Every year Kapuluan, a study center for university students and young professionals, celebrates a family day. It is a concrete gesture of expressing our gratitude to the boys and their families 

for the help they have extended to the center and its activities throughout the years. These activities mainly focus on helping university students to be competent and prestigious professionals in their respective fields.

Moreover, the activities help them discover a deeper plane in their work by learning to spice up everything they do with a supernatural flavor: by offering their work to serve God, family and acquaintances. This only seeks to live and transmit the novel and dynamic spirit that God had entrusted to Opus Dei's founder, St. Josemaría Escrivá.

St. Josemaría taught that God can be found in the most ordinary events of our lives. He said, "Heaven and earth seem to merge, my sons and daughters, on the horizon. But where they really meet is in your hearts, when you sanctify your everyday lives." (Homily, Passionately Loving the World, 8-X-1967) In this manner, he paved a new path to for many Christians that actualized their baptismal calling right where God had placed them in the middle of world.

For the majority of Christian men and women who have been called by God to marriage, the family is a wonderful and fruitful covenant between God and the spouses, and their children. Even early on in the beginnings of Opus Dei, St. Josemaría already saw marriage, not as a second-rate Christian calling as it was then commonly perceived, as a divine calling. This is illustrated in what is now found in his book the Way, when he surprised someone he was spiritually guiding, "You laugh because I tell you that you have a 'vocation for marriage'? Well, you have just that: a vocation." (no. 27)

Later on he would teach: “Husband and wife are called to sanctify their married life and to sanctify themselves in it. It would be a serious mistake if they were to exclude family life from their spiritual development. The marriage union, the care and education of children, the effort to provide for the needs of the family as well as for its security and development, the relationships with other persons who make up the community, all these are among the ordinary human situations that Christian couples are called upon to sanctify.” (Homily, Marriage a Christian Vocation, #23)

Towards the last years of his life he gave numerous catechetical gatherings to his sons and daughters the world over. In many of these he would emphasize on the positive role parents have in their vocation to marriage. “God has made marriage a holy bond, the image of the union of Christ and his Church. (…) Parents are the cooperators of God. (…) If you live marriage as God wishes you to, in a holy way, your house will be a bright and cheerful home, full of peace and joy.” (Homily, Interior Struggle, no. 78) But the home can only be “bright and cheerful, full of peace and joy” through the personal and constant sacrifice of each of its members. Without sacrifice these fruits described by St. Escrivá will not be easily reaped.

* * *

This thread of thought brings to my mind a story about a brother and sister rummaging through their mother’s cabinet. They were enjoying themselves seeing their parent’s marriage album and some other memorabilia. Inside the very same box they found something wrapped in a blue silk clothe. In their curiosity, they unwrapped the object. They found an old broken handle of what seemed to belong to a coffee cup. They felt that it was something that didn’t belong there, and decided to ask their mother about it.

Their mother replied, “Oh, that’s the reason how we met!” The two surprised children asked how a broken piece could have ever brought them together. Their mom told them the story.

She once invited a prospective suitor to dinner with her parents. He, however, unexpectedly brought a friend of his along. “He was to be your dad,” she said, “the first time I saw him, I felt he was the right man.” That feeling totally overtook her and she became very nervous at serving their guests.

“When coffee time came, I was shaking as I prepared the coffee. As I placed a cup beside your dad’s dessert plate, I began to tremble and accidentally tipped the cup and it fell to the floor!.”

“Then what happened?” the children asked. “Did dad help you clean up the mess?”

“No, I quickly picked up the pieces, but I realized that the handle was missing. I told myself that I would simply look for it the next day. In the meantime, I replaced your father’s cup.”

“So this is the missing piece?” the youngest asked.

“Yes. The next day I swept through the entire floor and found it strange that the handle was nowhere to be found.”

“Then who found it?”

“When dad came back for another date, and this time without my previous suitor, he shook my hand and said, ‘Oh, you must have been looking for this piece.’ And that’s how this broken piece brought us together.”

* * *

May this story help us to be grateful that God our Lord wants us to find in marriage and the family a wonderful path to become holy. But this doesn’t only depend on the fact that there aren’t any problems or trials within marriage. Let us understand, that whatever difficulties there may be –with prayer, sacrifice, the Sacraments, and God’s grace– will soon enough be the very ingredient to strengthen our love and self-giving.

Rather, let us learn to break our proud thoughts, our attachments to our plans and comfort, our sensitivities and critical thoughts, etc. In doing so, we would have truly made a sacrifice that would make our homes, our families a source of light and joy.

* * *

The youngest child then smiled mischievously at his mom and asked, “Mom? Does this mean that it’s alright for me to bring out the vase that I broke last week?” [That’s a different story!]