Whoever responds to God, giving his or her life to Him, is called to be in a relationship of contemplation and action, in perfect harmony, by being in the world but not of the world.
Those who respond by offering their lives to God are called to a deeper communion with Him and with their brothers and sisters. A dialogue, of relationship between contemplation and action, balanced, being in the world but not of the world (cf. Jn. 15:15,17;11:16-18). The totalitarian way in which the focolarino and focolarina carry out this response, characterizes the lay style of daily living, with no habit or convent that would somehow separate them from the world. They combine being totally given to God, like nuns in a convent, and being in the midst of the world, like normal lay people. What Chiara writes in a well-known meditation from the second half of the 1950s expresses this reality well: to penetrate the highest contemplation and to remain mingled among all, man next to man.
Understanding that everything can be lived with the same sacredness by fulfilling the will of God that the different circumstances manifest, even as a young girl, Chiara wished to live each day, life, completely for God. And the different aspects of life are conceived as linked by the golden thread of the same Love of which they are an expression.
In her 1967 diary, referring to life in the focolare, Chiara writes: What we must do is to love God. To Him all our being, our time, our work, our love, our intellect, everything. And in order to express this, it is incumbent upon us to pour out love also on creatures. We must do it for Him, to continue to love Him. We must be perennial contemplatives. How much we are lacking! And what freedom we would find in this one great love. How at the mere thought of it one feels liberated from a thousand ties that life in society with others places on us. No, we only have to love. “What does it matter, (we would say to everything that could be there or happen to us) Loving You matters!” Yes, thus, this is God’s will for us[1].
Every action thus comes to be unified, not unified with one another, but harmonized, like the colours of the rainbow, all light, in which white light refracts through a drop of water. For every aspect of life, sustained by the same light that is love, expresses, though in different ways, with different colorations, the same light. Just as under each colour of the rainbow, there is the whole of light, expressed in red, orange, yellow, etc., so under each aspect there is the whole of life, expressed in that particular way.
