Rocca di Papa, 9 July 1974
Before her Chiara has the young people (Gen1) of the Movement. Drop by drop, she wishes to transmit to them the whole patrimony of light and wisdom that she has received from God. Here we have her relationship with the Eucharist
(…)
God is Love: what an infinitely meaningful treasure is contained in these words! God is Love. He is not a God who is far away, static and inaccessible. God is Love and He comes towards each one of us in a thousand different ways. We must only want it.
Let’s look around us, Gen, to discover together to what folly of love our God … was moved by His love for us. Let’s look to see if in the world there is any trace of His love, any sign of His presence.
Let’s search for Him, not only to affirm a truth, not out of curiosity, good though it may be, but in order to draw near to His presence, to expose ourselves to the rays of His sun, to allow ourselves to be enlightened by His wisdom and inflamed by His Spirit. If we do this, we will possess Him more and more; we will fill our lives with Him to the point that He will overflow from our lives onto others.
Where He appears most evident, almost near enough to touch, is in the Eucharist. Dear Gen, you can’t imagine what Jesus in the Eucharist meant to the generation that preceded you. I would like to tell you about this at great length… The Ideal which was coming to life was extremely new and had to undergo a detailed study by the Church. Living with uncertainty was like our daily bread. “Are we on the right track?” Our hearts told us that we were, but only the Church could confirm it for us. The first generation had to put down the roots of this splendid tree (which is the entire Movement including the second generation) through trials which are necessary for a Work of God. Who gave us the courage to go ahead? Who sustained us? Jesus in the Eucharist.
We thought: we still are not able to have an audience with the Pope, with the Vicar of Christ, but every day, in every moment, we can have an audience with Christ Himself. We went to Jesus and said to Him: we know that the Pope is your Vicar, command him, tell him that we are his children, that our Movement wants only to serve the Church. And Jesus did this in an astonishing way: an almost countless number of approvals, both written and oral, followed. Do you understand that with Him we are all-powerful? The Gen must have the right sense of values and make this idea their own: we can speak with Him, the Almighty, every day; we can tell Him about our difficulties, about our joys; we can entrust to Him the Gen Movement, the Church, the unity of Christians, the unity of peoples, ….
I think that also the gen sometimes say: how beautiful it would have been to be alive in the times of Jesus! Well, we must believe in the love of God in this, too, and doing so I feel like saying that it is almost better to be alive in these times. In fact, in those days the presence of Jesus was limited to Palestine; now it is all over the globe. And now something else makes me prefer to be alive in these times. God became man in order to save us, and once He was a man, He even wanted to become food so that we could nourish ourselves with Him and become another Jesus. Now, one thing is seeing Jesus and another thing is being another Jesus here on earth (in a certain way). Eucharist, therefore, Eucharist. Gen, to say the word Gen and to say Eucharist is to affirm two things which refer to one another.
1 The Gen are the young people of the Focolare Movement.
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