His ours, ours his

WE have just celebrated the feast of St. Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei. I remember very distinctly his message about divine filiation—that is, that we are all children of God. It made such impact on me that I thought it triggered a paradigm shift in my thinking and way of life.

It was in his use of “his-ours-ours-his” expression that made me probing newer depths and flying to discover hidden horizons about this basic truth about ourselves.

In one of his homilies, he said: “All men are children of God…We must try to be children who realize that the Lord, by loving us as his children, has taken us into his house, in the middle of the world, to be members of his family, so that what is his is ours, and what is ours is his…”

I immediately thought the words were not just some smart ideas coming from a clever theologian or intellectual, or some rhetorical flourishes of a poet or a journalist. There was something to them that suggested they came from a holy man.

They were simple words, with the fresh breath of earnestness, and the quality of the common touch, though definitely they contained an enormous wealth of theological truth.

I was quite familiar then with the truth that we are all creatures of God, and that we have been made in the image and likeness of God, and that through grace, we have been elevated to the supernatural order.

But I did not make the connection that with these fundamental truths, the logical conclusion is that God actually is sharing in a the most intimate way what he has with us. What is his is also ours.

He is sharing his very life with us, and in a most penetrating way, since the sharing involves our own knowing and willing, our own use of freedom and the very act of loving, which is the supreme act we as persons can do.

Objectively, we are living in the whole mystery of God’s life. Now it is up to us if subjectively we conform ourselves to that design that comes from the will of God.

God wants to enter into our mind and heart, in fact, into our whole being. But since we are free, we have to choose to let him in or not. Fact is, our Christ himself, the fullness of divine revelation, said: “I am come that they (we) have life, and may have it more abundantly.” (Jn 10,10)

There’s no other way to understand those words of our Lord. He wants to unite himself with us, but we too have to want to unite ourselves with him. This is what love is, which is also God’s essence and how we are supposed to be, since we have been created out of love and for love.

Much less did I realize that with the redemptive work of Christ, what is ours, including our sinfulness, has also been assumed by him, though he himself was sinless. Christ made himself like sin, died to it and rose from it, to free us from sin and to teach us how to handle our sinfulness.

He bore everything that we have, in a way that only divine love can do. It’s an act of sympathy, of compassion, that identifies God with us without degrading himself to be like us, but rather of upgrading ourselves in order to be like him.

It’s the same divine love that we are supposed to live, with him and with everybody else, if only we truly and wholeheartedly unite ourselves with him. This has a stiff price, since it can only be achieved, we can only live with him if we are willing to suffer and die with him.

The whole dynamics of our relationship with God involves a mutual loving with an upward movement, that is, toward God and not toward us. It’s God who is the initiator and main propeller of this process. Ours is simply to cooperate as willingly as possible.

I feel that this awareness of our divine filiation, which St. Josemaria preached far and wide, should be made known to as many people as possible. It’s the permanent context of our life and everything in it. St. Josemaria made it the foundation of the spirit of Opus Dei.

May we have no other goal, no other sense of joy, satisfaction and fullfillment that is outside of God and his will for us! Our earthly affairs should begin and end with God.