Love leads to the sharing of material goods, talents, and spiritual riches; it is a light that spreads, involving people in new relationships. It renews the relationship with the Transcendent and nurtures a spirituality of communion.

***
Love is also an integral part of everything related to physical life, such as food, health, rest and associated recreational and sporting activities; indeed the whole course of human life, which includes sickness and death, culminating in the resurrection of the body at the end of time. Furthermore, all of creation, where humans live and of which they are a synthesis, was seen by Chiara Lubich as being “in a relationship of love: each thing with each thing”. It was in 1949 that Chiara grasped how the relationship between beings is characterized by giving: “I have been created as a gift for the one next to me and the one next to me has been created by God as a gift for me.” It is an experience that involves all of creation: “[Things] were all linked among themselves by love, all, so to speak, in love with one another. So if the stream flowed into the lake, it was for love. If one pine tree rose beside another, it was for love.”

On Feb. 26, 1999, with the award of an honorary doctorate in Humanities (Psychology), the University of Malta recognized “Chiara Lubich’s contribution to the field of human thought insofar as she has translated the nucleus of the Christian message into praxis and into a method of research, and particularly has offered to humanistic disciplines an original hermeneutical key of the human subject, when she founded a model of spiritual life characterized by equilibrium between respect for the individuality of the human person and the reciprocity of interpersonal relationships on the one hand, and the positive evaluation of human suffering and of what is negative in both personal and collective history on the other. In this manner she has helped to cultivate within the field of psychology an integral vision of the human person while in the field of education she has fostered the development of new systems of pedagogy.”[2]