The unpublished testimony, written in the 1980s by Doriana Zamboni, offers a special perspective on the look at Chiara’s consecration and brings to light, in that gesture, a characteristic fact. Doriana privately followed Chiara’s choice, who contributed to the Lubich family’s economy with her work as a teacher. On the morning of December 7, “I saw her arrive. ‘I was at a ceremony’ – she told me. In fact, she was wearing a new dress. She was overflowing with joy, but with such happiness that made her jump, a happiness all her own that she did not explain to me but which did not exclude me. We continued class as we did every day, and in the afternoon she came to my house to continue the study. After an hour, however, it seemed as if she would burst if she did not communicate to me the secret reason for her happiness. That day was the eve of the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary and she had been privileged to consecrate herself to God with a vow to be his forever. She was so pervaded by that divine happiness that although I did not understand her decision, I listened to her ecstatically. I did not understand her, because for me a vow was equivalent to a convent, a nun’s veil, but a religious habit and all that stuff, was repugnant to me. Chiara didn’t have all that and yet she was talking about vows! In fact, she told me, ‘You know it is like a flight, you leave all the things of the world to launch yourself into God.’ This pleased me since that God, whom I had come to know from her as love, I now loved Him too and wanted to unite myself to Him. “[1]

A few hours after the ceremony, being a “bride of God” that Chiara felt in her heart after the Mass seems to become clearer in her dialogue with Doriana. With her friend and student, she begins to express the newness in her act of consecration. With the formula she makes a vow, but her consecration, it was something else. “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,” a flight. The novelty of her consecration is revealed and understood over time, in the light of the particular charism she received that focuses, especially in the early days, Chiara and those who follow her, on Love, “the inspirational spark of all that is done under the name Focolare. “[2] That “launching into God” that leads Chiara to chastity is realized in being a virgin out of love, poor of everything because full of God, obedient, because in the total gift of material and spiritual goods, she flies higher than the dimension of her will. A flight into God, to whom she surrenders herself like a child in her mother’s arms (cf. Ps 131), a ‘popa’ (Trentino dialect term), an evangelical child who places all her trust in the Father who is Love. Not only that: it is the road on which she sets out to contribute to the realization of that page of the Gospel for which she feels she was born, so that “all may be one” (Jn. 17:21), for unity.

In June 1980 to a group of focolarini and focolarine in formation in Loppiano, Chiara recalls, “At the beginning of the Movement we did not make vows, we only made the consecration to God, practically the vow of chastity without even perhaps saying ‘vow’ at all. We only had this act of marrying God. And for us, as I said, marrying God, and it must remain this feeling, was not so much a vow but it was a flight, in fact we called it “the flight”: it was to detach ourselves from the earth, from all creatures to unite ourselves definitely with God.

In fact, at that time what mattered to us was the Gospel. And in the Gospel, unity had come to the fore; our spirituality.”[3]

The image of “flight” is the one that most explicitly expresses the “type” of giving to God according to Chiara Lubich’s spirituality. A new kind of response to God’s call, a new kind of sonship, in Jesus. A new vital environment, that of community spirituality, of the spirituality of unity.[4]

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