道 路, 76

If you don't have a plan of life, you'll never have order.

 

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This text, word for word, comes from Notebook 6, 946, dated 10 March 1933.

 

Here begins the last group of considerations in this second chapter. It is a series of five points highlighting the consequences for Christian practice — the change of lifestyle proposed in chapter 1 — of the decision to follow what the author calls a "plan of life".

 

St. Josemaría clearly considered the "plan of life" to be an important aspect of spiritual guidance. A "plan of life", at the time when he wrote these points, was a widely accepted concept in schools of spirituality and spiritual theology.

 

It is apparent that St. Josemaría was trying to give a formal structure to the collection of acts of piety and of Christian living which were widespread among ordinary Christian faithful and which, one way or another, were being lived personally by members of the Work, as a consequence of the spiritual direction he gave them. This highlighted the importance of the virtue of order in daily life, a virtue which he prayed to God for repeatedly, and which he recommended insistently to the people who came to his apostolate. In the first pages of Notebook 2 we read:

 

"Lord! Grant me the virtue of order! (I believe it is a virtue, and a basic one: that's why I'm asking for it.)"

 

What St. Josemaría was praying for was order as a virtue, not as an obsession, nor a mere technique. Order in activity and in external things, facilitated by a "plan of life", is the exercise of freedom filled with Love, or, as he put it in point 3 above, a reflection of "the peace and order of your soul". In this point 76 both "plan of life" and "order" appear in close relationship to one another. The meaning and the dynamics of this "plan of life" is better understood in the light of the chapter on "Little things."

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[excerpted from "The Way: Critical-historical edition," prepared by P. Rodriguez of the Josemaría Escrivá Historical Institute]

 

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