Rosaura, twenty-eight, is the daughter of Henar Zamora, who was a professor of classical Greek at the University of Valladolid. She and her three siblings grew up in a lively, open-minded household where different beliefs blended together. Though her parents were married in the Church, they soon stopped practicing their faith and turned to a spirituality centered on energies. “We grew up in a mix of what we learned about Christianity at school and what our parents taught us about other beliefs. Everything was very mixed together,” Rosaura recalls.
Her parents were restless seekers, actively searching for the truth wherever they could find it. Everything changed when they found that truth in the Catholic faith. In a previously recorded testimony (since Henar passed away last year) she described the turning point in their journey:
“The radical difference when you understand, through faith, what the truth is, is that everything has a meaning. Everything gains this depth that it didn't have before. In those other spiritualities, when you are wandering and searching, you find some answers, or rather, solutions to things that happen to you… But when you discover the truth through faith, everything starts to fit together.”
At the time, however, teenage Rosaura and her siblings saw none of that clarity. “I thought, ‘My parents have lost their minds,’” she admits. “Until recently, they'd been talking about energies and all that, and suddenly they were telling me that the truth was in Christ!”
But Henar and her husband had moved to a different stage. With emotion, Henar described what their conversion meant:
“Each of us has our own story. And mine... As the pieces fell into place, I saw that it was all part of a bigger story. I could read my own story of salvation up to that point, and everything made sense, even the bad things, because God’s infinite love allowed everything to serve a purpose, leading me toward something greater.”
When my husband and I experienced our conversion, the entire family became part of this new environment.
Henar recalls how their second son, who was finishing his physics degree at the time, told them he felt called to religious life. “In Opus Dei, he found people who helped him a lot. Today, he’s a Dominican.”
Despite Rosaura’s initial confusion and inner resistance to her parents' radical life change, she remembers that harmony gradually returned to their home as she and her siblings began to understand their parents’ new perspective. Little by little, they, too, started drawing closer to the Church and seeking formation in the Catholic faith.
Rosaura says her own conversion happened at nineteen when she attended a summer camp organized by the Communion and Liberation movement. She acknowledges that, at the time, her life was easy and comfortable, but she still felt an inner longing for something more. She describes it like this: “I think what I was really looking for was Someone, to have that encounter with Christ. I didn’t realize it at the time.”
That first encounter with Christ came during the Communion and Liberation summer camp. But that wasn’t the end of her journey. From her Jesuit education, she learned how to pray through the Spiritual Exercises; from her involvement with young people in Communion and Liberation, she learned how to share her faith. Through her mother’s work, she also had regular contact with the spirituality of the Dominicans, joining them for Easter celebrations. Eventually, she sought more doctrinal formation at an Opus Dei center.
God always respects each person’s pace.
Henar and her husband found their place in the Church when they discovered their vocation as supernumeraries of Opus Dei. A few years later, Rosaura also realized that this was her calling. She remembers that it took time for her to understand it, and she struggles to explain exactly how she recognized the call:
“I don’t know. It just feels so natural… The message of Opus Dei is very simple (…) I think that’s what’s most striking about it: you don’t have to do anything extraordinary to bring God into your life or to stay close to Him.”
Both Henar and Rosaura agree that when you have received and learned so much, the only possible response is to give of yourself. “You can’t just stay on the shore,” they say. Their gratitude to God compels them to share what they have received.