Jesus invites us to recognise how God’s love means that he is always close to us and he suggests ways in which we can respond and act accordingly: we can discover the way to reach full communion with the Father by doing his will.The Hurricane The images on the TV showed the places hit by the hurricane and left isolated. Our families lived there and so you can imagine the anxiety that we seminarians felt. The Word of Life of that month seemed very apt because it urged us to have faith. United, we prayed for our loved ones and we were given permission to leave the seminary the following day to go and find them. But that night the capital was also hit hard: flooded roads, collapsed bridges, no electricity…. But our seminary was still standing. We set off anyway: during that journey on foot or by makeshift means, in rafts or tied to ropes to overcome the resistance of the torrents, we were forced to deviate countless times. And finally, we came to our country… it was unrecognisable! Where there used to be countryside, there was now a lake. After embracing our loved ones (they had lost everything, but they were safe!), we offered our services to the parish priest to help with emergency services. The new Word proposed for that month seemed to be addressed precisely to us, to give us courage and to share it with others: “Blessed are the afflicted…”.
(Melvin – Honduras)
The umbrella I believe that Christ is behind every poor and marginalised person and is asking to be loved and so I try not to miss opportunities to do so. For example, in the café near my home I noticed a very poor person who we had nicknamed Pen: he was soaking wet because it was raining that day. I knew that that he had tuberculosis, and so, overcoming some resistance to being seen in his company, I invited him home to find him something dry to put on. My parents were amazed and incredulous. “Dad, we could use some clothes…”. Dad wasn’t very enthusiastic at first, but then he procured a pair of trousers while I found a jacket. But the rain didn’t seem to be stopping… And I said, getting back into the swing of things: “Dad, what if we gave them an umbrella as well?” We found one too. The man was happy, but I was even happier, because we had worked together to help him. But it didn’t end there. A few days later, Pen came back to return the umbrella. Actually, it wasn’t the one we had given him, it was much nicer. What had happened was that our umbrella had been stolen, and someone had given him another one. He wanted to give it back to us.
(Francesco – Italy)
Love cannot be explained with words Shortly after her birth, Mariana was diagnosed with a severe malformation of the brain. She would never be able to speak or walk. But God asked us to love her just as she was and, with trust, we threw ourselves, so to speak, into his Fatherly arms. This child lived with us for just four years; we never heard her say the words “Daddy” or “Mummy”, but in her silence her eyes spoke, with a shining light. We could not teach her to take her first steps, but she taught us to take our first steps in love, in the renunciation of ourselves in order to love. Mariana was a gift from God for our entire family: we could sum it all up in one phrase: love cannot be explained with words.
(Alba – Brazil)
edited by Lorenzo Russo
(Taken from “Il Vangelo del Giorno”, Città Nuova, VII, no.3, May – June 2021) .
The Bala Shanti Program is a project created to help abandoned women, supporting them to provide their children with the necessary care and schooling thus creating a condition of well-being, health and dignity. We are in Coimbatore, a region of south India. In 1991, the Bala Shanti Program was founded, a project that helps and welcomes the most vulnerable and needy children, aged between 3 and 5, and their mothers, who are often alone. The programme is part of the Shanti Ashram which is an international centre for cultural, social and health development serving the needs of the community in the area, inspired by the ideals and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. “My grandmother had to live on her own all the time, which is why my mother stopped studying when she was in secondary school and she had to get married when she was 16. This happened in ’78 but today, after more than 40 years, I still hear stories similar to this one”. These are the words of Deepa, head of the Bala Shanti Program. She explains that, even today, the children of abandoned mothers experience three challenges: poverty, dropping out of school and being forced into early marriage. The Bala Shanti Program therefore aims to help these women raise their children in a state of well-being, health and dignity. According to the United Nations 2019-2020 report, about 4.5% of families in India are composed of single mothers and an estimated 38% of these families live in poverty. Deepa explains: “A woman in India alone and in a vulnerable condition can hardly hope to survive: it is not a personal choice, many of them find themselves in conditions of neglect, insecurity, exploitation”. The ultimate goal of the Bala Shanti Program, therefore, is to fight poverty, malnutrition and diseases that develop in contexts of great hardship, building a society of peace. in addition to financial aid, children and their mothers are also trained in topics such as education, peace, nutrition, hygiene and leadership. Today, there are 9 Bala Shanti Kendra – early childhood development centres – which welcome more than 200 children a year. Since 1991, more than 10,000 children have completed their education, and during the year of the Covid-19 pandemic, aid was provided to 15,000 children and families. Since 1998, the project has been collaborating with AFN Onlus, the non-profit organisation linked to the Focolare Movement, which, through distance support, helps to provide children with scholarships at the Bala Shanti Program. There are many who could testify to the importance of the Bala Shanti Program in their own lives, like Fathima now aged 45. Until a few years ago she was a lone parent in financial difficulty and did not know how to raise and educate her son, little Aarish. Since the Bala Shanti Program started to help, her life has changed. Aarish went through training courses and received a distance scholarship. She explains “I was also helped with food supplies. They put me in touch with competent doctors and invited me to shows and dances through which I could distract myself and think about something beautiful. This was very important for me”. Now Aarish has grown up, is 15 years old and has been a volunteer at Shanti Ashram for three years. Also, thanks to his help, the Bala Shanti Program will offer more and more support to abandoned women and their children. Thus, the hope remains that this chain of aid will become more and more robust and widespread.
Before each daily action we can discover which face of Jesus Forsaken we can love through it. This is what Chiara Lubich suggests so as to carry out well and perfectly all that we have to do To love Jesus Forsaken. It is this name that touches upon so many aspects of our individual and collective life, that I would also like to expound on a bit today. To be more precise, I would like to tell you something about a particular way of loving Jesus Forsaken, who is the gateway and road to our holiness. (…) Wherever we look, we have the marvellous opportunity to love Him, to comfort Him, to find solutions to specific problems which are all expressions of Him. And this is a great grace. Through our work, we are always in contact with Him, with Jesus Forsaken, and by loving Him we can become saints. However, there are different ways to love Him. We can love Him greatly, or we can love Him a little. And this means that with our love for Him we can contribute towards our holiness in a great way or in a little way. Saints have searched for and are searching for that love which renders the most benefit for the glory of God. Are we writing our personal life story in order to share our experience? Let’s do it well, very well, listening with great love to the voice inside of us which sheds light on our past and present, a light which others would appreciate hearing about because it is attractive. Let’s pay close attention to what that voice suggests to us and to what corrections it makes. Let’s pour our greatest efforts into everything we do. Let’s continue to correct our work until that voice has no more to tell us. We must never mistreat the Work of God. We must never carry out imperfect works. Therefore, let’s do everything well, very well. (…) for every work that we carry out , let’s try to discover which countenance of Jesus Forsaken we can love in doing so, and then accomplish it perfectly. Therefore, perfect actions out of love for Jesus Forsaken. This is the way to build our holiness, our great holiness.
Chiara Lubich
(In a conference call, Loppiano February 20th,1986)
The testimony of the volunteers of the “Casa de los Niños” in Cochabamba (Bolivia), a project inspired by the spirituality of unity, committed to tirelessly caring for those infected by COVID-19 and bringing consolation to the dying. We returned to the streets of our city slightly reckless and very naive. This virus is frightening everyone and encouraging us to isolate ourselves from one another but we understand how important and necessary what is urgently required of us which is why we never back down especially as we are taking the necessary precautions. The tests we carry out every week continue to give us negative results. Perhaps someone is extending a merciful hand over our naivety. The cold season has now begun here and Covid-19 infections have increased dramatically reaching unprecedented figures. Public hospitals are collapsing under the strain. People are dying in cars, waiting for beds to become available… Even in the highly expensive private clinics admissions have been suspended. Oxygen is no longer available, and there are long queues for refills at the only two places able to provide this service, for a fee. A 6m3 cylinder lasts less than 5 hours! Specialist medicines are only available on the black market with each vial costing around 1,300 euros! This year those affected by the virus are much younger. We take oxygen and medicine to whoever needs it. We have permits to travel all day and every day. Our very spacious minibus has been turned into an ambulance and often, unfortunately, into a hearse at zero cost. Time is of the essence for those in need and struggling to breathe, so we too are rushing around and have no time to think about ourselves. We are bringing oxygen and medicine but, to be honest, we are mainly engaged in sowing seeds of hope. We get to know those we visit for the first time but a kind of mutual complicity is immediately established that opens up possibilities for hope. Little by little, fear begins to melt away and we see people smile serenely. We also take rosary beads with us. It is not a magic charm. No. They are the prayer beads of those of us who wish to entrust the enormous afflictions and sufferings of these days, of so many of our brothers and sisters, to the heart of our Mother in Heaven. It is part of the oxygen treatment, giving air to the hearts of those who suffer! Every evening we meet for community prayers in our little town, outside on the lawn in front of the beautiful chapel which holds the stories of so many of our children who have already flown to heaven. We pray before the statue of the “Virgen de Urcupiña”, patron saint of Cochabamba, who carries Her Son in her arms. Ours is a prayer that goes straight to heaven wanting to fix the names of the many people we have visited during the day. We ask for the light from heaven that each one of them needs to illuminate the night of their pain.
The volunteers of the “Casa de los Niños” – Cochabamba (Bolivia)
Stefano Zamagni, economist and President of the Pontifical Athenaeum for Social Sciences, recently spoke in Loppiano, Italy at the event marking the 30th anniversary of the Economy of Communion. We present an excerpt from his address in which he underlined the contribution of the Economy of Communion to the evolution of economic thought. ‘(…) I must confess that when, exactly 30 years ago, I listened to Chiara Lubich’s speech in Brazil when she launched the Economy of Communion project, I was very impressed but also shocked. Economy as a science uses many words such as wealth, income, efficiency, productivity and equity, but it does not use the word communion. I asked myself: “How could someone like Chiara whose cultural background did not include an economic element have launched an intellectual challenge of that kind?” There had to be a special charism at work and we know today that there was. This positively disturbed me. I began to reflect and asked myself: “Why, in the long history of economic thought, has this concept never been addressed?” A few years later I came across the work of Antonio Genovesi, the founder of civil economy, and I understood a whole series of connections between the Economy of Communion and civil economy. Obviously, at the beginning, there were many difficulties for the Economy of Communion. I remember that in 1994 in Ostuni in Puglia, Italy, the MEIC (Eccelsial Movement of Cultural Commitment) organised a series of cultural seminars during the summer. In a presentation chaired by a famous Italian economist, two newly graduated focolarine had the audacity to present the Economy of Communion project. This professor began to say: “This is nonsense, because it does not satisfy the criterion of rationality.” I was present and asked him: “But do you think that the gesture of the Good Samaritan satisfies the criterion of rationality? You see,” I continued, “you are a slave to a paradigm, to a way of thinking that you have sucked out of your studies without addressing the problem, because the rationality you think of is instrumental rationality, but there is also expressive rationality. Who said that instrumental rationality is superior to expressive rationality? Don’t you know that the Economy of Communion is part of the model of expressive rationality? In this case, expressive means that a charism is expressed – because charisms must be expressed and translated into historical reality.” The Economy of Communion has made it possible to recover that tradition of thought regarding civil economy that began in Naples in 1753. For example, think of the economy and the school of civil economy over which Luigino Bruni presides. In addition, the recent big “Economy of Francis” event which was really a mixture of civil economy – a paradigm, which is view of reality that is embodied in models, projects and different theories – and the economy of communion. This event took place recently, but I am sure its impact will soon become apparent. To close, I would like to use a word that has, unfortunately disappeared from use for at least a century: this word is “conation”. It was coined by Aristotle 2400 years ago. It derives from the combination of knowledge and action and means that knowledge must be put at the service of action, and action cannot be exercised and bear fruit unless it is based on knowledge. I say this because the challenge of the next 30 years, and even more, for the Economy of Communion is to strengthen the knowledge component. Up to now, priority has rightly been given to action, to achievements. But we must be aware that if action is not continually nourished by knowledge, it risks disintegrating. Chiara Lubich had a capacity for intuition and understanding, and therefore for foresight, even on subjects in which she was not a specialist. Indeed, the contribution of the Economy of Communion to the evolution of economic thought as a science has been remarkable. Luigino Bruni directs a research doctorate programme in the economy of communion and civil economy at the Lumsa (Libera Università Maria Assunta) in Rome, Italy; here in Loppiano there is the Sophia University Institute and in other universities too it is no longer forbidden to speak of Economy of Communion. I think this is a great, great outcome. (…)’ To review the live broadcast from Loppiano for the 30th anniversary of the Economy of Communion, click here
The cold season has now begun here and Covid-19 infections have increased dramatically reaching unprecedented figures. Public hospitals are collapsing under the strain. People are dying in cars, waiting for beds to become available… Even in the highly expensive private clinics admissions have been suspended. Oxygen is no longer available, and there are long queues for refills at the only two places able to provide this service, for a fee. A 6m3 cylinder lasts less than 5 hours! Specialist medicines are only available on the black market with each vial costing around 1,300 euros! This year those affected by the virus are much younger. We take oxygen and medicine to whoever needs it. We have permits to travel all day and every day. Our very spacious minibus has been turned into an ambulance and often, unfortunately, into a hearse at zero cost. Time is of the essence for those in need and struggling to breathe, so we too are rushing around and have no time to think about ourselves.
We are bringing oxygen and medicine but, to be honest, we are mainly engaged in sowing seeds of hope. We get to know those we visit for the first time but a kind of mutual complicity is immediately established that opens up possibilities for hope. Little by little, fear begins to melt away and we see people smile serenely. We also take rosary beads with us. It is not a magic charm. No. They are the prayer beads of those of us who wish to entrust the enormous afflictions and sufferings of these days, of so many of our brothers and sisters, to the heart of our Mother in Heaven. It is part of the oxygen treatment, giving air to the hearts of those who suffer! 