# A Spectacular Light

An episode of [St. Josemaria Institute Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/966458405), 22 Sep 2026, 30 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1862514/episodes/19730671-a-spectacular-light.mp3

In this meditation, Fr. Peter Armenio brings to life several stories from the life of St. Josemaria, including the footprints in the snow that helped him recognize his vocation and the founding of Opus Dei on October 2, 1928. Fr. Peter helps us consider the importance of being a contemplative soul in the midst of our occupation so that we can bear witness to the love of Christ in all we say and do. PAUSE & REFLECT: • Could I become a more ready apostolic instrument for the Holy Spirit to spread the blaze of Jesus Christ in and through my life? • Am I at risk of becoming worldly, and if so, what am I going to do about becoming a more contemplative soul? • What if I were to entrust myself and my resolutions from this time of prayer to my guardian angel? THANK YOU FOR LISTENING! If you enjoyed this meditation, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your feedback is important to us, and each rating and review helps expand our reach to more listeners! Support the show

## Transcript

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence; I beg your pardon for my sins and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
Well, as we begin our dialogue with Jesus Christ, we humbly ask for His mother's intercession and the intercession of Saint Josemaria, because we want to contemplate an event that is meant to rechristianize the world and to reach every nook and cranny where you find human beings in three basic arenas: the family, the workplace, and any kind of social gathering. We're contemplating a preternatural light, if you will, a mystical experience that is comprised of a message and a mandate and a vision, and that is the October 2, 1928, illumination received by Saint Josemaria after over 10 years of intense prayer and penance to see exactly what the Lord wanted of him.
To give it some context, one fine day, after a severe snowstorm in northern Spain, the teenage Josemaria was walking, perhaps walking home or walking to some other place to school. I don't know the particular facts surrounding this experience he had, but to cut to the chase, he encountered actual footprints in the snow. There weren't too many snow blowers in those days, so snow probably remained on the ground for quite a while. It was very cold out, and those were penitential footprints of a Carmelite friar leading into his friary or monastic house. Those footprints were a medium through which, to put it in modern jargon, the Holy Spirit hit him over the head. In fact, he describes it with a Spanish phrase, "una gracia tumbativa", and I translate that, and no Spanish speaker has contradicted me, so I think I'm in the right neighborhood. It's a grace that could be considered a knockout punch. He was about 17 years old, maybe 16, and it changed his life drastically. I surmised that he wanted to start a family himself and become a professional architect, maybe a journalist, since he had a gift for good writing. And then and there, he realized that the Lord wanted something of him. He didn't know what it was, and felt that to facilitate whatever the Lord wanted, he would become a priest, and he decided then and there he would give his whole life to Jesus Christ, serving him as a priest. The diocesan priest, as a way of being more docile to the grace of God, and to have those priestly powers that would also facilitate whatever work the Lord wanted of him.
For the next 10 plus years, he spent hours in prayer. Even before he went to the seminary, he spent afternoons in his parish church in prayer; he had the grace to do that. That is, in the seminary, he continued this ceaseless petition to the Lord to know what he wanted, and he used the phrase of the blind beggar: "Lord, may I see that I may see; that I may see!" That was his aspiration. Tell me what you want.
And to reinforce that prayer, he would make many pilgrimages to the cathedral in Saragossa, where the seminary was located, and that church was called Our Lady of the Pillar. Reliable tradition tells us that Saint James, who's a patron saint of Spain, was in the Iberian Peninsula evangelizing, and it was very difficult under a virulent persecution as well in those ancient Roman times. And on a broken pillar, pillars were very much in vogue in those ancient times; the Blessed Mother appeared, encouraging him to keep at it. Well, fast forward a millennium and a half, missionaries from Spain would convert a significant portion of the world: all of South America, the Philippines, Central America, etc. And so that pillar is in that church with a small image of Mary, and Saint Josemaria would go to that shrine, that church, and pray to her. And it seems like the Beatles plagiarized Saint Josemaria because his aspiration was in Latin, "ut sit", which means "let it be", and sometimes he'd modify it and say "Domina, ut sit or Lady, let it be."
Now, being priest of Opus Dei, a listener may think that, well, I'm biased towards it, that I'll favor it and that I'm called to serve Our Lord through Opus Dei. But I could safely say, and the data backs me up, that this enlightenment illumination is very special. Being an amateur teacher of the history of the church. I even authored a textbook many years ago called The History of the Church; it's not a very original title. And the first mandate to evangelize was preached to all nations. Different versions, but same idea, same message. Be my witness in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Saint Paul will elaborate a bit that it is the Lord's will that every human being receive the knowledge of the truth, and we see that nervous, healthy nervous tension in the Acts of the Apostles and the various letters of the New Testament this holy anxiety to get the message out.
From then on, there was derivations of that divine commission: monastic orders, religious congregations, missionaries, service to the sick, service to the poor, ransoming Christian slaves, vocational schools... This is all very much the work of the Holy Spirit, but they were more, I would say, they were subsets or particular expressions of that divine commission. But the original divine commission was not expressed in particular ways in terms of different orders, different congregations, and different institutions.
One reason is because the practice of Christianity was a capital offense, and for 300 years, the spread of the faith was the work of the laity. It could be the oldest Christian document after the New Testament, the Apostles' Creeds up there, the Didache, which is an instruction scroll, probably in those days, the rudiments of the Catholic faith. But this document describes the Church (the Letter to Diognetus). I would estimate that it was written probably 140 A.D. something like that, and you would not know that you had priests, bishops, and popes (maybe you would have to read it more carefully). The main message was the lay person who would witness the light of Christ, and would witness the charity of Christ, and maybe I'm reading into it too much, but the writer who was anonymous-it's called the Letter to Diognetus- is kind of miffed and surprised how they manage to live a pristine chastity, charity, chastity, and courage. They'll die for their faith, and they actually love those who hate them.
What makes this October 2 event unique and special doesn't make the recipient special, but it makes the actual enlightenment special because it is turning the clock back, way back. That doesn't abrogate the other beautiful, necessary expressions of the Holy Spirit in terms of different movements and different institutions and religious orders and organizations. But what makes it special is that, basically, that light of October 2, 1928, was preached to all nations through the laity.
And why did the Lord do that? Well, to give it more context, as we pray about this light, the culture of death rushed into the 20th century like a tidal wave or tsunami. Political regimes based on hatred of God, kind of a first; the French Revolution was not too far from that as well, but especially Nazism and communism; the Bolshevik Revolution had occurred 11 years previous and Nazi Germany was on the horizon. Practical atheism in the West, where Jesus gets in the way because he's irrelevant. Religious persecutions that have taken a toll, such a great toll in human life, that it hadsurpassed the early centuries of the church. That comes from Saint John Paul.
To preach to all nations, to rechristianize the world or christianize the world, depends. The parishes, though indispensable, and the different institutions, though quite necessary, the only way the church could get into every nook and cranny when we pass a city, and we see those lights on in the different rooms, the different offices. That those lights, those natural, those electrical lights, should be symbols that Christ wants to be there. How do you get Him there?!
I've had the experience. I'm talking now quite a lot, maybe 1000s of people, since I've been a priest 46 years, where people want to come to Christ, learn more about Christ. Non-Christians want to become Catholic. Nominal Catholics want to become holy. No non-Catholic Christians want to become Catholic. Many individuals want to turn their life around through deep repentance because of my circumstances, and I could speak probably for many, many priests; I would be flipping hamburgers, metaphorically speaking, if the lay people did not bring me their friends, their family members, their spouses, their boyfriends, their girlfriends, their colleagues at work, and invariably they tell me, these people who come to talk with me, to talk to other priests. "I like what I see in my friend", or in my father-in-law, or my mom, or my grandmother, or my brother, or I love the change I've seen in my sister. Whatever it is, I want a piece of that action.
On a natural level, let's put ourselves in the circumstances. These are tough times for Saint Josemaria. Saint Joseph Maria will witness Spain's greatest age of martyrdom. He will experience a hatred of the church unseen. He will receive that light under those very difficult circumstances, where he'strying to financially support his widowed mother and his sister and his brother. He was a civil lawyer and a canon lawyer, and he earned a very meager salary teaching civil law. He was praying hard that he would still see what the Lord wanted, and Our Lord gave him a light that would is meant to change the world. And he was labeled as a dreamer, as crazy, as insane. And to be very honest, without the gift of faith and without the grace of God, if a 26-year-old kid came up to me and said, "I've received the light from the Lord to re-Christianize the world to change the world. I'm hungry because I don't have enough money for food. I'm living under very Spartan conditions. I'm totally unknown." You could still smell the chrism from the anointing of his ordination. I would think he's crazy. I probably wouldn't pay attention to him. With the light of faith and the grace of God, of course, yes.
Now, that vision of bringing the Lord all everywhere-oh, there's a long way to go. The surface has hardly been scratched. But that spirit of Saint Josemaria, that spirit of Opus Dei, that advocates or promotes centering on Jesus in your work, in your family life, in your unsanctimonious activities like buying toothpaste or shampoo; that everything has to be centered on Christ. That message has been embraced by many on all continents. If there were more people living in Antarctica, I guess we would be there too. But all the populated continents.
I remember an anecdote. I just remember a young man who was, I think, he may have been an army or a marine captain, and he had a layover in Chicago, and he was going to the Middle east a number of years ago, going to Iraq during the Iraqi War, and he was looking for a priest to talk to and go to confession. And I answered the door, and there he was. Leave for the Mideast within two days. Had a layover in Chicago, and we talked about the work of evangelization of Opus Dei, and I gave him the vision, and I said one day, even in Iraq, the spirit of Opus Dei is meant to go there too. It's non-Christian, but it's meant to go there as well. And it was around June 26, which is the feast day of Saint Josemaria. And he listened, and then about I don't know a week later, around that date of June 26, he sends me pictures of a mass of Saint Josemaria in a makeshift chapel with people in there, in Basra. And he reminded me of what Saint Josemaria said because he was accused of being a dreamer, just like the different Josephs in the Bible-- "Dream, and your dream will fall short!" And this is a point in The Way, and it's I think is important to read it when within the context of when he composed it, because that was during the Civil War, the end towards the end, where it was a very dark chapter, very tragic chapter, and this is what he says. Let me read (The Way, no. 801): "Through the world still echoes that divine cry: 'I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already!' And you see: it has nearly all died out…Will you not help to spread the blaze?" And one more point (The Way, no. 942): "Bear in mind, son, that you are not just a soul who has joined other souls in order to do a good thing. That is a lot, but it's still little. You are the Apostle who is carrying out an imperative command from Christ."
An important piece of this, so he gets this light. And we unpack it, and it applies to the lay people to bring the church to the people, like the early church did. Don't wait for the people. I don't know if Saint Josemaria realized that the church at least would be packed. There wasn't this low percentage of practicing Catholics today and this was not the case then, and to spread the faith according to the teachings of the Gospel, loving God whole heart, whole mind, whole soul, to be centered on Christ, which is the normal way to live our faith. It's the job of the laity, but and he says, in order to pull it off, the laity have to love Jesus. Let's just use some Spanish saints because that's probably his frame of reference. They had to love Jesus as much as Teresa of Avila. We also had devotions to Saint Therese as much as Saint Therese of Lisieux, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Dominic, and the great saints that mark the history of the church.
Perhaps if he founded Opus Dei today, he would say that hairdresser, that cab driver, that construction worker, that lawyer, that accountant, that teacher, is called to devote his or her life to Jesus Christ with the same dedication and the same fervor as Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa, in terms of her extraordinary calling to serve the poorest of the poor, the teacher's calling, the administrative assistant, the physician, to adore the Lord and love the Lord wholeheartedly through their family life, through their profession, and so the lay person has to be very much centered on the Eucharist, on the Word of God.
And maybe to finish up, there was an anecdote. A cardinal came to Opus Dei headquarters to congratulate Saint Josemaria that the Second Vatican Council had made solemn a lot of his teachings, especially about the lay person's call to bring Christ into the modern world. And it seems like Saint Josemaria threw a little bit of cold water on his parade and said, "Thank you, Your Eminence. They will change the world if they're contemplative, if they're centered on Jesus. But the world will sweep them away if they're not." And thank God there's been so many exemplary lay people who'vebenefited from this light, who brought Christ to many, many people. Let's make that resolution first, to foster that sentiment.
Lord, give me the grace to really want to be totally centered on you, and help me not to underestimate the amount of good I could do if I am struggling to fall more and more in love with you, and help me feel that urgency to spread this treasure that is yourself, Jesus.
And we ask for the intercession of the Blessed Mother and of Saint Josemaria, so we can concretize those desires, those sentiments, in specific resolutions.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me in this time of prayer. I ask your help in putting them into effect. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

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