‘Every time the air-raid siren sounded, all we could take into the shelter with us was one small book: the Gospel. We opened it and the words, even though we already knew them quite well, because of the new charism, were lit up as if they had a candle beneath them, they inflamed our hearts and pushed us to put them into practice straight away  We were attracted to them all and tried to live them one after another. I read for example; ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ (Mt 19,19). Our neighbour. Where was our neighbour? There, next to us in the all the people who had been hurt by the War, wounded, without clothes, without houses, hungry and thirsty. We immediately dedicated ourselves to them in many ways.’ The adventure led by Chiara Lubich and her first companions was based on just one ‘text book’: the Bible. It was through reading the Gospel that she and friends discovered a way of life that led them to God. During that period Chiara had an intuition: the ‘Word of Life’. They read and then lived a sentence from the Gospel.