DYA was an academy where students prepared for university entrance exams. Later it became a university residence. Its initials, DYA, stood for Derecho y Arquitectura (Law and Architecture), but also for Dios y Audacia (God and Daring).
Why God? And what kind of daring?
Why God?
Since the young men who frequented the academy and their friends already had a Christian background, Saint Josemaría told them: “Rather than giving you Christian doctrine, what I’m going to do is teach you to have a more personal relationship with God. I’m going to teach you how to relate to God, who is our Father.”
“You write: ‘To pray is to talk with God. But about what?’ About what? About Him, about yourself: joys, sorrows, successes and failures, noble ambitions, daily worries, weaknesses! And acts of thanksgiving and petitions: and Love and reparation. In a word: to get to know Him and to get to know yourself: ‘to get acquainted!’” (The Way, no. 91)
May you “set out along the way of prayer and of Love”... That’s what Saint Josemaría writes in the prologue of The Way, a book originally written for a group of friends, the young students involved in DYA. He explains in a letter: “With this publication, I tried to present a gradual inclined plane, which souls could climb little by little, helping them to understand the divine call and become contemplative souls in the middle of society. It is meant to be a book that leads one to get to know and to love God and to serve everyone.”
From the month of March 1934, while still living on Luchana Street, Fr. Josemaría (then a young priest) began preaching monthly recollection for the university students who came to DYA, in the Redemptorist church. They didn’t so much hear about God as learn how to hear Him themselves, forming a personal relationship with Him in everyday life.
For example, during the recollection, he invited them to go to the Tabernacle in their hearts, through their imagination, to keep Jesus company. Those were experiences that made it easier to talk to Him in the Eucharist sincerely, devoutly, and personally.
In The Way, he wrote: “Tell Jesus, really present in the Tabernacle, of the cares and worries of your day. And you will receive light and strength for your life as a Christian” (The Way, no. 554).
The certainty that he was always in the presence of God, his Father, and could therefore talk to Him with the simplicity of a child, led Saint Josemaría to tell the young men at DYA: “Like little children, if you can’t talk to Him much, just look at Him from time to time… and He will smile at you.”*
What kind of daring?
Opening an “academy” in a 110-square-meter apartment, with no money, was bold... And the fruit of a desire to bring many people closer to God. Saint Josemaría had the audacity to begin; the courage to propose a demanding Christian life; the daring to dream big.
One of the DYA students, Pedro Rocamora, wrote: “Dare to be an apostle, dare to sacrifice yourself, audacity to do good, dare to help those who suffer and those in need, dare to give advice even when it’s inconvenient, to pull a friend out of the clutches of sin. That’s what the daring Saint Josemaría preached was for.”
Dare to...
- Do God’s will: “Say to her: Mother, my Mother — yours, because you are hers on many counts — may your love bind me to your Son’s Cross: may I not lack the Faith, nor the courage, nor the daring, to carry out the will of our Jesus” (The Way, no. 497).
- Be “a little crazy:” “Don’t be content to ask Jesus pardon just for your own faults: don’t love Him just with your own heart… Console Him for every offence that has been, is, or will be done to Him. Love Him with all the strength of all the hearts of all those who have most loved Him. Be daring: tell Him that you are crazier about Him than Mary Magdalen, than either of his two Teresas, that you love Him madly, more than Augustine and Dominic and Francis, more than Ignatius and Xavier” (The Way, no. 402).
- Ask for anything: “Be more daring still, and, when you need something, don't ask, but — always mindful of the Fiat — say, ‘Jesus, I want that… and that… and that,’ for this is the way children ask” (The Way, no. 403).
The kind of daring Saint Josemaría wanted those young people to have was one born of love. “He spoke to us,” recalls Fernando Alonso Martínez Saumell, one of the students, “about work, about study, about the love of God. About how it was good for us to be ambitious, very ambitious, extremely so… but for Christ!”
A bold idea born at DYA
With no resources and no technical know-how, the founder of Opus Dei looked for a way to stay connected during the summer. You could call it the 1930s version of a WhatsApp group.
When DYA had already become a university residence, and as a way of keeping in touch with the students over the summer, Saint Josemaría came up with an idea: to send the same letter to all the residents and friends of DYA. From their written replies, those who were with him in Madrid gathered bits of news about what each person was doing and then put together a kind of “circular letter,” sharing a little of everyone’s life. That way, everyone knew something about everyone else.
This small publication, which they called Noticias (News), was produced with a very simple, homemade kind of photocopier of the time. It opened with a few words from Saint Josemaría encouraging them to rest, study languages, make good use of their time, and also spend time with friends, to be with others, not just comfortable at home all day. Then came short updates about each person, and at the end they were encouraged to keep writing to the residence.
* From Camino, Edición Crítico – Histórica (our translation).
