Who does not want to be happy? Experience says, however, that not everyone achieves it. We daily find uneasiness, tears, and unhappy existences in our own life and in those of others. This unhappiness amounts to an intimate conflict between, on the one hand, the unlimited plentitude towards which we tend, our yearning for the absolute, for transcendence and lasting fulfillment and, on the other, the shabby reality of everyday life, sown with anxiety, prosaic tasks, misery, and frustration. "Everything, everyday is a lot and ugly," Quevedo wrote. Poetry and prose added to the heap. It is as if in our life there were two selves: the adventurer after the absolute, plenitude, heaven and the slithering cynic, doomed to grubfor any old pleasure. Well, since we have fallen into the mousetrap, we are going to eat the cheese, as Luis Landero would say.

Is there anyway to exit this dilemma? We’ve got piles of escape attempts and false starts. Every day we see them: there are those who absolutize money ("there is no idol that cheapens the human being more than money," as Zeldin writes), health, pleasure, beauty, success. And they burn incense unceasingly on the altar of their idol(s). An absolute yes to something gives way to many other noes, be it to family, friendship, one's own conscience or even God himself. But reality always ends up punishing the fugitive.

Our idols are a good thermometer for our scale of values. Who do we idolize more? Perhaps the highest scorer, the highest earner, the billboard chart topper, the most liked or shared, the most talked about... Those who the market is most eager to leave (often suddenly) in a free fall.

While at other times in history, the dominant culture offered firm foundations on which to raise one's life and social existence, today,this is just so flatly not the case. As Adam Zagajewski has written, we live "in a torn world, in a world where basic life values ​​are shattered," where it is not easy to find and share even a few plausible references.

In this context, it amazes and airs one out to read confessions like those of Christian Bobin: "What I love in a person is not his beauty or his strength or his wit; it is the intelligence of the bond that he has found to tie with life.” Perhaps we should value people who succeed in entangling the prose and poetry of life, the outdated and the transcendent, because, although these people are not normally shining stars, as Thoreau noted, "the hero is usually the simplest and darkest of men."

I like to recall that the road to this achievement, that is, to marrying the earth and sky, was already opened up two thousand years ago when God the Son became flesh, like all of us, in the womb of a young woman in a remote Palestinian village. If we really knew what we are saying when we confess to believe that God became man, there would be a radical shift in our lives, like that of Saul of Tarsus. Since then, the first century of our era, from the moment of the Incarnation, the path has been cleared so that the flesh and the spirit can live in harmony. That is, of course, the harmony achievable “in this valley of tears.”

There is nothing, then, fully human that cannot be amassed with the divine. The most prosaic of things has ceased to be at odds with the most sublime. Saint Paul left it etched in stone, "Whether you eat, drink or do anything else, do everything for the glory of God." This idea fascinated Josemaría Escrivá, who proclaimed that, "on earth, divine paths" have been opened up. I was lucky to be here at the University of Navarra on October 8, 1967, fifty years ago. Perhaps I was not fully aware of the relevance of what that priest said. But neither did the echo of the following words fall on deaf ears: “When a Christian carries out with love the most insignificant everyday action, that action overflows with the transcendence of God. That is why I have told you repeatedly, and hammered away once and again on the idea that the Christian vocation consists of making heroic verse out of the prose of each day. 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…”

While the mythical King Midas turned everything he touched into gold, a Christian treasures his unique ability to sprinkle every work of his hands with a bit of light.