Riccardi

Castel Gandolfo, December 28, 1997 (From a talk given by Chiara Lubich to Focolare members on the Word of Life...) If people were to ask: what is your 'uniform' like, without hesitating we would give just one answer arising from the charism that God gave Chiara: mutual love, without limits. In that talk Chiara shared her own experience. She was in Switzerland when she encountered the beauty and visibility of different charisms in the life of the Church. She asked herself how the charism of unity could best be seen. It was only when she met her first companion, Natalia Dallapiccola, that she was able to reply: I understood, it is the mutual love of the Gospel: "By this all will know that you are my disciples"... “As I was walking through the streets of Einsiedeln, in Switzerland, I saw many people from different religious Orders going by. It was lovely to see the different types of habit worn by the various groups of Sisters and priests, against the background of

Castel Gandolfo, 18 June 1988 This was a question a little girl asked Chiara during a congress. Chiara shares her ‘secret’ and the fruit of suffering that has been loved. (…) “How do you spend your day, in sadness or in joy? In particular, what do you do when you are not happy? Chiara: She asks me what I do when I am not happy. This is very important. … You need to learn it by heart. … When we are not happy, we must go deep down into our hearts and say to Jesus, "Listen Jesus, I feel a suffering, but you felt suffering too. I am happy to be like you and I offer you this suffering." And then we must start to love the others right away, and the suffering will go away. Jesus takes it away. It is as if he puts it in a parcel and takes our suffering away. This slide shows a little boy who is sad, I think. But he offered up his