Passionately Loving the World

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“And God saw all things and he saw that they were good” (Gen. 1:31). Our faith gives us a very positive outlook on creation and the world.

This meditation is about passionately loving the world.

I often think that that phrase and the translation of it will contain an interesting message. If you were to say that “we love the world passionately”, we would have the same emphasis.

If you were to take the adverb and place it first, it gives a new emphasis.

If you heard someone say that they wanted “to love Manchester United passionately,” well, OK, I think that might be something impressive. But then if they say “passionately loving Manchester United,” it gives great emphasis.

Or “loving chapati passionately” and you put the adverb for “passionately loving chapati.” It might almost sound a bit over the top.

But yet very definitely and consciously, our Father used that phrase, and it got translated into English in the same way: passionately loving the world.

Love it with passion. It's a very strong statement. At the time that it was made, it was even stronger, and loving the world was considered to be something alien to the religious mentality. So just that phrase alone contains a great message.

“God saw all things and he saw that they were good” (Gen. 1:31). If God saw all things and He saw that they were good, then it's very logical that we should love those things.

I love the place where they are and love every aspect that God has created around them. “I do not ask,” said Our Lord in St. John, “that you would take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one” (John 17:15).

So, all the time the goodness of the world is emphasized. That's our place, that's what we've been created for. That's the place to be—the lay mentality. Secularity. We see the good things in the world.

I was rather impressed with the final parting shot of one of the people in the documentary last night, where he sort of says, Get out there and look at nature, it's beautiful.

Powerful statement in that. It's the message that we have for everybody who comes in contact with our apostolate.

Pope St. John Paul used to talk a lot about the culture of life and the culture of death.

Pope Benedict brought that onto a more philosophical plane, where he talked about the cult of beauty. We're all involved in the cult of beauty; promoting the beautiful because the world can be beautiful.

There are many beautiful things in the world. Part of our role is to open the eyes of humanity to that beauty, so that they discover it.

Pope Benedict liked to say that the world is presenting many ugly things to young people: contraception, abortion, euthanasia.

We're here to present the beautiful, to open people's eyes to that greater truth and reality that God saw all things, “and he saw that they were good.”

This gives us a very positive outlook on everything that we're doing.

Jack Valero had a get-together with people in Sudek online a few days ago. What was interesting was to listen to this PR personality talking with great optimism about the whole world of media and public relations.

Behind the words and the means he was using to communicate this message was that very positive idea that we have something beautiful, something good, something positive to communicate to people.

We love the world. We love things of sport or fashion or finance or whatever it may be, because the world is our place. We have no fear of the world. We don't run away from it.

In fact, we face the difficulties with fortitude, optimism, with a sporting spirit, with supernatural outlook.

It’s a bit like St. Joseph faced Bethlehem, with all of its difficulties, contradictions, and trials.

When he found there was no room at the inn (Luke 2:7), he didn't throw his hat on the ground and say, ‘This is too much’ or ‘I'm going home.’ He didn't give in, in the battle.

He looked for a solution. If this is the way things are, then there must be some other divine plan here.

St. Josemaría in “In Joseph's Workshop” says, “Joseph showed initiative and responsibility in all that he was asked to do. … He was in no way shy or frightened of life. He faced up to difficult situations, dealt with difficult problems” (Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 39).

This is the model of how we have to be in the middle of the world: initiative and responsibility. Two beautiful words on the lips of a member of Opus Dei.

We find a lot of that initiative and the ideas for that initiative in our prayer, coming from the tabernacle.

Our Lord gives us ideas. He gives us an optical angle, helps us to work things out so that we come up with the true solutions that are a fruit of this love for the world, and love for the difficulties, and love for the future, and building the future—that same optimism that our Father had on so many occasions.

We have a healthy love for the good things of the world because we see God in them.

“There is something divine, hidden in the most ordinary human situations, and it is up to each one of us to discover it” (J. Escrivá, Conversations, ‘Passionately Loving the World,’ Point 114).

Managerial situation, financial situation, sporting situation—there is something here. There is something for us. There is something God wants us to chew on and work on and come up with a solution.

We love the world because it has come from God's hands, and it will lead us to Him. That means that we are preoccupied, also, with the problems of the world: social situations that we want to change; things that aren't right that is to bother us, our social consciousness.

It’s part of our Christian vocation. We have the great means, the social doctrine of the Church, to try and change those situations, to infect people with those ideas that are mind-blowing and mind-boggling and can change realities; to lift the whole of the world.

When Don Javier came to Hong Kong in…I think it was early 1997, just before the handover, he went into China. At that stage, there were a lot of things that were a little bit on the low side from the point of view of development. Many things have happened since then.

But when he came back to Hong Kong, bursting with activity and business and all the rest of it, he said in a get-together, “I was a bit observant of this reality.” Then he said, “Never forget that Christianity has come to lift everything up.”

It was a very simple statement, but yet, a very powerful statement. “Christianity has come to lift everything up.”

And so, we have come to lift everything up. That's why we're here, that's what it's all about. That's what our apostolates are about.

Every center of the Work, every detail of formation. We're here to lift people up, lift up humanity.

The “Christian materialism” of our centers is a manifestation of our lay mentality. We have good items of decor of any Christian family. We look after them well; we make them last, because they carry a message.

I often think that the floral arrangement on the hall table of Tigoni Study Center is the most formative thing in the whole place.

We think people come to retreats and they listen to meditations and talks, and we think they get all sorts of wonderful ideas.

But often, it's the material things, the taste, the beauty, the care, that has its deepest impact—the care of the things of the world, because they carry this profound message.

I was talking to a man in Manila once on a retreat, and he had been coming to retreats for many years, and he said, “You know, I always learn something from the retreats that I come to.”

I was expecting him to make some comment about some talk or some meditation, and he said, “The last time I was here, I ran my finger on the top of the door of my room, and there wasn't a speck of dust. I went home to my house, and I did the same thing, and then I showed my wife my finger. She's not happy that I come to these retreats, because I come back with similar observations every time.”

All of the things he learned were all about the material things of the place.

Our centers are for formation. Everything's meant to give formation. It fosters a Christian outlook on material things.

That's why we have to take care of those material things. It's not just an added icing on the cake. It's not just a nice detail to make things look well.

There's some great positive divine message there. We're promoting the cult of the beautiful, the tasteful, the dignified, as a manifestation of the beauty of Christ.

And we're totally taken up with that beauty; hence, the reason behind that phrase, “passionately loving the world.”

Because we passionately love God. We passionately love Christ.

We don't love material things for the sake of material things. Or money for the sake of money. Or new gadgets, whatever it may be. It would be a manifestation of a frivolous mentality.

But we love them for the deeper realities that are behind them. That opens great horizons for us.

Lord, help me to love the world a little more, and to love it in such a way that I look for solutions. I look for ways to make it better. I plant the seeds. I transmit ideas.

I burn with apostolic desire to make myself more effective in transmitting these ideas.

Don Álvaro in the January 1993 letter says, “We find in any upright activity the raw material for our sanctity and the field of our apostolate.”

“In any upright activity.” No matter what situation, or how bad it might be, or how disordered, or a whole pile of other things, because we have a great contribution to make, a serious contribution. Seminal ideas that can change those realities.

“An apparent wasteland,” he says, “which is rendered fertile by heaven's graces when we cultivate it with the means God has marked out for us.”

We have certain means—means through which we show that we passionately love the world. We want it to improve and to be better and to be a more dignified place.

We point out to people the errors or the problems or the dangers. We also open their eyes to other beautiful realities that perhaps they haven't seen.

“Domine ut videam! Lord, that I may see!” (Mark 10:51).

We know that with our formation, and with grace, and with the passage of time, our eyes are also opened to new beautiful realities—new aspects of ideas that maybe we've heard many times before, but the Holy Spirit gives us new lights; or new ways to see how God is acting in the world or how He's acted through history; or the beauty of our Church; or a certain holy pride when we consider all the wonderful things the Church has achieved down through the centuries.

History has so much to teach us. People have so much to teach us.

“First,” he says, “our personal friendship with confidence are the key to true effectiveness in our apostolate, which enables us to enkindle other hearts with the love of God burning in our own.”

We also kindle in other hearts a love for the world—a positive love for the world, an enthusiasm for the world that helps people to see that they also have a role to play.

We're all involved in this cult of beauty, in changing things and lifting everything up, because that's what Christianity has come to do.

Then the specific means of formation of St. Gabriel's and St. Raphael's work, the focal point in which our efforts should converge.

Everything leads to that: the love of the world, the ideas that we transmit—ultimately, a means for promoting the work of St. Gabriel and of St. Raphael.

Every day, every hour, we're caught up with that. That's the means that we have to transmit this great message. The focal point.

How can I bring this forward? How can I be more effective? How can I transmit this love for the world that we have and everything in it, so that we make it a better place to be in and to live?

“We know full well the crucial importance of our task within the Church's mission.”

“The crucial importance.” Where would the world be without the Church? Where would the world be without that moral direction that comes from the See of Peter? The values, the truth, the beauty, the love, the care; the message of the dignity of every human person; the central ideas about the greatness of man.

It was interesting to hear Pope St. John Paul talking about man in Italian. He used the word uomo.

But whenever he said uomo, he would say it with a certain profundity and depth. The greatness of man is because of the dignity of the human person. The dignity of women. The dignity of the family.

The basis of so many things that we have to transmit to the world.

That's why our task within the Church's mission is so crucial: to bring to all the areas of society, every last person, every last shamba, this great message.

“And with this conviction,” he says, “each of us undertakes the initiatives that seem to him most appropriate, mentioning them in spiritual direction.”

“With this conviction”—the conviction about the greatness and beauty of the world, that it has come from God's hands, that this is where He wants us to be.

“I do not pray that you would take them out of the world” (John 17:15). But that you place them bang smack in the middle of the world, in the middle of those problems, and challenges, and difficulties, and lead them to function with the means that I've given them, “with the initiatives that seem most appropriate, mentioning them in spiritual direction.”

We can ask Our Lord, when we go to the chat or spiritual direction, if we talk about those initiatives.

Or if, from time to time, God gives us a certain idea, a seminal idea that perhaps can have a big impact, and in the coming years or decades, we want to work on that particular idea.

If God has invested so much formation in us—intellectual, spiritual, doctrinal, apostolic, cultural—often, the best wine has to come at the end.

I was at a deanery meeting once in Singapore and there was a fairly elderly Dutch priest there. Quite vocal. Missionary priest.

At one stage in the discussion, he says, “There is so much emphasis on youth in our Church. I'll have you know I'm 64. I'm not dead yet, and the best wine comes at the end.”

He was sort of saying that if God has invested so much in us, maybe our greatest contributions have yet to come.

You think of the latter years of our Father's life—Cavabianca, Torreciudad—the impact of those places over time.

So, there may be seminal ideas that Our Lord has not yet communicated to us that has to have a great impact on where we are, in our surroundings.

As our Father used to say, “Freedom, my daughters and sons, freedom, which is the key to the lay mentality all of us have in Opus Dei.”

“What interests me,” said our Father in 1973 in one of the campanadas, “my dear children, is the supernatural life in your soul; your interior life and its direct apostolic manifestations.

“Other successes, other achievements, and human achievements seem well to me if they bring you to God. But the Work is something different, and this is your task—the task of each one.”

If, in some extraordinary case, that personal task was to be converted into an obstacle; if it was to put in danger the salvation of your soul; if there was to come a storm in your soul, and you were to begin to concern yourself more for the cargo than for the boat, then, that would be the moment to be heroic and to throw the cargo overboard.

But if there is a life of piety, if you take care of your senses, if you cultivate humility continuously, it's difficult for that situation, such an extreme situation, to present itself.

But it's very good to conserve, very well engraved in your heart, that hierarchy of values.

“What's not possible ever in our vocation is not to work apostolically. All my children, young and those who have attained many years, can and should bring forward the works of apostolates of the Work.

“If we weren't to feel that responsibility, if we were to be weakening little by little, then we would be converting ourselves inevitably into useless instruments. In that case, we could lose our vocation very easily.”

In these campanadas, our Father speaks very clearly. He calls a spade a spade.

We have this wonderful task. This great panorama is in front of us.

In the latest letter of the Father, in the opening paragraphs, he invites us to look to the anniversary of October 2nd, 1928, the 100th anniversary.

He says, “this great apostolic panorama that's opening before us.”

In some ways, you could say the Church is in our hands. The world is in our hands. A lot has been achieved up to now. But it's nothing in comparison to what's there in the future.

You see his words, chosen very carefully, “open these incredible horizons before us.” So much depends that we get things right; that we function in the way that God wants us to; that we take care of our souls.

“We all have to occupy ourselves with serious professional work,” he says. And also, in a very concrete apostolic work, and constant.

Besides carrying out that apostolic work with a desire for souls, we do this in such a way that it sanctifies us and helps us to sanctify others.

It would be a sad reality if we were to deceive ourselves, calling something apostolic when it is just a personal caprice. Or any occupation, with the excuse that it's something important or something of value or something of a high level.

“Souls,” he says. “This is the measure, the criteria to know if that activity is truly Opus Dei, the Work of God.”

Behind this love of the world, there is this love of souls. Desire for souls. Desire to do new things and have new ideas and new initiatives.

It's very dynamic, and if we foster that dynamism, great things will happen.

“Therefore, my daughters and sons,” he says in this same January 1993 letter. “We need drive and initiative. God counts on our personal freedom and responsibility and our lay mentality. The world is there, we passionately love it, but it has been entrusted to us, entrusted to us to do something with it.”

We're going to read in the Gospel today about the five talents. Each of us has five talents.

God wants us to work at achieving five new talents. Maybe we've achieved three or four. Maybe there's one more that we've got to work on; new things that God wants to entrust to us.

He wants us to be salt dispersed through the food in seasons, not to remain a solid lump. He wants us everywhere—each one, in his or her own place—so as to impart a Christian flavor to the environment in which we move.

He wants me to be a better salt, to disperse a little more, to see with your help how I can savor things a little better.

Work to improve in this area or that area. Be a better person. Take this goal of my holiness and apostolate with a new seriousness in us, in a new way.

And in particular, to take this new letter of the Father which is like a clarion call, another campanada, to bring to our minds and our hearts and our prayers. Read things again and again.

What does the Father say to us, so that these next ten years—they're special years in our lives. (Not so much ten years, they're now eight years. Passing already!)

We give it our best shot. What can I contribute? What can I do?

“Be convinced,” he says, “of the importance of exercising your freedom, which brings with it a corresponding personal responsibility to get involved in national and international bodies which can be a platform for promoting Christian values regarding the family, education, the defense of human life, and many other issues which have to be approached in accordance with the Church's teaching.”

In another letter, Don Álvaro reminds us of the Spanish phrase: A río revuelto, ganancia de pescadores. When the river is in flood, the fishermen have a boom day because all the fish come to the top.

I saw a picture last night of a consequence of a typhoon in the Philippines, where the waters are raging, and people are trying to save things from their houses. They’re almost thigh-deep in raging waters.

In some ways, the atmosphere of society is a bit like that. But we have the answers.

The call is to get involved. Because we love the world, we try to be involved.

We could ask ourselves, What national and international organizations am I involved in—learning how to function in those bodies, bringing that salt with me with my ideas, with things that I can contribute.

Just listened to the discussion in that get-together with Jack Valero. Many people were contributing in Sudek.

It was a pretty high-level discussion. People were saying very intelligent things. You could see the educational, and cultural, and everything else, formation that was there.

We are very well prepared to have this great impact, to try and see what we have and use it well.

I entertain a dream that Nairobi would become a global hub for good ideas. In some ways, that's what the university is all about, and the people that have come through it.

There aren't too many global hubs for good ideas at the moment. You have to think with great panoramas how to be that salt in all sorts of places, so that the morning newspaper, Sydney Morning Herald, will interest us a little bit. Or the Hong Kong Morning Post, or the Santiago de Chile Herald, or whatever it may be.

We have an input there because of our ideas that we can spread around the place; powerful ideas with which the Church has given us to change the world.

If your work has anything to do with media, press, television, etc., just imagine the apostolic impact it would have, if, as it performs its informative and cultural role, it also bears the stamp of the unity of life.

The sky is the limit. Our Lord wants us to love the world so much that we go all out to do all sorts of wonderful things.

Our Father says in The Forge, “You are an ordinary citizen. It is precisely because of that secularity of yours, which is the same as, and neither more nor less than, that of your colleagues, that you have to be sufficiently brave—which may sometimes mean being very brave—to make your faith felt. They should see your good works and the motive that drives you to do them” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 723).

We can have a great superiority complex because we have the answers, because we have the truth, and we try to live it in every way. The lay mentality leads us to love our family and our family life.

In the coming weeks, we know it is a more important time. Any Christian layman loves to be with his family. The best times at home are with the family. They love to come home with a healthy sign.

Family life finds its divine meaning in Christ. We are here to change family life all over the world.

Loving the world means doing our work with professional competence—doing the best job possible, irrespective of how we are feeling.

James Stenson says that professionalism is doing the best job irrespective of how we are feeling.

Our love of work is influenced by our love of God. We use our time well. We try to be punctual, ordered, with economic responsibility. We have a lot of things to bring forward. God is using us in special ways.

In Christifideles laici, we are told that “each member of the lay faithful should always be fully aware of being a ‘member of the Church’ yet entrusted with a unique task which cannot be done by another and which is to be fulfilled for the good of all” (John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Christifideles laici, December 30, 1988).

A parliamentarian in Singapore told me once how he was retired and he would meet for lunch a few times a week with other retired parliamentarians in Parliament House.

None of them were Catholics, many weren't Christians—Buddhists, Hindus, many people with no religion. Six or eight of them would sit around a lunch table discussing how badly the country was being run ever since they retired.

Then he said, After one of these lunches people were getting up to go, and suddenly one of them asked me, “What's this thing that you Catholics pray, where you pray one and you pray ten and you pray one, what's that all about?” He said, “Oh, that's the Rosary.”

“And what's the one and what's the ten and what's the one?”

“That's the Our Father, there's the Hail Mary and the Glory Be.”

“And what's the Hail Mary all about?”

He began to give an impromptu talk on the Rosary to all of these very educated people, super-cultural, super-experienced, who had never heard anything about the Rosary before.

And he said, “I noticed that as one or two people had got up to leave the table, when I started to talk they sort of hung back a little bit, one ear cocked to listen to what I had to say.”

It was a rather interesting description of the apostolate of the layman in the middle of the world. No nun or priest would probably ever be in Parliament House with that sort of opportunity.

Our love of the world leads us to seize those opportunities, that unique task which cannot be done by another, which is to be fulfilled for the good of all.

“The apostolate exercised by the individual,” he says, “which flows abundantly from a truly Christian life, is the origin and condition of the whole lay apostolate. Regardless of all circumstances, all laypersons, including those who have no opportunity or possibility for collaboration and associations, are called to this type of apostolate and obliged to engage in it.”

Pretty strong terms: “Regardless of all circumstances.”

It's rather interesting to hear Cardinal Pell say he got a note from the Association of Career Criminals there in prison, telling him that they were all convinced of his innocence, and how it was difficult for them to believe how all of them could see this, but all the judges couldn't.

In those circumstances the criminals, career criminals, were doing certain good, planting a seed, having an impact, and here we are talking about them.

“Such an apostolate is useful at all times and places, but in certain circumstances, it's the only one available and feasible.”

We can thank Our Lord that He has given us this love for the world which is passionate.

As we accompany the Holy Family in these coming weeks, we see also their love for the difficulties, the problems, the challenges. They don't run back to Nazareth; run away from them. They face them.

They're going forward all the time. Mary, may you help us to have that same optimism, that same confidence, that same supernatural outlook that you had on your way to Bethlehem.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

CPG