Thought
In order to grasp what characterizes “the world in colours,” one of Chiara Lubich’s distinctive conceptual matrixes, we must go back the early days of her experience in Trent. Without this root it is difficult to understand the development of her work and the importance of her contribution to contemporary culture.
Just as light passing through a prism refracts into the seven colours of the rainbow, so too, thought – preceded by life – becomes incarnate and open to new perspectives. The light of the charism of unity, entering Chiara’s life, enabled her to understand. It illuminated and initiated new processes which responded to the challenges of the times. “Every aspect of this new life, which the spirit of Jesus brought about in his Church, expresses in different ways and with different colours, the same light. Just as beneath each colour of the rainbow, there is the whole light, expressed in red, orange, yellow, etc., so under each aspect of life there is the whole of life, expressed in that particular way.”(1)
“At a given moment,” Chiara told young people, “the Lord helped me understand that the love we had in our hearts was urging us to do the most varied and most diverse things, which, however, were all love. “
Different spheres of life were renewed, could be explored and like parts of a single design, contributed to the realization of those words for which Chiara felt she was born: “That they may all be one” (Jn. 17:21).
(1) Chiara Lubich, to a group of focolarine and focolarini, Milan, 13 April 1955
We must live and spread the culture of giving... You should keep for yourselves only what you need, as the plants do. They absorb from the earth only the water, salts and other things that they need, and not more. Likewise, each one of us must have what he or she needs. All the rest should be given away and put in common with the others.
Fraternal communion is not state of beatitude: it is a continual progression, with the result not only of maintaining communion, but of spreading it among many, because the communion spoken of here is love, it is charity, and charity spreads by its very nature.
The Lord is within me. He would like to move my actions, permeate my thoughts with his light, rouse up my will, give me, in short, the law that regulates my stillness and my movement.
While all of us will take great care to protect nature, in a mysterious way nature itself will respond to our love, as happens with all that is animated and sustained by God.
Today we bemoan the scarcity of great artists. Perhaps that is because in the world there are few great people. We never ought to let our imagination play in detachment from everything else in us; that way it would cease to be a gift and fall into vanity. We must not consider human beings as they are not, but as they are: as social beings.
Geniuses and scientists have offered and offer so much; but to change the world as we want, universal ideas are needed, ideas that encompass and complete the partial truths that the great thinkers left us. We need The Idea, we need the Word.
It is thought that what is not communicated is lost. For the teller and the listener, light is thus shone on lived experience, and the experience appears fixed in eternity.
