Who doesn't want to be happy? Experience tells us, however, that not everyone does. On the contrary, we see every day, in our own lives and in those of others, distresses and tears, existences lacking in harmony. An intimate discordance between, on the one hand, the unlimited plenitude to which we tend, the yearning for the infinite and the absolute, for transcendent and lasting fulfillment staff ; and, on the other hand, the shabby reality of the day to day, sown with anxiety, prosaic tasks, misery, short bursts, frustration. Quevedo wrote: "Everything in everyday life is much and ugly". Poetry and prose at each other's throats, in unequal combat. As if in our life there were two "I's": the adventurer of the absolute, of plenitude, of heaven; and the cynical and crawling one, doomed to sickle as much enjoyment as the earth offers. Anyway, since we have fallen into the mousetrap, let's eat the cheese, as Luis Landero would say.

Any successful solution to this apparent dilemma? Escapes and evasions, false starts, galore. We see them every day: there are those who absolutize money, health, pleasure, beauty and success. And they burn incense incessantly on the altar of their idol. Because an absolute yes to something is fed by many noes to everything else, be it family, friendship, conscience or even God himself. But reality always ends up punishing the fugitive. I share the opinion of the British writer Theodore Zeldin, that "there is no idol that demeans the human being more than money".

Our idols are a good thermometer of our scale of values. Who do we idolize the most? Maybe the one who scores the most goals, earns the most money, sells the most music, gets the most screen share, gets the most media coverage... The one who the market raises the most, and then, sometimes suddenly, leaves in free fall. And idols are also a good thermometer of the social quotation of values.

If at other times in history the dominant culture offered a firm instructions on which to build one's own life and social coexistence, today this is emphatically not the case. As the last award Princess of Asturias for Letters, Adam Zagajewski, wrote, we live "in a world torn apart, in a world where basic vital values are in tatters"; where it is not easy to find a minimum of plausible points of reference to share.

It is astonishing and refreshing to read today confessions such as that of the French writer 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 he has been able to knot with life". Perhaps we should discover and value more those who are able to combine the prose and the poetry of life; the outdated and the transcendent; even if these people are not shining stars, because, as Henry David Thoreau noted, "the hero is usually the simplest and most obscure of men".

I like to recall that the way to this achievement, that is, to "marry" earth and heaven, was already open to everyone two thousand years ago, when God the Son became flesh, like any of us, in the womb of a little girl who lived in a lost village in Palestine. If we really knew what we were saying when we confessed to believe that God became man, there would be a radical change in our lives, like Saul of Tarsus. Since then, in the first century of our era, from the moment of the Incarnation, the path has been open so that the flesh and the spirit can live in harmony. Always, of course, with the harmony attainable "in this valley of tears".

There is no longer anything fully human that cannot be amassed with the divine. The most prosaic has ceased to be at odds with the most sublime. St. Paul left it in writing: "Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Cor 10:31). It is an idea that fascinated one of the precursors of the Second Vatican Council, Josemaría Escrivá, who proclaimed to the four winds that "the divine ways of the earth" had been opened. I was fortunate enough to be present at campus at the University of Navarre on that October 8, 1967, 50 years ago now. I was then a second year student of degree program in Seville. Perhaps I was not fully aware of the significance of what that priest, the future St. Josemaría, was saying. But the echo of those words has not died out in my ears: "When a Christian carries out the most insignificant of daily actions with love, it overflows with the transcendence of God. That is why I have repeated to you, with a repeated hammering, that the Christian vocation consists in making hendecasyllables of the prose of each day. On the horizon line, my children, heaven and earth seem to meet. But no, where they really come together is in your hearts, when you live holy ordinary lives..."

If the mythical King Midas turned everything he touched into gold, the Christian treasures the unprecedented School to decorate with a bath of light everything that comes out of his hands.