The ideal: Jesus forsaken

24 Jan 2014 | Focolare Worldwide

“One day the spiritual director asked Chiara: ‘When in his life did the Lord suffers the most?”

“I suppose in the Garden of Olives”.

“No. In my opinion he suffered the most on the cross when he cried out: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mt 27,46; Mk 15,34)”.

He left, and Chiara speaking with Dori (one of her students, and among the first to follow her, editor’s note) and later with the others, began to focus her love – and her studies – on that cry: on that moment of anguish in which Christ felt abandoned even by the Father, for whom he had become man.

“I am convinced that Jesus forsaken will be the ideal that will solve the world’s problems: it will spread to all corners of the earth.”

Year after year, this conviction would have been consolidated in all kinds of trials, thanks to which her ideal was taking root among humankind.

Thus, Jesus forsaken became Chiara’s love. And it became the love – the ideal, the goal, the norm – of the Work of Mary (or Focolare Movement, editor’s note).

One day she explained to us: “If when I am old and dying, the youth come to ask me to define in brief our ideal, I will reply with a feeble voice: Its Jesus forsaken!”.

Source: “It was a time of war…”, Chiara Lubich – Igino Giordani, Città Nuova Ed., Rome, 2007, pp. 122-123.

Lesley Ellison: My calling

21 Jan 2014 | Focolare Worldwide

I grew up near to Liverpool in the North West of England. As a child I remember there used to be processions either of Catholics or of Protestants and I used to go with other children to throw stones at the Catholics! When I was 18 I started working for ecumenism which was beginning to develop among various churches in England at that time. It wasn’t easy. Many adults in the area put obstacles in the way of unity because they were afraid of opening up towards Catholics. One day I felt particularly discouraged and I challenged God:  “Let me find others who are enthusiastic about unity!” The next day I went to church to a Service for young people. The preacher told us a story: “It was wartime, and everything was collapsing…”  It was the story of Chiara Lubich and the beginnings of the focolare. While he was speaking my heart was burning within me!  I interrupted his talk: “Where are those girls now? Did they die in the air raids?”   “No,” he replied, “don’t you know? They’re here in Liverpool!” I went to see them straight away.  Rather than finding three foreign girls in the focolare I would say I found the Gospel being lived. I felt as if I was being born anew and starting my life all over again. I wanted to live the Gospel, too. I wanted to give God the first place in my life. But there were many prejudices to overcome.

London, 11 November 1996: Chiara Lubich and a group of Anglican focolarini with Archbishop George Carey and Bishop Robin Smith.

Ivory Coast: In the City of 18 Mountains

16 Jan 2014 | Focolare Worldwide

Man (Côte d’Ivoire ), the ‘city of 18 mountains’ has some 100 thousand inhabitants from several different ethnic groups. Most of them are dedicated to farming and are reduced to extreme material and human poverty that has worsened as a result of the war that spread across the country in 2002. This is the social context in which the Focolare Movement’s Mariapolis Victoria is situated in the northeast of Africa. There were over 3000 refugees during the hot moments of the war; more than 100,000 patients showed up at its Community Medical Centre. The Movement also has a child nutrition programme that operates in the city and surrounding villages.

Some members of the Mariapolis share how Christmas was also spent in function of the most marginalised and lonely, especially those in most need of love: “There was a day of feasting with the Christian and Muslim children from the surrounding area at the local parish. There was singing, dancing, performances and lunch for everyone!” Each of the some 1000 children – plate and cup in hand – stood in a long line waiting to receive lunch. “It was nice to be able to look into their eyes, wish them bon appétit and thank them for waiting so patiently!”

One group of young people from the Movement decided to attend the festivities in Blolequin village, 175 km from Man, with some orphan children and the Consolata Missionary Sisters who care for them.

In the village of Glole, 30 km from Man, a group from the Focolare community became involved in preparing a Christmas feast. People arrived from 12 villages that have been assisted for many years by the Nutrition Centre at the Mariapolis. Local chiefs and village notables also attended, as well as leaders from several Churches. In the atmosphere of reciprocity that was created, one of the village chiefs stated: “When I present my work plan to my collaborators, if they don’t agree with it, I feel that I will no longer be able to bring it ahead on my own. Instead I will try to embrace what we can agree on together.”

An important contribution to the evening programme was a well-known text written by Chiara Lubich: One City is Not Enough. In it Chiara encourages us to seek out the poorest, the most abandoned, the orphans, the prisoners, the ones on the margins of life . . . and give to them: a smile, a friendly word, time, material assistance . . . concrete love that is able to transform a city and even more. This was followed by an exchange of testimonials, mostly concerning the activities in underway for suffering children and orphans.

Lebanon: A Courageous Decision

13 Jan 2014 | Focolare Worldwide

Daisy: We both come from Christian families. We met the Focolare Movement at a Mariapolis, and since then the spirituality of unity has given meaning to our lives.

Samir: In 1989, during the war in Lebanon, the situation became dramatic with death and destruction all around us: no work; no school; offices closed . . . We moved to the United States where my brother was living. As a university lecturer I was entitled to a sabbatical year.

Daisy: It was an intense year with many trials that led us to experience God’s love that kept us together. We often wondered which choice was better, whether to return to Lebanon or to stay on in a country that had so much to offer. We had both found a job and were eligible for American citizenship. Moreover, our children’s future would be secured.

Samir: It wasn’t an easy decision, but we didn’t feel that we could abandon our country when it was going through such hard times. We consulted our children and our friends in the Focolare and decided that we would return to Lebanon. Actually, we were all quite convinced that loving our own people was more important than the security that could be offered to us by the United States.

Daisy: When we returned to Lebanon our lives changed. We realized that happiness doesn’t depend on external circumstances, but is the fruit of our relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters. In our country we live alongside Muslims and through the spirituality of unity have established real fraternity with many of them.

One time we had to go to a Focolare gathering in Syria, the country on the other side of the conflict. Relations were still difficult and full of prejudice and distrust. Yet, our experience was that these were our brothers and sisters and we should also give our lives for them.

Samir: We understood our role in witnessing to love between Muslims and Christians when we welcomed 150 mostly Muslim people at our Mariapolis Centre. We feel that our role as Christians in the Middle East isn’t merely to be here, but to be an active presence in politics and in governmental institutions.

Daisy: At the present moment when most of the Lebanese are anxious for the future and many are trying to leave the country, we feel God’s love that is with us every day, deeply rooting us in our land and helping us to spread hope.

The Adventure of Unity: Igino Giordani

12 Jan 2014 | Focolare Worldwide

Although a lover of peace Igino Giordani became an officer in the First World War where he was wounded and awarded a medal of honour. Teacher, anti-fascist, librarian, husband and father of four children, he was also a well-known polemicist for the Catholic side. After the Second World War, as an anti-fascist, he was forced into exile but later became elected to the Italian Constituent Assembly. He was the one credited with bringing lay married people and families into the Focolare as active members, opening the Movement – in a certain sense – to the entire human family.

His encounter with Chiara Lubich took place in his office at the Office of Deputies in Montecitorio, in September 1948. He was going through a particularly difficult moment in his life, both spiritually and politically: “”I studied religious topics with a passion,” he writes in his Memorie di un cristiano ingenuo, “but mostly so that I would not have to think about my soul whose appearance wasn’t very edifying. It was burdened with boredom and, in order not to have to admit to its paralysis, I buried myself in books and tired myself with activity. I believed this was all I could do. I had grasped and possessed a bit from all the areas of religious culture: apologetics, ascetics, mysticism, dogmatics and morality . . . but I possessed them only as a matter of culture. They weren’t integrated with my life.” That day quite an assorted group appeared at his desk, whose originality immediately struck someone like Giordani who was rather expert on ecclesial life: a Conventual Franciscan, a Friar Minor, a Cappuchin, a man from the Third Order and a woman from the Third Order (Chiara). He would later write: “To see them united in such harmony already appeared like a miracle of unity!” Chiara spoke first, while perceiving the courteous skepticism of the deputy: “I was sure I would hear a lot of sentimental dribble about some utopian welfare scheme.” But that wasn’t the case at all! “There was an unusual tone in her voice,” he later commented, “a sense of deep certainty and conviction that seemed to come from something supernatural. Suddenly my curiosity was aroused and a fire began to blaze within me. A half hour later when she had finished speaking, I found myself completely taken by an enchanted atmosphere: enclosed in a halo of happiness and light; and I would have wanted that voice to continue speaking. It was the voice that I, without realizing, was waiting to hear. It placed holiness within the reach of everyone.” Giordani asked Chiara to write down what she had just said, and she quickly did. But personally, Giordani wanted to know more about his new acquaintances. He gradually came to discover in his experience of the Focolare, the deep desire of St John Chrysostom that the laity might live as the monks but without celibacy. “This desire had always been so strong in me,” he went on to say, “and so I had always the Franciscan style of teaching among the people and the virginal instruction given by St Catherine of Siena to the Dominican Third Order. And I supported all the initiatives to bring down the walls placed between the monastic life and the laity, between the consecrated and the common folk: confines within which the Church suffered like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Something happened in me. Those chunks of culture that had always been standing side by side for comparison began to move and come alive, to become a living body that was generously flowing with blood. Love had entered in and invested those ideas, and its gravitational pull drew them into an orbital path of gladness.” Following the death of his wife, Mya, whom he deeply loved, he spent his final years living in a focolare in Rocca di Papa, Italy. Here he would often explain his “discovery” to people with the following words: “I moved away from the library cluttered with books, to the Church filled with Christians.” It was a real and true conversion, a new conversion, which “having plucked me from the doldrums that fenced me in, was now urging me to step onto a new landscape that was endless, somewhere between earth and Heaven, inviting me to walk again.” The cause is presently underway for Servant of God Igino Giordani, who was familiarly known as  “Foco”. Biography oj Igino Giordani (more…)

Congo: Beyond the Silence

11 Jan 2014 | Focolare Worldwide

“It’s not easy to describe what we’re going through in North Kivu, Congo, due to the terrible situation of conflict that has been unsettling my country for years. Our history has been filled with so much suffering that is still not overcome.

I had been a member of the Gen3. I belonged to a community of people who were genuinely living the Gospel. When I entered university I found myself in a different world. I saw people reaching to the point of killing one another because of tribal and ethnic differences. Corruption, fraud, revenge and many other evils were the daily fabric of life.

When I graduated, I found work in a non-governmental agency that was working for the rights of Congolese women and particularly for women who had suffered violence and had their consciences enslaved. As I travelled all around the country I was met with the misery of so many people, even though Congo is very rich in natural resources.

I watched as the climate of resignation grew. You’d hear people saying: “This country is already dead, there’s no point in trying to do anything . . .”

Around the beginning of 2012 something new happened within me. I knew that God can come and be among us and that all things are possible for Him. I realized that it was up to me to take the first step, to be willing to spend myself in a radical way to bring some change in my land.

Thus a protest movement was begun, comprised mostly of young people. The first public protest was held to denounce unemployment among young people. According to statistics, unemployment among young people in Congo is up to 96%. As Congo’s Independence Day drew near we anonymously printed flyers denouncing the crisis in justice,  serious unemployment among the young and the paradox of the great natural resources of the country and the general poverty of most of the population.

On the evening of the vigil, as we were distributing the flyers, I was placed under arrest for a week along with two other young people. I was subjected to dozens of interrogations that were veritable psychological torture. I felt the threat of death or condemnation drawing nearer each day. I wondered why God had not intervened for those who were fighting on the side of justice. The thought of the dying Jesus came to my mind. He had also felt abandoned by the Father, and so I began to love again. I found something I could do during the days of my arrest. I could prepare some food for the other detainees and the guards.

In a show of solidarity and to obtain our release the young people organised a sit-in in front of the building; the mobilization was very large. Students decided not to return to university until we were freed. In the days that followed another two friends allowed themselves to be arrested.

We fight for a Congo of the people, who are able to demand justice but also fulfill their civic duties. A year of struggle has brought about some results. The movement now exists and is recognized  and in other places in the country; we have carried out more than 50 actions with concrete positive results; we are still alive in spite of the many waves of arrests, threats and attempts at exploitation; we are the first youth group i which while respecting the laws of the land, has managed to denounce, sustain, take a position on many even serious problems, including sanctions against the military who have been implicated in crimes and extortion. And now not just us taking a position. An ever larger generation of Congolese has taken up hope again and become involved for the good of the country.”

I share the Word of Life with many of the young people in this movement. The most important thing I’ve learned is that in order to bring about a true change, the strength comes from love. Acting with love, without violence, means acting on the side of God.” (M.M. – Congo)