Bishop Javier Echevarria preached the following homily on the Feast of Blessed Josemaria, June, 26, 1998, at St. Eugene's Basilica in Rome.

Learning to deal with the Holy Spirit

I will give you shepherds after my own heart, and they shall feed you on knowledge and sound teaching. This promise announced by the prophet Jeremiah, which the Church applies to its holy pastors, was fully realized in Blessed Josemaria Escriva, whose liturgical feast we celebrate today. The founder of Opus Dei was and continues to be a gift of God to humanity, an authentic pastor to the measure of the Heart of God who dedicated his life to proclaiming joyfully and untiringly the universal call to holiness and apostolate, thus opening to souls the paths of Christian wisdom.

1. I would like to pause a moment to point out some specific aspects of Blessed Josemaria's life which reveal that he was truly a shepherd after the heart of Christ. This year we are preparing for the great Jubilee of the Year 2000 by intensifying our recourse to the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, despite our good desires, we perhaps are not finding it easy to come up with practical ways of dealing with the Paraclete with greater intimacy. We have tried to invoke him more frequently, perhaps using some of the many prayers that the liturgy of the Church or the piety of the saints offer us. We have asked for his grace with more faith; we have tried to be especially docile to his inspirations.

Every Christian has to make a sincere effort in this direction, as we can also see in the spiritual journey of Blessed Josemaria. In glancing through his writings, we find many references to this effort to make his conversation with the Holy Spirit more profound and effective.

This is the way he summed up the content of a conversation he had with his spiritual director on November 8, 1932: "He told me: 'Be friends with the Holy Spirit. Don't talk to him; listen to him. ...'

"In the midst of a prayer that was calm and luminous, I considered that the life of childhood, which makes me feel that I am a son of God, gives me a love for the Father that, previously, passed through Mary to Jesus, whom I adore as a friend, as a brother, as are in love, which I am. ... Up until now I knew that the Holy Spirit dwelt in my soul to sanctify it … but I did not grasp this truth of his presence. ... I feel that Love within me and I want to speak with him, to be his friend, his confidant … to facilitate his work of polishing, of rooting up, of enkindling. I don't know how to do it. But he will give me strength. He will do everything if I want him to. ... May I want him to! Divine Guest, Master, Light, Guide, Love: may your poor donkey know how to treat you attentively, listen to your lessons, and become enkindled, and follow you, and love you."

And this is how he ended that prayer: "A resolution: frequent, if possible without interruption, the friendship and docile and loving conversation with the Holy Spirit: Veni, Sancte Spiritus! …"1

The prayer that I will read now is from two years later, in the month of April 1934, and it seems to sum up quite well the interior dispositions of Blessed Josemaria in regard to the Paraclete: "Come, O Holy Spirit! Enlighten my understanding to know your commands; strengthen my heart against the snares of the enemy; inflame my will. I have heard your voice, and I do not want to become hardened and resist, saying: later, tomorrow. Nunc Coepi! Now!"2

How much we can learn if we meditate slowly on these words! How many lessons of filial confidence in God do they hold for us, who so often resist following the inspirations of the Paraclete for fear of complicating our lives. Blessed Josemaria cultivated an attitude of total and confident surrender to of a responsibility to give good example; generous prayer for the others; an assiduous search for new occasions to speak about God and to invite our friends to make use of the sacraments; strength to correct, in ourselves or in our neighbor, whatever might be an obstacle on our path to heaven; and so many other things that each one must consider in his personal conversation with our Lord.

Blessed Josemaria, impelled by God's grace, vibrated with apostolic zeal and therefore acted without ever putting himself in first place, delicately respecting the freedom of others. In this too he imitated the Paraclete, who he referred to as the Great Unknown, in part, because we converse with him so little; but also because his way of acting is very inconspicuous. Love doesn't seek to attract attention, it gives itself in silence. In this sense the motto that inspired Blessed Josemaria's conduct perfectly reflected the teaching of the Holy Spirit: "It is for me to hide and disappear, so that only Jesus will shine forth," he liked to say. This was not just a theoretical maxim. One need only consider the decades that he spent in Rome, far from the spotlight, taken up with a work that did not attract attention but which was of immense fruitfulness: with his struggle to be heroic in the little things of each day, spurring on the apostolic expansion of Opus Dei throughout the whole world, in the service of the Church.

This is an invitation to meditate on our rectitude of intention in work and in our apostolate. It is an invitation to prefer to pass unnoticed instead of calling attention to ourselves, to avoid seeking applause, to not want others to recognize our merits.

3. We can say that the Holy Spirit is the one who molds and builds up the Church in unity. A unity that not only respects variety, but encourages it. The multiplicity of charisms that enrich the Church and the plurality of ways that lead to heaven are open to the eyes of all. But at the same time there is only one flock and one shepherd. This is the harmony proper to divine works.

Blessed Josemaria passionately loved the unity and the legitimate variety with which our Lord has adorned the Church. Those who had the privilege and the responsibility of being in contact with him here on earth can give witness that he always built unity while promoting the specificity of each person's way of being, the characteristics of each personality, of each language, of each race, of each nation, and the patrimony of each spirituality.

He loved freedom so much that, referring to Opus Dei, he stated: in the Work "diversity in all temporal things and in all theological questions of opinion, is a clear manifestation of good spirit."8 At the same time, he loved unity. In first place, union with God and with the Church, through communion with the Pope and bishops. He prayed and worked for the full union of Christians, but he also yearned with all his strength for a greater solidarity among men and women in the environment of work, in family and social life, and in the relations of different peoples with each other.

Each Christian has to be an instrument of unity. Each of us will be such if we docilely accept the Sanctifier into our soul. What disunites, at all levels, is self-love, sin; what unites, in contrast, is love of God, charity. The Holy Spirit unites.

Perhaps the fruit that our Lord expects of us today is this: to eliminate the barriers, the divisions that each of us may have created. And beyond this, to build unity, to facilitate reciprocal understanding in one's family, one's work, the circle of one's friends, among all those that we encounter. We can do this with the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Let us invoke the Blessed Virgin Mary, the outstanding prototype of these aspects of life according to the Spirit that we have just been recalling. Mary collaborated with Christ, with profound humility, in the infusion of grace into souls. From heaven, just as when she was on earth, she continues to unite souls to her divine Son. We ask her, the spouse of the Holy Spirit, through the intercession of Blessed Josemaria, to help us to converse more deeply and intimately with the Sanctifier of the Church and of souls. Amen.