“Why isn’t this completely redundant?”  That’s the question I had to answer before I sought to join Opus Dei.  And yet now Opus Dei seems to me completely indispensable.

I had converted to Catholicism a few years earlier, from “Evangelical” Christianity.   In that interval, I had started praying everyday:  How else can anyone develop a friendship with Christ?   Then I started going to Mass everyday: If you are going to pray, and the Mass is the best prayer, then above all you should go to Mass.   Then I started praying a daily Rosary (doesn’t the Church recommend it?).   Of course I still kept my “Protestant” habit of reading the Bible everyday, and, as a recent convert, I still had that enthusiasm which takes the form of obsessive reading of all things Catholic.

Now that just about covers the “plan of life” that people in Opus Dei try to live.  

So, when I met someone in Opus Dei, and he thought I should consider joining, I replied:   “Isn’t this simply what any Catholic should be doing?   No need to start a new organization for the purpose.  The Catholic Church serves well enough.”

Well, that was the reply that an intellectual might give.  (I was a graduate student in philosophy.)  If I were honest, I would have looked squarely at my own lack of complete success in carrying out what I had intended and concluded that I might very well need some assistance and help—a spiritual ‘coach’, as it were, and friends for the journey.  And Opus Dei provides such things.

Also, at that point I had only two children, and they were both toddlers.  About the only  difficulty I faced as a father was scraping together enough money to buy diapers every week.   I hadn’t yet had to try to integrate, in an effective and practical way, Christian devotion into my daily family life.  Yet Opus Dei offers that also.

My wife might have added, in discrete conversation with that friend, that along with my seriousness about Christianity came a certain inflexibility in daily life, and an extremism. For instance, I would sometimes be strenuously against some things that were, in fact, morally indifferent—thus erecting my personal likes and dislikes into moral absolutes for the both of us.   My wife might also have added that my character was far from perfect—in fact, I was not immune from the disease that sometimes afflicts religious people, of excusing one’s faults by appeal to one’s orthodoxy—and thus I might have profited from bringing some honest and sustained attention to my weaknesses (and strengths) of character.   This, too, Opus Dei helps with.

And I could say much more. 

To tell the truth, I never did answer that question back then.  I asked to join Opus Dei in spite of my sense that it was redundant: I joined it largely because, as it seemed to me in prayer, God wanted me to join.

Yet with years of experience in Opus Dei I now would say, if someone asked whether Opus Dei wasn’t, after all, redundant:  “For me, yes, Opus Dei would be redundant, if it were enough for Christianity to be a true idea, rather than a true way of life.”