannot tell anyone what happened in theirs.

That's why I don't want to respond to the series by discussing testimonies that aren't my place to judge. I'm interested in a question that runs through many of the situations narrated there: what does it mean to nurture a vocation so that it can last a lifetime? And, if the purpose was to nurture it, how can we understand someone remembering that nurturing as a wound?

We take care of what we want to last.

No one gets married expecting to get divorced. Those who promise a life together look for ways to nurture that promise: they set aside time to be together, protect their relationship, and learn to navigate crises. When we want something to last, we take care of it so that it can.

With children comes another challenge: it's not enough to love them, you have to learn to care for each one. Parents advise, set limits, ask questions, correct, and when a child makes a decision they consider wrong, they don't usually respond with indifference: "it's your freedom.".

These two experiences help us consider a more concrete question. The series specifically includes testimonies from people who lived celibacy in Opus Dei. I would like to focus on them.

For a numerary, Opus Dei is also the family in which they have chosen to live out their commitment. They want to be faithful to a vocation they have embraced for life; and this family seeks to help them to allow that vocation to flourish and persevere.

When you try to do this with many different people, specific ways of caring for them inevitably emerge: training, customs, norms, and forms of support. Experience creates ways of caring that are then passed on.

And that's where the problem begins: how to find common ways to care for people who are different?

Caring with fidelity in mind

There is something else that conditions these ways of caring: the future for which they were designed.

The formation of a numerary is not organized on the assumption that in a few years they will cease to be one. It is based on the premise that this vocation is for life. The question is not "what will this person need if they leave someday?", but rather "what do they need to live this vocation well throughout their life?"«

That also changes the way we deal with a crisis.

If a brother told me tomorrow that he wanted to leave, I don't think loving him simply means replying, "You're free, go." I would want to know what's wrong, be there for him, and perhaps advise him not to make a final decision in a moment of exhaustion.

It's not very different from what parents might do when a child tells them their marriage is going through a crisis. Respecting their freedom doesn't mean indifferently watching a decision that could change their life.

If a commitment is considered final, a crisis shouldn't be immediately interpreted as its end. It may be precisely the moment when more support is needed. Many training programs seek to foster this perseverance because that is the future they envision.

When care does not produce the expected result

But understanding why these forms of support exist does not mean that they have always provided good care.

Any parent can figure this out. The high standards that help one child can make another feel like they're never good enough. A question one parent perceives as genuine interest can be experienced by another as intrusion.

The parents are the same. Often, so is the intention. The children are not.

Something similar can happen in a spiritual family. Common criteria are needed, but there is no methodology that can guarantee that the same way of caring will produce the same results in everyone.

This does not mean that everything is relative. There are limits that do not depend on individual personality: human dignity, freedom of conscience, truth, and justice. There are objectively wrong actions, even if they stem from the best of intentions.

But there is also a vast area where prudence is needed: getting to know the individual, knowing when to persist and when to remain silent, when a correction helps growth and when someone needs, above all, to be heard. Even accepting that a practice that has helped many may need to be reviewed.

And here a particularly strong temptation arises when we already know the end of a story: to tell it backwards.

If someone stayed and is happy, it's easy to conclude that all the support they received was good. If someone left hurt, it's equally easy to reread every rule, piece of advice, or insistence as a piece of what ultimately harmed them.

But lives are not usually written with the clarity with which we later recount them.

That a particular form of support has caused pain compels us to ask what happened. It may reveal imprudence, a practice that needs to change, or even an injustice that demands recognition and redress.

But it is also important to avoid the opposite approach: concluding that, because a particular form of support produced pain, it necessarily stemmed from a desire to control, or that all the good that others found in it was fictitious.

Human reality often resists such perfectly ordered narratives.

Good intentions don't prove that good care was taken. But a painful outcome also doesn't automatically allow us to reconstruct the intention behind the action.

Both things can be true at the same time: someone could have tried to take care of someone and have taken care of them badly.

That is precisely why there is responsibility: to listen, to learn, to rectify and, when appropriate, to apologize and make amends.

Same house, different stories

We return then to the initial question: how can some people call "family" what others remember as a place of suffering?

Two siblings can grow up under the same roof and have surprisingly different childhoods. That doesn't mean everything is subjective. If there was harm done, it deserves to be acknowledged; if there was an injustice, it must be called what it is. A family also demonstrates its love by what it does when it discovers it was wrong.

But one painful story cannot automatically become the explanation for all others.

My experience of finding a family doesn't prove that someone else couldn't have been hurt by it. Nor does their hurt prove that what I received as affection was actually a form of control that I still haven't been able to recognize.

Perhaps our difficulty lies in wanting to find one story that explains all the others.

Maybe it doesn't exist.

I remain a numerary member and consider my vocation a gift. Precisely for this reason, painful stories need not be seen as a threat. They can help us examine our ways of caring: what we sought to protect, when we helped, when we didn't, and what we can learn from them.

We don't have a perfect method for loving. No family does. We have principles, experience, prudence, and the humility to correct ourselves when we discover we've made a mistake.

Loyalty also needs care. And caring well requires never stopping learning how to do it.