The Way by St. Josemaría Escrivá: Holiness in the Ordinary

Why I picked up The Way

I'd just finished a review on Catholic fasting, and before that a video on the red pill movement — a worldview I used to actually believe. Action, action, action, no accountability to anything higher than yourself. I wanted something written by a man who took discipline further than any self-help book I'd read, so I picked up The Way by St. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. Born in Spain in 1902, died in 1975, canonized in 2002. Opus Dei means "the work of God," and that's basically the whole book in three words.

It's 176 pages. Ninety-nine maxims, grouped by theme — direction, character, prayer, purity — most of them three or four sentences long. It reads like Proverbs, not a memoir. I highlighted more of this book than almost anything I've read this year.

The question that reframed everything

The book opens on a question I couldn't shake: what if God isn't calling you to do more, but to do what you're already doing — tying your shoes, making your calls, running your business — with holiness? I stand in Times Square most days looking at 40- and 50-story buildings, all built for man, all built for mana. Nothing wrong with money. But Escrivá's point, straight out of Augustine, is that you're either building the City of God or the city of man. Most of what's around me is built for the second one.

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His answer isn't "quit your job and become a monk." It's sanctify the job you already have. Add a supernatural motive to your ordinary work and it gets sanctified — that's a direct line from the book, and it's the one I keep coming back to when a Tuesday is nothing but emails and closings.

Silence before action

The maxim that hit hardest: prayer, then atonement, then action, in that order. I used to live the red pill version of that sequence, which is just action, and who cares about the rest. My soul was dying on a treadmill of more money, more stuff, more noise, and I didn't know it because I never sat still long enough to notice.

One thing I've actually built into my life from this: I stopped checking my phone in elevators, going back four or five years now. Every single time, everyone else pulls theirs out for one floor of silence they can't sit through. That's the modern problem in miniature. Escrivá's fix is blunt — sit in silence before you act, because God might have a different path than the one you're already sprinting toward.

Work isn't the punishment, it's the path

This is the one I'd hand to anyone building a company:

• Diligence, order, punctuality are virtues, not personality traits
• "Don't say that's the way I am, it's my character. It's your lack of character."
• You don't leave your job to follow Christ — you transform the job with Christ

I've used that line on character more than once this year, usually right after making an excuse for being late or sloppy. It's also changed how present I am at Mass and how I approach confession — a priest actually pushed me once on whether I was really repenting or just running the same script every Saturday.

Who should read this

If you've read a lot of soft, therapeutic Christian books and walked away thinking something was missing, this is the antidote. It reads like a father, not a life coach — direct, sometimes harsh, and short enough that "I don't have time" isn't an excuse.

Comparing myself to Escrivá, or to Francis of Assisi, or Padre Pio, mostly showed me how far I am from any of it. That's the point. The Way doesn't ask you to admire holiness from a distance. It asks what ordinary thing you're doing today — laundry, emails, a call you don't want to make — and whether you're willing to offer it up instead of just getting through it.