Castel Gandolfo, 9 December 1995
From a talk to the focolarine.
The charism of unity has its root in the One and Triune God and in the mystery of the Word made flesh who, in the Passion, lives the abandonment. Chiara explains how we should enter the dynamism of Trinitarian love.
… The will of God is God, and God is love. His will, therefore, is love, and he wants us to love too. He wants us to love him with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, and to love every neighbor as ourselves (cf. Mt 22:37–39).
We, too, had to be love in life: little suns beside the Sun.
At that time, the word “love” usually indicated either the natural sentiment that links a man and a woman or eroticism. It was not normally used in religious terminology, where the preferred term was “charity,” but often with the limited meaning of almsgiving. The singular manifestation of God-Love that we had received, and our direct contact with the Word of God, re-focused our attention on the Christian meaning of love.
Indeed, we immediately sensed that love was the very core of the Christian message and, as such, it was our absolute duty to put it into practice.
We began by loving the poor. But quite soon, because of this practice (since love brings light) we understood that we had to love everyone.
But how could we do this? By serving, which the Spirit soon explained to us with the words “making
ourselves one.”
I wrote: “Making ourselves one with every person we meet. This means sharing their feelings, carrying their burdens, making their problems our own and solving them as if they were ours, because love has made them ours.
“We must make ourselves one in everything except sin.
“This is what Paul meant when he said: ‘I made myself all things to all people’ (1 Cor 9:22).
“Making ourselves one requires constantly dying to ourselves. Yet, it is for this very reason that when others are loved in this way, sooner or later they are won over by Christ who lives in us through the death of our ego.”
When this happens, the other person responds to our love with his or her own love, and love of neighbor grows to the point of becoming mutual.
In another writing, we find: “See Jesus in every person you meet in each moment of the day, from morning till night.
“If your eye is clear, it is God seeing through you. And God is love, and love wants to unite, by winning over the other.
“Look outside yourself, not at yourself, not at things, not at people; look at God outside yourself in order to unite yourself to him.
“He is in the depths of every soul that has life; if a soul has no life, it is like a tabernacle of God waiting to achieve the meaning and joy of its existence.
“Look at every neighbor with love, and loving is giving. But one gift calls for another, and you will be loved.
“Thus, love is loving and being loved, as in the Trinity.
“And God in you will capture hearts, lighting up in them the Trinity, already present perhaps through grace, but inactive. …
“Look then at your neighbor and give yourself to your neighbor in order to give yourself to Jesus, and Jesus will give himself to you. It is the law of love: ‘Give and gifts will be given to you’ (Lk 6:38).
“Let yourself be consumed by the other person – out of love for Jesus. Let yourself be ‘eaten’ – as another eucharist. Put yourself completely at the other’s service, which means at the service of God, and your neighbor will come to you and will love you. …
“Love is a fire that penetrates hearts and makes them perfectly one.
“Then within yourself, you will no longer find yourself, or your brother or sister; you will find Love, which is God living within you.
“And Love will go out to love other brothers and sisters because, now that your eye is clear, it will find Him in them, and all will be one. . . .”
And “all will be one.” Not just any kind of love, then. No, the kind of love that brings about unity.
(From Chiara Lubich, A New Way, The Spirituality of Unity, New City Press, New York 2006, pp. 44-46.)
Video in Italian
