Personal Holiness: Giving Oneself to God
“Ever since I began to preach, I have warned people against a certain mistaken sense of holiness. Don’t be afraid to know your real self. That’s right, you are made of clay. Don’t be worried. For you and I are sons of God — and that is the right way of being made divine. We are chosen by a divine calling from all eternity: ‘The Father chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him’ (Eph 1:4). We belong especially to God, we are his instruments in spite of our great personal shortcomings. And we will be effective if we do not lose this awareness of our own weakness. Our temptations give us the measure of our own weakness.”
“Personal holiness, giving oneself to God, is the one cure which overcomes any difficulty.
“Being holy means living exactly as our Father in heaven wants us to live. You will say that it is difficult. It is. The ideal is a very high one. And yet it is also easy. It is within our reach. When a person becomes ill, there may be no appropriate medicine. But in supernatural affairs, it is not like that. The medicine is always at hand. It is Jesus Christ, present in the holy Eucharist, and he also gives us his grace in the other sacraments which he established.
“Let us say again, in word and in action: ‘Lord, I trust in you; your ordinary providence, your help each day, is all I need.’ We do not have to ask God to perform great miracles. Rather, we have to beg him to increase our faith, to enlighten our intellect and strengthen our will. Jesus always stays by our side and is always himself.”
St. Josemaria Escriva
St. Josemaria Escriva, priest and founder of Opus Dei, was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002 and declared the “saint of the ordinary” for his example and teachings on the value of work and daily life as the path to holiness in the middle of the world.
