Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei by Scott Hahn

Author:Scott Hahn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Spirituality, Religion, Catholicism, Memoir, Christianity
ISBN: 0385519249
Publisher: Image
Published: 2005-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Soul of the World

The early Christians succeeded in a quiet way, sanctifying the world from within, like yeast in the dough. The second-century Letter to Diognetus put it beautifully: “As the soul is in the body, so Christians are in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world…. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible.”

It was a seemingly invisible work of the Church. For Christians were not doing anything out of the ordinary. They weren't wearing a distinctive uniform or behaving oddly in public places. The Letter to Diognetus explained: “Christians are distinguished from others neither by country, nor language, nor the customs they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor use a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by anything unusual…. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities … and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and striking way of life.”

So successful were our Christian ancestors that the pagan authorities often accused them of relying on magic, secrecy, and a vast web of conspirators to accomplish their ends. Their success seemed too great to be chalked up to ordinary human means. The African Christian Tertullian noted: “We began just yesterday, and already we fill the world and all your places: the cities, the islands, the towns, the municipalities, the councils, even the army camps, the tribunals, the assemblies, the palace, the senate, and the forum. We have left you only your temples!”

Yet so it was: they converted the world by doing their work—and by doing God's work, which came down to the same thing. They conquered not by military means, or by covert means, and certainly not by preaching. Instead, in the words of the Second Vatican Council, ordinary lay Christians made “Christ known to others, especially by the testimony of a life resplendent in faith, hope, and charity.”

St. Josemaria exhorted ordinary Christians to carry out the same kind of quiet but effective evangelization today. He called it the “apostolate of friendship and confidence.”

Friendship is, after all, the ordinary social bond between people. Confidence and trust are the cement in everyday professional relationships. Only on the basis of friendship and confidence can ordinary Christians give a credible, full-time witness to the claims of Christianity.

For our ordinary apostolate must be personal. It must be individual, person to person. This is the only way we can realistically fulfill the Church's universal call to the apostolate. The alternative is to hanker forever after doing mass-market evangelism, for which we might never have time. One corporate executive faced this spiritual crisis and went on a pilgrimage to Calcutta, India, to seek the advice of Mother Teresa. She spoke sharply with him. She

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