Jenny Driver, M.D., is an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a numerary member of Opus Dei.

  "I am a physician, not an expert in theology or philosophy and I never knew St. Josemaría personally.  I do, however, consider myself an expert in one thing: stress.  Like many of my colleagues, I am a connoisseur of stress...

On July 1, the first day of internship, the only people in teaching hospitals more nervous than the new interns are the patients who know that they are being cared for by green recruits, fresh out of medical school... We (interns) helped each other through experiences like having to tell a young mother that she was full of cancer or making an error that led to a patient's death.  The emotional, physical and existential stress took its toll on us... Each one of us ultimately faced the questions, "Why am I doing this? What is the meaning of my patient's suffering?  What is the value of my work?"

But there was no time to think about or answer these questions.  Products of a contemplatively challenged society with few spiritual roots, the majority of us kept working and kept going, hoping that the angst brought on by our work would pass with time.  My workplace was desperately in need of a soul.  For me, that need was met by St. Josemaria's teaching about the possibility of contemplation in the midst of a frenetic work life, which helped me transform my work from an experience of sheer stress into a place where I can encounter God.

My experience of contemplation and an inner life began on a Himalayan peak in northern India, surrounded by Tibetan prayer flags, thin bits of cloth whipping in the wind, as if echoing the prayers of pilgrims before me who had climbed the mountain in search of peace and spiritual help.  I added my brightly colored flags to the faded and tattered ones.  I had left my home, my culture, and my religion behind and was spending my junior year abroad in India.  A poster child for Generation X, I had been baptized Catholic but fell away from the Church in childhood despite the example of a very devout mother and a Catholic education.  I was turned off by what I considered the "corruption of organized religion" and the materialism of my society.

When I went off to college I had a deep spiritual longing, I majored in the -isms and Indian studies and longed to "escape" from the world and from the ordinary.  In Existentialism 101 I was intrigued by Martin Heidegger's concept of "authentic existence," a state of "mindfulness of being" in contrast to the "forgetfulness of being" in which one surrenders to the everyday world and becomes lost in its concerns.  I lived a double life: my spiritual interests were my own private quest and were not integrated with the reality of my social and school life.

I climbed the mountain because there, far away from the worries and stresses of the world I felt peaceful.  I was able to forget about the contradictions and inconsistencies of my own life.  It was easy to have a spirituality that demanded nothing of me that I didn't want to give.  I felt I had escaped the "world" and material things with all their negative influence on me.  I had moments of light and inspiration.  Once, when I was spending time in Dharamsala, in northern India, where the Dalai Lama lived in exile, I noticed that bells would ring at odd times.  I wondered what they meant.  I went up to an elderly Tibetan woman, and asked her what the bells were for.  She smiled and laughed: "They are to remind you that it is now." At the time, I did not grasp the meaning of her words.  It was only later, much later, through the words of St. Josemaría, that I came to understand them.

As soon as I returned from India, my Buddhist veneer wore off.  Fighting with my brothers and full of complaints, I was really longing for my mountain.  I had no way of integrating my "spirituality" with the reality of each day.  It was about that time that my mother introduced me to some women in Opus Dei.

I was immediately fascinated by their ideal of being contemplatives in the midst of the world, something I thought to be a contradiction.  I was moved by their obvious love for and intimacy with God, who was a person to them, someone loving and understanding. These women were busy professionals and threw themselves into their work, but somehow they had a depth and peace that helped them absorb the bumps in the road that seemed to throw me off-kilter.  Through my friends in Opus Dei and the life and teachings of St. Josemaría, I came to a deeper understanding of the truths of the Catholic faith.  I began to pray and came back to the sacraments.  I no longer needed a mountain retreat to feel close to God.  I had discovered him in the center of my soul...

Excerpt from Women of Opus Dei, In their Own Words