Foreword

Rodolfo Valdes

What does it mean to be a Christian? There are many ways to answer this question. Perhaps one of the most succinct is the one found several times in the letters of St. Paul: to be a Christian is to live in Christ, to live our life with him, to live his life in ours. In him God chose us before the foundation of the world that we should be holy (Eph 1:4); in him we are baptised to share in his death and resurrection (cf. Rom 6:1-14); in him we become a new creation (2 Cor 5:17).

Life in Christ leads us to go beyond the limits of a self-enclosed existence. It opens us to the horizon of communion with God and with the people around us, leaving behind the dissatisfaction brought about by exclusively worldly concerns. It gives us a new hope, which acts in our daily life and, at the same time, projects itself beyond death: None of us lives to himself and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord; if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s (Rom 14:7-8). Life in Christ is a gift that we receive in a particular way by participating in the sacraments, and which translates into an existence guided by the Holy Spirit, marked by Love (cf. Rom 8).

The centrality of the Person of Jesus Christ must therefore be the starting point and the guiding thread of our whole existence. In one of his first pastoral letters, the prelate of Opus Dei, Msgr. Fernando Ocáriz, recalled this basic principle of Christian life, and pointed out some of its many consequences:

Putting Jesus at the centre of our life means deepening in our contemplative prayer in the middle of the world, and helping others to travel along “paths of contemplation”. It means rediscovering with new light the anthropological and Christian value of the various ascetical means; reaching the person in all of his or her integrity: intellect, will, heart, relations with others; fostering interior freedom, which leads us to do things for love; helping people to think, so that each person can discover what God is asking of them and make decisions with full personal responsibility; nourishing confidence in God’s grace, in order to be on the alert against voluntarism and sentimentalism; expressing the ideal of Christian life without confusing it with perfectionism, and teaching people how to live with and accept their own weakness and that of others; practising, with all its consequences, a daily attitude of hopeful abandonment to God’s will, grounded on divine filiation.

In this way the sense of mission that our vocation entails will be strengthened along with our complete and joyful self-giving. We are called to contribute, with initiative and spontaneity, to improving the world and the culture of our times, so that God’s plans for mankind are opened up: cogitationes cordis eius, the plans of his heart which are sustained from generation to generation (Ps 33 [32]:11).¹

The following paragraphs of the same letter add other aspects that derive from the centrality of Jesus Christ in our life, such as the need to have a heart detached from material goods, so that we are truly “free to love”, and our love for the Church, which “will spur us to obtain resources for the development of the apostolates, and to foster in everyone a great professional eagerness.”² It also considers the sense of mission of those who know they are called by a “God who is love and puts love into us so that we can love him and love others”³ Because to share the gift we have received, the world seems small and time too short.

Contemplative prayer in the world, which Msgr. Ocáriz describes as the first of the consequences of this centrality of Christ in the life of believers, was covered in a series of articles published on the Opus Dei website and later collected in the book New Mediterraneans. Since then, also in line with these words of the Prelate of Opus Dei, various authors have written articles that explore other aspects in greater depth. These texts, also published on the Opus Dei website, are now offered in this book, in order to facilitate their reading and to appreciate their thematic connection. Beginning with the centrality of the Person of Jesus as the source of a joy full of hope, they then deal with: the life of prayer in the midst of the world, from a more combined perspective; Christian formation as a process that reaches the person in all its dimensions; the interior freedom of the children of God; the spiritual struggle as a grateful response to God's gift to us in Christ; the sense of mission characteristic of those who have accepted a divine call; and the awareness of the Lord's unconditional love as the foundation of our efforts to please Him.

Certainly, there are many issues that remain to be addressed, and even those addressed here could be the subject of further articles. We have not, however, attempted to exhaust a subject which is in itself so wide. On the other hand, it is our hope that the texts collected here will be an invitation to our readers to enter ever more deeply into the mystery of a God who comes to meet us, so that we can all say with St Paul: For me, to live is Christ (Phil 1:21).

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