A bit like mothers who use to tell “a few stories from their childhood, from when they were engaged, then afterwards, and they always tell them all over again,” Chiara addresses a group of young people interested in learning more about the vocation of the focolarino. She tells them about herself, the first focolarina, setting out in the following of Jesus, on what she calls the fourth way.

[…] I was about your age: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, when, like all young people, I think there is not one who does not feel it and if you have not felt it, you will feel it, I felt a great attraction to holiness, to make myself a saint. It was very strong this attraction to sanctity but I didn’t know how to do it, that was the point, because I had read books of saints and I was saying, if to make yourself holy you have to do penances, I will do them, the cilizi and the chains, beat yourself; if you have to do fasting, I will do it, if you have to pray always, I will do it. But how do I become a saint? So I had this great aspiration and I did not know how to do it. So, in those days, I still felt as if a wall was in front of me, a high wall, you know, very high, impossible to get over. I didn’t know how to make myself holy.

At that time there were three paths where young people like you could go: one was marriage, the other was the call to the convent, and the other was consecrating yourself to God by staying at home. These three paths were the only ones that existed then, and since they were the only ones that existed and I was called to neither this one nor this one, naturally I did not find them suitable for me.

There is something attractive in each of those forms of response to God’s call.  In marriage is the freedom of love in the family, the unconditional love of parents toward their children, for example, are admirable. However, for Chiara it lacks “that something that attracts precisely young people, who want to spend their lives for something great.” The convent, where people consecrate themselves to God totally and leave their relatives and homeland is attractive. But there was something there, too, that didn’t sit well with me. It was the fact that by now in the Church already 20 years before the Council, the Holy Spirit was blowing in a certain direction and saying: holiness outside the convents, in the midst of the world, everyone has to make themselves holy, even the laity in the midst of the world, make themselves holy. Then I would say: this is beautiful but I miss the ‘in the midst of the world,’ it should be in the midst of the world.

Then there is the response of those who consecrate themselves to God by staying at home, “This consecration is beautiful, but that staying at home […] I expected something different and it was not there, my way did not exist.”

After receiving her teaching certificate in 1938, Chiara was a primary school teacher in a small village in Val di Sole, Trentino. From 1940, she continued teaching at the Movement Serafica of the Capuchin Fathers in Cognola di Trento.

In 1938, she attended a conference with the young women of Catholic Action in Loreto, and there the first outlines of what would be a new path began to emerge. On December 7, 1943, with her flight, Chiara reached a first goal: “total consecration, so a heroic thing not a mediocre thing.”

In the months following her consecration, Chiara continued to live with her family. The war with bombing raged in Trent. Many families left the city, even the Lubichs decided to evacuate to a nearby valley. Chiara stayed next to those first people who had made God the ideal of their lives with her, committed to solving Trent’s social problem, certain that Love would conquer all. However, she could not live in the family home because it was damaged after the bombing of May 13, 1944.

[…] at a certain point, I,  and my companions who remained in Trent were offered the possibility of going to a very small apartment. We did not know what was being born, it is not that I founded the focolare, Providence really founded it.

We went into this little apartment and we said: let’s stay here together, I remember we made the list: we have a lot of oil, a lot of flour, like this, to eat, to live, to be there, but by now I had spread the Ideal, the first spark had been ignited and it was love, the love that had now become mutual, so there we immediately experience that. We were a community, let’s say a convent if you like, but with Jesus in the midst and in the midst of the world, because we never wanted to be a convent, we wanted to be in the midst of the world. We were sisters. Jesus came, He made universal fraternity and that’s okay, we are a little piece of this fraternity. That’s how the focolare was. So the third thing was fulfilled: agreeing yes, that is, gathering yes together, but in the midst of the world: that was the third element. Then I remembered Loreto and I saw how in the Holy Family there are the three elements that I liked because it is a family, all three consecrated, (also Jesus is God) in the midst of the world. And making the comparison I saw that the focolare, we gave it that name  much later on, was in the midst of the world, with people all given to God  – however in the midst of the world and who left everything, because we had left, with this flight that I had made, which we call the flight, I had left everything and also the family, like that. That is the focolare![1]