SpiritualitY
Chiara Lubich’s spirituality is one to be embodied in everyday life and involves all aspects of human life. Universal gospel values are respectfully proposed in a distinctive communitarian perspective. It is a personal spirituality, which is not individual but rather communitarian, because union with God is achieved through and together with our brothers and sisters. Perhaps, precisely because of this distinctive communitarian aspect, those who live this spirituality feel they are in solidarity with each other and, in a certain way, united, even if motivated by different human, ethical and religious values.
Chiara’s spirituality expresses multiple perspectives of relationship: with God, with our neighbours and with history. It is a pathway of shared experience, which has initiated and sustained forms of dialogue among members of the Catholic Church and with other charismatic realities, with Christians of various Churches and ecclesial communities, with followers of other religions, and also with people who, while not referring to a religious belief, desire to contribute to bringing the human family together in fraternity.
“We understood that, in order to love God with all our heart, all our soul and all our strength, we had to do his will with all our heart, all our soul and all our strength. It was therefore clear that loving God was not simply a feeling, but meant doing his will”(1).
“We, our companions, white people, black people, those born two centuries ago, the ones of the year two thousand, the mother and the parliamentarian, the farmer and the prisoner, the child and the grandfather: every person who came into the world could live the word of God, every word of God”(1)
From the very beginning, we immediately understood that loving our neighbour as ourselves (Mk 12:31), as the Gospel required, had to be taken seriously, literally. The word “as” really meant “as”. (1)
“I have the impression that mutual love is like today’s currency, and that those who do not live mutual love have a currency that is out of date, of other times”[1].
“God became man in order to save us, but when he became man, he even wanted to become food, so that by feeding on him we might become another Him” [1]
“Every person in his or her large or small world of daily activities— in the family, office, factory, labour union, immersed as they may be in local and general problems, in public institutions of the city or beyond, all the way to the United Nations— can truly be a builder of peace, a witness to love, an instrument of unity”[1].
“From the torn heart of Jesus forsaken flowed thespirituality which generates unity, that spiritualitywhich is both particular and universal—just as hisforsakenness is one pain among many of his passion,but one that sums up all.”[1]
Mary was present from the very beginning of Chiara Lubich’s experience. During one of the bombings in the Second World War, in Trent, Chiara felt a special bond with Mary: “The shelter where we were hiding suddenly filled with dust. Completely covered, I got up from the ground, almost miraculously saved. Amid people’s screams, I told my friends, “Just now, when we were in danger, I experienced a sharp stab in my soul — the pain of not being able to recite the Hail Mary here on earth anymore.””[2] It was not yet the time to understand the meaning of that suffering and those words. In 1949, the characteristics of Chiara’s contribution to the Church began to take shape, with greater clarity, in a Marian key:”It seemed to us that the Work that was being born would be nothing more than a mystical presence of Mary in the Church”[3].In 1958 Chiara wrote of her understanding that, as a human being, Mary is close to us, while at the same time her […]
“God is interested in the divine bond, the Holy Spirit, the One who makes us children of God and brothers and sisters of one another, the sole bond of fraternity”. [1]
In the midst of the carnage of war, the result of hatred, we were dazzled, as if it were for the first time, by the truth about God: ‘God is Love’ (1).
“Jesus in the midst is like a light that enters into each one of us, those who are united in his name, and he illuminates all thehuman elements within us” [1].
