Itinerarios De Vida Cristiana

http://www.archicompostela.org/Publicaciones/BoletinOficial/abril2001/Bibliografia.htm

"The Prelate of Opus Dei, Mons. Echevarría, has wished to join, with this book, the programme designed by His Holiness John Paul II in his Apostolic Letter “Novo Millennio Ineunte”, offering us a series of considerations on various aspects of Christian life. Nineteen chapters, well distributed in three Parts, each one dealing with Christian existence, the path to an encounter with God, and vocation.

But he has wanted to incorporate three themes, those that have aided, by express wish of the Pope, the preparation of the Great Jubilee. There are the needed reflections on the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, origin of the dignity bestowed by god upon each of us Christians. Msgr. Echevarría writes: “John Paul II wanted us to prepare ourselves for the Great Jubilee through a Trinitarian path”. Our calling by God the Father does not eliminate a feminist look/glance, as present as is the masculine, because “the Paternity of God possesses an ultra-corporeal sense”, as the Pope wrote. We have to configure ourselves to Christ, by knowing Him, loving Him, and making Him known.

The Christian —says the book’s author—ought to “reflect Jesus Christ faithfully and heroically”, communing with Him and fulfilling his mission of communicating this treasure. In the whole of Christian life, we find the fundamental role played by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the manifestation of God’s Love, of that God who is Love. Rightly does the author refers to the metaphor of the boat, with which many theologians describe the action of the Holy Spirit in the believer: “the supernatural virtues of the Christian, present in the soul through Baptism, are represented by those oars, which demand effort and tiredness for their steering; the gifts of the Holy Spirit would be those sails blown by the wind”. And, along with the Blessed Trinity, our Mother Mary, the divine “masterpiece”, to whose protection we have been entrusted.

Our vocation to the faith has integrated us into the Church, who is our Mother and our Home. Msgr. Echevarría exhorts the reader to live in love for the Church, intensifying his unity with the Pope through the Bishops, a proposal that is encompassed in St. Josemaría’s “omnes cum Petro, ad Iesum per Mariam”.

Eight reflections and as many chapters make up the Second Part of the book: “The Path to an Encounter with God”. This part begins with the need for conversion, which is fundamental to every Christian itinerary, a path that, based on the experience of many, is owing to an encounter with Mary. She is the Mother of Mercy, an example of humility. The re-encounter comes through the confession of sins and the subsequent repentance. There, just as in every human life, we find the meeting between one’s own weaknesses and Divine Mercy. Recalling examples from Christ’s life, the following Chapter is centered on prayer, which ought to be simple, trusting, sincere, spontaneous, and persevering.

The Eucharist ought to be the center of Christian life, “sign of unity, sacrament of piety, bond of charity, paschal banquet”. The author calls it the fount of hope. Even though the Mass is a community celebration, in it and in whatever moment of his life, the Christian ought to foster interiority, without ceasing to walk with Him in his daily march. Magnificent, too, is the presentation of “the value and meaning of corporeality”. That divine gift, which is bodiliness, has to cause us to glorify God in our body and to sanctify the body. Two chapters, the last ones in the second block, handle paternity and maternity —“a gift and a task” — as well as suffering, sickness, and death which fundamentally affect our body. In those trials, “we ought to learn the science of the Cross”.

The book closes with considerations on time, the strength of love, sanctification of work, poverty as a social function of the Christian, and the joy that should gush forth from our condition as believers coherent with our faith. In the first place, time of the Church, which is a time of grace in this fullness of time in which we are now living. Then he goes deep into the fundamental value of charity, a true distinctive mark of the Christian, above anything and everything else. Afterward, he underlines the sanctifying and redeeming value of work. And, taking as a jump-off point a line from St. Josemaría, he speaks of the mastery of man over the goods and the subsequent charity from which no one ever feels alienated, just because of what is material. The Christian does not separate himself from the world, but rather, precisely because of the faith, he ought to be an exemplary citizen fulfilling his obligations in the world. Msgr. Echevarría enumerates, on pages 241-242, the duties of the believer and also the negative perspective that we discover in our world. And he ends the book with the invitation to joy and its contagion to the people around us, thus being “sowers of joy” as St. Josemaría had always wanted, imitating Mary whom we venerate in the Litany as “Cause of our joy”.

The book by Msgr. Echevarría, just like all books, is for reading… The personality of the author and the reception of him in an editorial collection that is so important, comes out definitely through this publication. His major sources are the documents of the Pope, especially those of John Paul II given the currency of the work at that time; the writings of the Fathers and Theologians, as well as the Magisterium of St. Josemaría Escrivá.”


Review from: http://www.churchforum.org/itinerarios-vida-cristiana.htm-0

Author: Padre Llucià Pou Sabaté

“Don’t you think, at times, how sorrow, pain and injustice dominate human history? I have read, with pleasure, ‘Itinerarios de vida cristiana’, the new book in the Planeta+ Testimonio collection about topics that are so current in the Church and the modern world. The author, Javier Echevarría (Bishop Prelate of Opus Dei), says that in these complex and paradoxical moments in the world in which we live, along with those undeniable shadows we find lights; but above all, the presence of Jesus is never missing: God-with-us (‘Emmanuel’), ‘giving us the possibility of being children of God: we can never thank Him enough for this treasure, which leads us to face the various circumstances with supernatural optimism’.

The author deals with and discusses, in an attractive manner, the most piercing questions of Christian life at this start of the millennium, in a profound and lively way. He makes us confront existential solitude, the bitter fruit of egoism which so many people in our society suffer from; the author analyzes what meaning suffering can have, going to the root of Christian life, the sign of the Christian, i.e., the paradox of the Cross as unveiling the face of Jesus, as a Paschal itinerary, that is to say, as expression of love and path to glory.

The Church —we see this very much during the Holy Week— sings the Cross, which means that sorrow/pain does not cancel out joy, if one lives united to the self-giving of Jesus for our salvation. Joy is not opposed to sorrow, but rather is obliterated by the egoism of our sinfulness, by our forgetting to love God and neighbor. Egoism is the evil of our time, along with lack of repentance (grudges, interior hatred, badly-cured hurts). Whoever lives dominated by an environment where what is paramount is the cult of a good image, of success, of power, that person gets depressed before any failure, before economic crises, even in the face of the wrinkles on one’s face. Joy is not linked to impeccability, but rather to the willingness to ask for pardon and to make reparation. True joy is that of the Prodigal Son (who knew how to ask for forgiveness, to be humble, and to begin anew). Therefore (the author continues), ‘each time I understand better that St. Josemaría Escrivá had always called the sacrament of penance the sacrament of joy’.
Life is not absurd, neither is Christianity a utopia. This book contains a hymn/canticle to the universal call to perfection in love (sanctity), by the hand of the Founder of this Institution, St. Josemaría Escrivá, whose doctrine illumines and gives life to the various considerations which —far from being theoretical— are life in its profundity, and lead to an improvement in our Christian life. Nowadays, theory is not so highly valued; models, witnesses, and above personal experience are: but these do not oblige us, they merely show. A few days ago, I was listening to a get-together on the radio; one was saying that honesty ought to lead the Christian to be coherent with his faith, confessing Christ without human respects, and if there exists in our society an attitude of rejection of topics of a religious character, one will have to create it, by creating a climate of freedom. I think that we have a ‘bruja’ [lit. ‘sorceress’] in this present world which we can call fear of speaking of God: the silence of God in the mass media, which is quite strange since more than 90% profess having a faith/religion.

There are so many who consider themselves as possessing the truth, ‘objective truth’, and make life impossible for those who think otherwise. Jesus has been and is the sign of contradiction. ‘When the apostles received the Holy Spirit, they overcame their fear of announcing Christ, but at once ‘they took them for fools, for drunkards, they imprisoned them' and afterward we know how it all ended, although we know they were always happy men. And thus, throughout history. The novelty of Christianity will always shock/scandalize, but this shock can and ought to be revolutionary, that is, it should generate love, should humanize man, open up for him new perspectives, liberate him…’ Perhaps the central idea of this work is the proclamation of the ‘sense of Divine Filiation’. To feel oneself Child of God which takes on, among their various forms of expression, joy and love for freedom: ‘Let each wayfarer follow his own way [cada caminante, siga su camino]’, since each one ought to find his own ‘personal itinerary’, because personal is each soul’s encounter with Jesus…

The book describes some central points along that path. The sources of Christian existence constitute the take-off point: love for the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for the Church and the Most Holy Virgin) where one sees that religion is not a titanic task or struggle to carry out some mere obligations or renouncing things or a list of prohibitions, but rather it is the giving of self out of love which God has made to man, the giving of self as a response in this following of Jesus, Word Incarnate, and through the Holy Spirit one goes to the home of the Father. From this Trinitarian point of departure, the book moves on to speak of that ‘path of encounter with God’: the conversion of evil (sin), and the struggle to improve toward a more perfect likeness with the model that is Christ, above all through prayer (speaking with God) and the sacraments (going deep in Baptism, Penance, the Eucharist…)

The last part, “With Christ, in History”, is the social projection of this existence, which offers a new way of living on this earth, with the ‘vibration of eternity’ [‘vibración de eternidad’], that is to say, with our gaze on Heaven, whilst we do our work out of love, give of ourselves in family life, and serve in civic society, building up a better world…"