Aug 28, 2016 | Non categorizzato, Word of
We can bring all things as a gift to God, if we learn how to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep, transforming each pain into love. The setting of these words is the Christian community in Corinth. It was extremely lively, full of initiative, animated by groups linked to different charismatic leaders. This also gave rise to tensions among individuals and groups, to divisions, personality cults, the desire to dominate. Paul intervened decisively and reminded everyone that, in the richness and variety of gifts and leaders belonging to the community, something much deeper bound them in unity: belonging to God. Once more the great Christian proclamation rings out: God is with us, and we are not lost, orphaned, abandoned to ourselves, but, as God’s children, we are God’s. As a true Father God cares for each one, without letting us lack anything we need for our good. Indeed, God is superabundant in love and in giving, as Paul affirms: ‘The world, life, death, the present, the future—all belong to you!’ God has even given us his Son, Jesus. What huge trust on God’s part in giving each thing into our hands! How often instead have we abused his gifts! We have believed ourselves to be the lords of creation to the point of plundering and despoiling it, lords of our brothers and sisters to the point of enslaving and slaughtering them, lords of our own lives to the point of wasting them in narcissism and self- destruction. God’s huge gift – ‘All belong to you’ – asks for gratitude. Often we complain about what we don’t have and we only turn to God to ask. Why don’t we look around and discover the beauty and the goodness surrounding us? Why don’t we say thank you to God for what he gives us each day? This ‘All belong to you’ is also a responsibility. It demands our attention, our tenderness, our care for all that has been entrusted to us: the whole world and every human being, the same care that Jesus has for us (‘you belong to Christ’), the same care that the Father has for Jesus (‘Christ belongs to God’). We ought to know how to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep, ready to gather up every groan, division, pain, violence, as something that belongs to us, so as to share it, to the point of transforming it into love. Everything has been given to us so that we bring it to Christ, that is, to the fullness of life, and to God, that is, to its final goal, giving back the dignity and the deepest meaning that belong to each thing and to each person. One day in the summer of 1949, Chiara Lubich sensed such a unity with Christ that she felt bound to him as a bride to her Spouse. This led her to think of the dowry she would bring, and she understood that it should be the whole of creation! On his side, he would bring her as his inheritance the whole of Paradise. She remembered then the words of the psalm: ‘Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.’ (Ps 2:8) And she commented: ‘And we believed and we asked and He gave us all things that we may bring them to Him and He will give us Heaven: we the created, He the Uncreated.’ Towards the end of her life, speaking of the Movement to which she had given life and in which she saw herself reflected, Chiara Lubich wrote: ‘What, just now, would be my last wish? I wish that the Work of Mary [that is, the Focolare Movement], at the end of the ages, when it will be waiting, united, to appear before Jesus forsaken and risen, may be able to repeat to him, making its own the words of the Belgian theologian Jacques Leclercq, words I always find moving: “On your day, my God, I shall come to you…. I shall come to you, my God … with my wildest dream: to bring you the world in my arms.” ’1 Fabio Ciardi 1 Essential Writings, (London and New York: New City and New City Press, 2007), p. 369.
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Aug 28, 2016 | Non categorizzato
“While taking a short break, contemplating the immensity of the universe, the extraordinary beauty and power of nature, my mind rose spontaneously to the Creator of it all, to a new sort of understanding of God’s immensity. (…) I saw that he is so great, so great, so great that it seemed impossible he should think of us. This impression of God’s immensity stayed with me for several days. To pray, ‘Hallowed be thy name’, or ‘Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit’, is different for me now: it has become a need of the heart. … We are on a journey. When people travel, they are already thinking about the surroundings they will be in on their arrival, the landscape, the city; they are getting ready. We should do the same. Will we praise God up there? Then let’s start praising him right now, letting our hearts cry out to him with all our love… Let’s praise him with words and in our hearts. We can take this opportunity to enliven some of the prayers we say daily which have this purpose. Let’s glorify him also with our whole being. As we know, the more we become nothing (modelling ourselves on Jesus Forsaken, who reduced himself to nothing) the more we cry out with our lives that God is everything, and so we praise him, we glorify him and adore him. During the day let’s find many opportunities to adore God and praise him. Let’s do so during our meditation, or when visiting a church, or at Mass. Let’s praise him beyond nature or in the depths of our hearts. Above all, let’s live dead to ourselves and alive to the will of God, to love for our brothers and sisters. May we too be, as Elizabeth of the Trinity used to say, a living praise of his Glory. In this way we shall experience a bit of paradise, and make up for the indifference to God in many hearts living in the world today.”
Chiara Lubich
(Chiara Lubich, Cercando le cose di lassù, Roma 1992, p. 15-17)
Aug 26, 2016 | Non categorizzato
Student accommodation “I live with six other students in a rented flat. We divided the chores and cleaning shifts,but Franz was not helping out and thus created tension in the group. I tried in vain to remind him. One day, precisely his family was coming to visit, and as an act of love for them, I started cleaning the bathrooms and also Franz’s room. His parents and sister were so pleased with the order they found that before leaving, they went to shop for loads of food that filled the fridge. Since then Franz has become very thoughtful and caring towards others. (F.F. – Austria) The poor helping the poor “That couple was extremely poor and ashamed of it, and their worries reached a peak with the arrival of their first son. The love of other friends warmed their hearts. Struck by the story of an equally poor family, but that believed that God who is a Father never abandons his children, they thought of sharing some of their food with another poor family. And the next day to their surprise, they saw all sorts of foodstuff arriving at their doorstep. In addition, there were also the things their son needed, a cradle, baby clothes, bathtub….…” (J.E. – Brazil) Praying for rain “That evening I felt very tired and wanted to tell the kids to say their night prayers by themselves in the room so I could immediately go to bed. But John, our eldest, asked if we could say the rosary to pray for rain: in fact, it hadn’t rained for a long time and the corn and sweet potatoes we had planted really needed it. To our surprise, that same night it started to rain and continued up to the afternoon of the next day.” (B. M. – Uganda) The armchairs “In our place, most parents incur so many debts for the weddings of their daughters and consequently have to work all their lives to paythem. For my wedding I made my parents spend as little as possible, confiding in Divine Providence. One day I went with my mom to the furniture shop. At the end he said,«Usually the other girls are never satisfied with what they find… but you are different. I would like to ask you to pray for my son who is very sick.». I assured him that I would do so, and he gave me two armchairs as a wedding gift: it was exactly what I needed.” (C. J. – Pakistan).
Aug 15, 2016 | Non categorizzato
After Jesus had died and the Holy Spirit had appeared, Mary disappeared into obscurity. She had accomplished her mission and returned to living in her own element: silent service. She solved the problem of old age by seeking refuge in God, almost a second childhood of the spirit. She teaches how to die. The dying process that provokes fear, in Mary, the Mother, became a returning to her origins by constantly losing herself in God: Life that never ends. And that losing of herself in the Eternal was the death of Mary. It came on the day when the Apostles could do it on their own. But it wasn’t death as we intend it or experience it, but rather something short and sweet that theologians express with a variety of terms: pause, transition, transit, falling-asleep, life-giving-death. . . That virgin body would have been contaminated by the process of decomposition; whereas, having suffered with Christ it couldn’t but immediately rise to glory with Christ. What Resurrection was for Christ, the Assumption was for Mary: a double victory of body and spirit over death. In our times there is the terrifying spectre of the destruction of millions of human beings if not all humankind by atomic weapons, or environmental pollution. There is no way out of it other than reproducing the victory of Jesus and Mary. We must spiritually become Jesus and Mary, agents of life, and this is done by inserting our human nothingness into Divine omnipotence. If we join together in living the Gospel we become the mystical Christ, and if we are made Mary we give Jesus to society, and then war will no longer make sense and the atomic weapon will become a museum piece. There will be peace: the one heart and one soul of a community gathered around the Mother, and its blessed fruit will be unity, the unity of the Living. By rising from this bloody swamp of the earth, to the Heaven of Mary, the Fairest Star of the Sea, we come to a better understanding of the meaning of her Assumption which is the ultimate seal on her unique privilege as the Virgin Mother of God. The materialist should also be moved by this, since it represents the exaltation of the physical body by the power of the Spirit. In Mary we celebrate the redemption of matter and exalt the physical universe that is transfigured into a Temple of the Most High. It’s enough to contemplate even for a moment with the knowledge of love, the place of Mary who rises from earth to Heaven through the cosmos to the full grasp of her identity and of her role. She is the masterpiece of creation. Mary is humble, because no outward highness elevates her; silent, because no human voice seems to be able to define her; poor, because no earthly ornament seems able to decorate her. She speaks only with the language of God’s Word whose richness is only Wisdom of God, grand with the grandness of God. So identified with the Lord, Mary is the human expression of the greatness of the Trinity’s very mind and of its love. She is the Queen – Mistress and Servant – of the Lord’s Dwelling, who opens the doors and lets the children in, occupying herself with welcoming everyone into the palace of the Father, for the glory of the Son in the Seal of the Spirit. She provides mortals with an idea of God who infinitely dominates and overwhelms their intelligence. As if to mediate the power, the wisdom and the love of the ineffable Trinity, God wished to manifest all his power in her. In his infinite originality which humankind would never have tapped, the Creator invented Mary in whose womb the Eternal Word became flesh in our midst and, in his humanity, God became accessible and the Divine Love became part of our home life. Mary among us brings God into our midst. She is the Gate of Heaven. She is taken into Heaven in order to gather the children into the Father’s house. That is why they call on her even a hundred times a day, that she might pray for them now and at the hour of death. (Igino Giordani, Maria modello perfetto, (Rome: Città Nuova, 2012 [1967]), p. 157 – 163.
Aug 13, 2016 | Non categorizzato
La prima reazione è stata di gratitudine. Nella Iuvenescit Ecclesia il Movimento dei Focolari vede un invito a proseguire nel cammino che l’ha accompagnato fino ad oggi. In particolare il richiamo alla «reciprocità tra doni gerarchici e doni carismatici», alla loro «coessenzialità» sembra interpretare appieno l’esperienza maturata, giorno dopo giorno, dalla nuova realtà ecclesiale fondata da Chiara Lubich. Con l’intervista a Maria Voce, presidente del Movimento dei Focolari, proseguiamo il ciclo dedicato all’approfondimento della lettera della Congregazione per la dottrina della fede, su cui nelle scorse settimane sono intervenuti Salvatore Martinez, presidente nazionale del Rinnovamento nello Spirito Santo e don Julián Carrón, presidente della Fraternità di Comunione e liberazione. «Il documento – sottolinea Maria Voce – parla chiaro: la Chiesa è una, è “un corpo” chiamato a incarnare il mistero di comunione della vita trinitaria. Protagonista del ringiovanimento della Chiesa è lo Spirito Santo che agisce, in particolare, attraverso i carismi. Il documento riconosce dunque ai movimenti una cosa importante: la capacità, se corrispondiamo alla grazia, di rivitalizzare la Chiesa. Con uno scopo chiaro: contribuire a immettere la vita di Dio negli ingranaggi della vita sociale, farla “toccare” dagli uomini e donne immersi nella complessità del nostro mondo. Il punto centrale del documento è la reciprocità, la coessenzialità nella vita della Chiesa tra doni gerarchici e doni carismatici. Si tratta di un richiamo esplicito all’insegnamento conciliare. Sì, mi pare che la lettera ponga in maniera inequivoca una pietra miliare di notevole portata dottrinale, sia nel riferirsi al Concilio Vaticano II, sia nel riconoscere una “convergenza del recente magistero ecclesiale” sulla coessenzialità: medesima origine e medesimo fine dei doni gerarchici e dei doni carismatici, tema che in questi anni non era stato recepito sufficientemente e aspettava un approfondimento. 
Una coessenzialità che voi sottolineate far parte da sempre della vostra esperienza. Dagli inizi il Movimento dei Focolari ha teso a questo intimo rapporto con chi nella Chiesa aveva il carisma del discernimento. Lo si vede, ad esempio, dalla lunga storia della sua approvazione, inseguita con determinazione adamantina e fiducia totale, a volte nella sofferenza, da Chiara Lubich e da quanti generavano con lei questa nuova creatura. La narra lei stessa nel suo libro “Il Grido”. I riconoscimenti poi, come si sa, sono arrivati abbondanti. Anche altri rappresentanti di Chiese cristiane hanno voluto esplicitare il proprio riconoscimento, a cominciare dal patriarca ecumenico Athenagoras I, dal vescovo luterano Hermann Dietzfelbinger, dal primate anglicano Michael Ramsey e da tanti altri. La lettera sottolinea che non può esistere contrapposizione tra Chiesa delle istituzioni e Chiesa della carità. Che significa da una parte rinunciare a ogni presunzione istituzionale, dall’altra all’autoreferenzialità. In che modo si possono evitare questi rischi? Vivendo ciascuno per lo scopo per cui la Chiesa esiste: l’umanità intera. Nel concreto e nel locale avviene poi il reciproco implementarsi con la ricchezza di ciascuno. La fraternità universale esige l’impegno di tutti e richiede infiniti piccoli passi. Dal 30 giugno al 2 luglio, ad esempio, 300 movimenti e comunità nati in seno alla Chiesa cattolica e a molte altre Chiese si sono dati appuntamento a Monaco, in Germania. ‘Insieme per l’Europa’, è un cammino iniziato nel 1999 e che continua insieme per il bene di questo continente, che deve riscoprire se stesso e ha gravi doveri verso il resto del mondo. E per realizzare l’armonia di cui parla il documento, come e dove bisogna operare? Credo che dobbiamo procedere con fiducia sulla strada che indica. Forse occorre approfondire maggiormente le conseguenze del riconoscere la coessenzialità tra doni gerarchici e carismatici. Bisogna pensare come avviare nella pratica una profonda e concreta partecipazione di ambedue aspetti ai vari livelli della Chiesa. Non basta la constatazione, mi sembra che si debbano trovare anche le modalità operative per procedere insieme. Uno slogan per il documento potrebbe essere quello di “Unirsi per una Chiesa in uscita”. Come interpretare questo impegno? Quella dei dialoghi è la via percorsa dai Focolari, manifestatisi via via con chiarezza, legati a fatti precisi e a incontri con persone concrete. Non quindi strategia, ma sostanza della relazione nel vicendevole riconoscimento e nel reciproco amore. Da qui il maturare del dialogo all’interno delle proprie Chiese, tra le chiese cristiane, con le altre religioni, con persone di riferimento non religioso, con la cultura contemporanea. Alcuni interpreti sottolineano come papa Francesco sia spesso un tantino severo verso i movimenti. È così? Non lo ritengo severo. Trovo sintonia fra le sue parole e gesti e il vissuto dei movimenti. È uno dei Papi che più è entrato in contatto con essi partecipando a manifestazioni o nelle udienze. Così con il Rinnovamento nello Spirito, Cammino Neocatecumenale, Comunione e Liberazione, Schoenstatt… Lo ha fatto anche con i Focolari ricevendo i 600 partecipanti all’Assemblea generale del 2014. Certe sue precisazioni che ad osservatori esterni possono risultare rimproveri, spronano i movimenti a vivere il proprio carisma, ad essere più fedeli allo Spirito Santo per meglio contribuire alla Chiesa comunione. Nitide le sue parole dello scorso aprile nella sua inaspettata visita alla Mariapoli di Roma a Villa Borghese. Con un’immagine, ha sottolineato l’importanza e la capacità dei movimenti di vivificare i vari ambienti: «trasformate i deserti in foresta». L’ultima parte del documento contiene l’invito a guardare a Maria. Un “richiamo” che in qualche modo fa parte del vostro stesso essere Movimento. Maria è la carismatica per eccellenza e ciò la pone al centro della Chiesa nascente, custode della presenza del Risorto fra gli apostoli che, in una Chiesa che non sapeva ancora di essere tale, solo lei poteva bene interpretare. «La dimensione mariana della Chiesa precede la sua dimensione petrina», scrive Giovanni Paolo II nella Mulieris dignitatem: infatti non siamo i cristiani a “fare” la Chiesa ma è il Risorto che ci precede. Da qui il richiamo al Movimento dei Focolari, chiamato dal suo specifico carisma a generare Gesù spiritualmente laddove i suoi membri vivono. Una vocazione descritta negli Statuti con parole forti: essere – per quanto è possibile – una continuazione di Maria, proprio in quella sua specifica opera di dare al mondo Cristo. Il vostro obiettivo, mi corregga se sbaglio, è edificare tutti insieme la civiltà nuova dell’amore. Dove bisogna operare soprattutto in questi tempi? Quali le periferie in cui è necessario essere presenti? Le periferie sono là dove c’è un di più di sofferenza. Papa Francesco non smette di indicarle. Non sono solo le povertà materiali ma anche quelle spirituali: la perdita di senso, lo smarrimento delle radici cristiane in un’Europa logorata dal consumismo, dall’edonismo, dal potere economico e tecnologico, la devastazione del creato, le stragi, il dramma umanitario dei rifugiati e le migrazioni di massa, i tanti conflitti armati. Le periferie sono infinite. Non si tratta di fare tutti insieme la stessa cosa, ma di lavorare insieme con lo stesso scopo: trasformare il deserto in foresta. Riccardo Maccioni, 7 agosto 2016 Pdf dell’intervista
Aug 10, 2016 | Non categorizzato
“I’m sorry …” “One of my older medical colleagues had taken me to task in front of the patients, for a mistake he thought I had made. I was struck to the quick and left the room slamming the door behind me. When I got home, I wasn’t able to regain my calm. I had to do something to re-establish the relationship. After several attempts, I decided to telephone him at his office. “I’m sorry,” I told him, “for what happened this morning.” It took him totally by surprise and made him very happy. Our relationship has continued to grow since then. I discovered that even amidst all the difficulties, it is possible to bring a human dimension to our work.” R. S. – Canada What should we do with the money? “We had received a large sum of money from a relative. We were surprised by the generous gesture and wondered what we should do with the money. There are nine people in our family and each one was saying what he or she wanted. . . As for me, I would have liked to use at least part of the money for a social cause. But would our children agree? Just then my wife and I recalled that we also had a son in Heaven. If he were still with us, he would certainly want his share of the money. So, nobody objected to donating his share to a charitable cause. Just sharing the idea with the kids was enough for them to cheerfully agree.” C. M. – Argentina Loving Without Expectations “Our daughter, Anna, was a girl full of life and ideals that she wanted to fulfil: finishing her degree, doing archaeology and starting a family. . . Unfortunately things didn’t work out that way. After graduation she went through a period of serious stress because her boyfriend had just left her. My wife and I were quite disturbed. We felt helpless and began to wonder if we had done something wrong in her upbringing. She had even attempted suicide. This hard experience led us into a deeper relationship with God. We and our other children tried to love Anna without expecting anything in return and, little by little, following appropriate treatment, she was able to come out of the tunnel. One day she confided to me that the love she had received from the family had healed her.” E. P. – Austria
