“Imagine a girl in love; in love with that love which is the first, the purest, the one not yet declared, but which begins to burn the soul. With only one difference: the girl in love like this, on this earth, has the figure of her beloved in her eyes; this one, she does not see him, she does not feel him, she does not touch him, she does not smell him with the senses of this body, but with those of the soul, through which Love has entered and invaded her completely. Hence a characteristic joy, difficult to reproduce in life, secret, serene, exultant joy.”

The beginning of Chiara Lubich’s account of consecration, is like of a love story, which she narrates with the words of the emotions and the senses of the body, to communicate an inexpressible relationship that is between God and a soul. We can try to imagine what it may have been like on that December 7, 1943 in the way Chiara chose to describe her wedding day. Let us revisit that day as she recalled it in 1973.

“A storm was raging, so that I had to make my way by pushing my umbrella in front of me. This, too, was not without meaning. It seemed to me to express that the act I was doing would find obstacles. That deluge of water and the headwind seemed to me a symbol of someone against me.”

On the advice of her confessor, the night before her consecration, Chiara kept vigil with the metal crucifix she had in her room. Kneeling beside the bed, she prayed for about two hours. Young and unconvinced of certain practices that later turned out not to be in conformity with her vocation, she fell asleep, after observing that the crucifix was all sprayed with moisture from the breath of her prayer. This fact seemed symbolic to her: the crucifix she was to follow would not be so much that of the physical wounds, which many spiritualties had already emphasized, as that of the spiritual sufferings Jesus had experienced.

Early in the morning, from Via Gocciadoro where she lived with her family, Chiara walked across town to the chapel of the Capuchin Minor Seminary, about a thirty-minute walk from her home. Her mother had been told she would have to attend a service that would last a long time.

“I arrived at the college to a change of scene. A huge door opened automatically. I felt a sense of relief and welcome, almost like the wide-open arms of that God who was waiting for me.”

It was God who was calling her, waiting for her. That God who, in the rubble of World War II, had manifested Himself to her as Love. It is God who welcomed her, gave herself to Him.

“The little church was adorned as best it could be.

An immaculate Madonna stood out in the background. In front of the altar, beyond the balustrade, a kneeler had been carefully prepared.

The priest had previously told me to bring him a sealed card with a request for a grace, certain that I would obtain it on that day. He took it. In it I asked for faith for someone dear to me. He put it under the corporal and began the Mass.”

At that time the priest celebrated Mass with his back to the people, and so Father Casimir did that that morning as well. “But at a certain point, I don’t know, I put my foot wrong, I made a move, I don’t know, and I turned sharply so I wouldn’t fall down and I saw her face; I never told anyone, not even Chiara […], but when I turned sharply because of that stumble I saw her aflame. A soul of flame, and so I accepted that vow into my hands with greater confidence, but I did not tell her this….

“Before Communion I saw, in an instant, what I was about to do: I had crossed a bridge with my consecration to God; the bridge collapsed behind my back, I would never be able to return to the world. Yes, because my consecration was not simply like the formula I later read before the Eucharist raised before me, “I take a vow of perfect and perpetual chastity”; it was something else.

I was getting married. I was marrying God. And that meant not just purity, not human marriage, but leaving everything behind: parents, study, school, diversions, everything in my little world I had loved until then. That opening of my eyes to what I was doing,” I remember, “was immediate, brief, but so strong, that a tear fell on my missal.”

Chiara explains what she experienced with the language of the spousal relationship: “I was getting married. I was marrying God.” She pronounces a vow, a formula, but her consecration is something else. A secret marriage, to which only she, God and the confessor are privy. An act forever, which means leaving everything in her small world which she loved. “Opening her eyes,” realizing what she has accomplished, brings a tear to her eye. It is a conscious, free act that she performs: in her heart a serene, exultant joy.

 

“The Mass ended in silence. I went down and knelt in a pew.

The priest took off his vestments and knelt a few pews behind me. A long thanksgiving.

Then the priest approached and said, “You will be a bride of blood.”

While grateful for everything that was said to me, I felt no consonance between what he said and what I felt in my soul. That “bride of blood” seemed like an old-fashioned formula, not made for me. And what my heart responded was, “No, I am God’s bride.” And it was that God who would later manifest himself as forsaken: blood certainly, but blood of the soul.

I think I went back home in a hurry. I paused only stopping near the bishop’s house, to buy three red carnations for the crucifix that awaited me in my room. They would be a sign of the communal feast. And that was it. “[1]

In 1943 we were nineteen years from the Beginning of the Second Vatican Council and the novelty of that “yes,” could only be better understood in later times. Like a seed that holds within it the embryo from which a new plant will develop, on the day of consecration, in that vow, however, is enshrined all that is to come.

The words of the priest to Chiara after Mass, “You will be a bride of blood,” hints at how the act of perpetual giving to God could be understood up to that moment. It used to be, Fr. Casimiro Bonetti recalls, that virginity was also linked to martyrdom, to giving life and life is signified in blood, then there is the most precious blood of Christ. A tradition that comes from Catherine of Siena, I think.[2] Chiara did not answer, as if she did not have words to express what had happened. They were suggested to her from the heart, “No, I am the bride of God.”  The priest expressed himself as best he could, Chiara understood the answer in her heart. A particular dialogue, in which the subject, finds an answer that she does not communicate, that she guards and meditates, but that announces the novelty and particularity of her vocation.

The dissonance between what the priest said and what Chiara sensed in her soul may be a first sign of the new way that through her, opens up in the Church: an exclusive relationship between humanity and God Love “who would later be manifested as forsaken: blood certainly, but blood of the soul.”