Rome, 1978
When someone passes by us during the day, at work or at school, our only task is to always love.
But we must love as Jesus.
To do this, we must always listen to his voice speaking within us, so that we do not make mistakes by exaggeration or by default. The Gospel warns us, for example, not to give holy things to dogs, and even though we can and should always consider ourselves inferior to everyone else, since God alone knows the graces he has given us and which we have not made enough use of, we must be very careful not to speak of ‘holy things’ in surroundings which have not been prepared to receive them.
Otherwise they will be despised, ‘trampled on’, and we will be ridiculed, ‘torn to pieces’, as the Gospel puts it.
At the same time, we must remember that the Gospel itself also teaches us to love our neighbour as ourselves and, therefore, to share the spiritual goods we may have, the light which God gives us, with whoever is disposed to receive them.
In the first case, we must bear witness to Jesus only with our life. In the second case, we must also bear witness with words.
Christians who seek to present the life of the Gospel from an adventurous, poetic or romantic angle, trying to attract people with a pseudo Gospel message which flatters self-love, gives people a sense of being entrusted with an apparent mission, and gets their imagination working, can err by exaggeration. We must not take from the life of the Gospel what is its greatest beauty: the normality of a limpid, harmonious, supernatural life which is not artificial or exaggerated, but is simple, like nature.
Nothing is known of the activities of Mary, the mother of the Creator and of all creatures among her contemporaries who were also her children. She only did the will of God: she loved Jesus and helped the apostles. And I believe that no one has lived the Gospel better than her.
Christians who are tied up too much in their own duties, who see the will of God only in them, and who close themselves in the meantime to what he expresses through circumstances, can err by default. Those people who err by default end up, for example, not loving whoever passes them by. They live in little intimacy with God, because they do not listen to his voice in each present moment of the day. Although believing themselves rightly attached to their own better duties, they are, in fact, also attached to themselves. They do not know the poetry of the Gospel, its divine adventure, because they do not know how to see the golden thread of the plan made by God’s provident hand, which illuminates and designs the life of every human being, including the lives of the simplest and most unknown people.
Those who sin by exaggerating sometimes appear to be over-excited, while those who sin by default are boring and gloomy. Their presence says nothing and drives people away.
True Christians are the ones in whom Jesus lives always: everyone draws near to them in love and awe, because from them, as from Jesus, love and truth shine out: He is the light of the world.
Chiara Lubich
Taken from Chiara Lubich, Yes Yes, No No, New City London,1977, p. 57 / Da Scritti Spirituali/2, L’essenziale di oggi, 1978, p.164
