FOREWORD

The lives of the saints act as a light that illuminates the path of our lives when night falls. They have travelled the same path as us, and have known how to reach the goal: the Love of God which is in our origin, and which desires to embrace us for all eternity.

In these pages we are going to look at the holy life of St Josemaría Escrivá; in particular, at some of the discoveries he made during his years as a young priest. As many people who knew him pointed out, he was a lover of God who taught many souls “to understand more profoundly the love of God, so that we are able to show that love to other people through what we do and say.”1 This is the path of the Christian life, which we too wish to undertake.

Now, there is something special about this inward journey. It does not go from a known place to an unknown place: it consists rather in going deeper into what is already known, into what seems obvious, what we have heard many times. Then we discover something which we in fact already knew, but which we now perceive with a new strength and depth. In The Forge he says:

“In the interior life, as in human love, we have to persevere. Yes, you have to meditate often on the same themes, keeping on until you rediscover an old discovery.

—“And how could I not have seen this so clearly before?” you’ll ask in surprise. Simply because sometimes we’re like stones, that let the water flow over them, without absorbing a drop.

—That’s why we have to go over the same things again and again — because they aren’t the same things — if we want to soak up God’s blessings.”2

Going “over the same things again and again” to try to open ourselves to all their richness and thus discover that “they aren’t the same things.” This is the path of contemplation to which we are called. It is about sailing a sea that, at first sight, is not new, because it is part of our daily landscape. The Romans called the Mediterranean Mare nostrum: it was the known sea, the sea with which they lived. St. Josemaría speaks of rediscovering the Mediterranean because, as soon as we enter those seas that we think we know well, wide, unsuspected horizons open up before our eyes. We can then say to God, in the words of St. Catherine of Siena: “You are like a deep sea, in which the more I seek the more I find, and the more I find the more I seek you.”3

These discoveries respond to lights that God gives us when and how he wants. Nevertheless, our calm consideration puts us in a position to receive these lights from God. “And as a man, who being previously in darkness then suddenly beholds the sun, is enlightened in his bodily sight, and sees plainly things which he saw not, so likewise he to whom the Holy Ghost is vouchsafed, is enlightened in his soul, and sees things beyond man’s sight, which he knew not.”4 In these pages we will review some of the Mediterraneans that St. Josemaría discovered in his interior life, in order to delve, with him, “into the depth of God's love.”5

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1 St Josemaría, Christ is Passing By, 97.

2 St Josemaría, The Forge, 540.

3 St Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 167.

4 St Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis 16, 16.

5 The texts included in this book, except the Interlude and the Epilogue, have been published in the Opus Dei website www.opusdei.org during 2018.