Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace Quotes

“Christ has no body now but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours, Yours are the eyes with which He looks Compassion on this world, Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good, Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“We would have a poor idea of marriage and of human affection if we were to think that love and joy come to an end when faced with such difficulties. It is precisely then that our true sentiments come to the surface. Then the tenderness of a person's gift of himself takes root and shows itself in a true and profound affection that is stronger than death.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“the heart of Opus Dei is the Christian experience of divine filiation. God is our Father. We are His children in Christ Jesus, the eternal Son; thus, gathered together around His table, the Church is the family of God on earth, as the Trinity is the Family of God in heaven.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Nevertheless, secularity, like any good thing, can be overdone. In our zeal to laicize our piety, we shouldn't leave people guessing whether we're Christians. That would be every bit as unnatural as wearing a monk's habit over one's work clothes. Our secularity should never lapse into secularism.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Josemaria, in his life and ministry, showed that it is possible for Catholics to have both a priestly soul and a lay mentality. It is possible for both priests and laypeople. He revered the work of religious orders; and their saints, such as St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Therese of Lisieux, had no small influence on his spirituality. For many years his spiritual director was a Jesuit, and the founder trained the first members of Opus Dei with St. Therese's Story of a Soul. We can hear echoes of St. Ignatius's phrase “contemplatives in action” in St. Josemaria's “contemplatives in the middle of the world.” We can hear echoes of St. Therese's “Little Way” in the founder's own emphasis on “little things.” Still, by divine disposition, his ways were distinctively not their ways.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“One corporate executive faced this spiritual crisis and went on a pilgrimage to Calcutta, India, to seek the advice of Mother Teresa. She spoke sharply with him. She told him to go back home to Wisconsin and be a good CEO so that his company might prosper and keep many people gainfully employed. “Bloom where you're planted,” she told him, so that in Milwaukee the Missionaries of Charity would never find “the poorest of the poor.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“The second-century Letter to Diognetus put it beautifully: “As the soul is in the body, so Christians are in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world…. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Spreading the love of Jesus Christ is a duty of all Christians. We can't keep our faith unless we give it away.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Thus, there is a hidden grandeur in the most ordinary things. St. Josemaria saw this, and he had little patience for those would-be saints with romantic inclinations who saw ordinary life as merely an obstacle to true greatness.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“The little things we do are the building blocks of the big things God has planned, in our lives, in history, and in the spinning out of the cosmos. Indeed, little things matter so much to us because they matter so much to God. That is the plain meaning of Jesus's parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14—31)—a parable of ambition. Twice in that parable Jesus portrays the master (representing God) as saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Thus, far from thinking that works produced by man's own talent and energy are in opposition to God's power, and that the rational creature exists as a kind of rival to the Creator, Christians are convinced that the triumphs of the human race are a sign of God's grace and the flowering of His own mysterious design.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Driven by petty ambition, we serve only ourselves. St. Josemaria put it well: “Those who are ‘ambitious,’ with small, personal, miserable ambitions, cannot understand that the friends of God should seek to achieve something through a spirit of service and without such'ambition.' “ We should never confuse Christian humility and modesty with a will to underachieve.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Through Malachi, God chastises them for “thinking that the Lord's table may be despised” (Malachi 1:7). That's strong language, but it rings true. A man who insists that he loves his wife while he lavishes the finest gifts upon his mistress does not truly love his wife.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“God instituted sacrifice not for His own sake but for our sake. The sacrificial law is a means to God's glorious end: it disciplines His people, focusing their attention on worship, gratitude, sorrow for sin, the need for purity, and the necessity of renouncing everything in order to cling to God.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“St. Augustine once defined peace as “tranquility in order “The plan of life is what finally imposed a spiritual order on my ordinary days. And that order was the necessary precondition of peace.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“St. Josemaria diagnosed this tendency to overwork as a sickness of the spirit. That was before the word “workaholism” was coined. St. Josemaria called the condition “professionalitis”— suggesting a corruption of something good.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“In 1965, in the Council's “Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests” (Pres-byterorum ordinis, 10), the Church proposed a new institutional form, called the “personal prelature.” Such an institution could accommodate both clergy and lay members cooperating to accomplish specific pastoral tasks.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“The two-tiered spirituality created an artificial separation between the clergy and the laity—and thus between the Church and the world.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Thus, the founder of Opus Dei, though he was a priest, did not seek to gather power to the clergy. In fact, he wanted the Catholic laity to discover their own dignity and assume the responsibilities that came with baptism.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Opus Dei's authority extends only to the personal spiritual formation of its members.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Penetration was unnecessary, he explained, because the Church was already there—in Catholics who were busy at their work. He told an interviewer: “I hope the time will come when the phrase ‘the Catholics are penetrating all sectors of society’ will go out of circulation because everyone will have realized that it is a clerical expression…. [They] have no need to ‘penetrate’ the temporal sector for the simple reason that they are ordinary citizens, the same as their fellow citizens, and so they are there already.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Our identification with Christ is a permanent thing; our communion with Christ is as constant as the state of grace in our souls. You and I are the Church; that is our”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Wrong. Christ was not our substitute but our representative, and since His saving passion was representative, it doesn't exempt us from suffering but rather endows our suffering with divine power and redemptive value.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“And on the seventh day God finished His work … and He rested … from all His work which He had done” (Genesis 2:2). Thus, work itself is something divine, something God Himself does. So”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Yet even more than He made man and woman for the sake of work, He made work for the sake of man and woman— because only through work could they become truly godlike. It's”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Isn't it true,” St. Josemaria once said, “that you have seen the need to become a soul of prayer, to reach an intimacy with God that leads to divinization? Such is the Christian faith as always understood by souls of prayer.” And as if to prove the “always” part, he goes on to quote St. Clement of Alexandria, who wrote around the year 203 A.D.: “A man becomes God, because he loves whatever God loves.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“Modern covenant research, however, showed me something entirely different. An ancient covenant was more than a contract. It was the means by which two unrelated parties struck a family bond. They became siblings, spouses, or parent and child. Marriage was a covenant; adoption was a covenant. With His covenant, then, God was not just laying down a law. He was raising up a family. The inevitable consequence of covenant is divine filiation.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“God is the eternal Father of Jesus Christ. And God is Father of those who live in Jesus Christ, through baptism.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“it is God Himself who made this possible, by assuming human flesh in Jesus Christ. In doing so, He humanized His divinity, but He also divinized humanity, and thus He sanctified—made holy—everything that fills up a human life: friendship, meals, family, travel, study, and work.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

“When I blessed those three … I saw three hundred, three hundred thousand, thirty million, three billion … white, black, yellow, of all the colors, all the combinations that human love can produce.”
― Scott Hahn, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei