The Infinite Love loves you

30 Mar 2013 | Non categorizzato

My Dearest Little Sister in Saint Francis,

I just read this:

Saint Matilda saw the Lord open the Wound of His most sweet Heart and say: “Admire the size of my heart that you may know it well; nowhere more explicitly than in the words of the Gospel will you find

Love, for never will you find expressed anywhere in words a love that is stronger or more tender: As the Father has loved me, so I love you.” [1]

Perhaps you didn’t always think that you were so precious a thing, the very object of God’s love.

But He loved you, even before you were born, and soon you will be returning to him. Time is like a flight, a very quick Passage.

The Resurrection draws near.

My heart would desire so much from you, being so aware of your worth. There’s not enough gold in the universe that could pay for the value of your soul which has been purchased by the Blood of God.

But if I could put into a few words what I’d like to tell you … Listen:

Rise to a totally new life and believe that God loves you.

I assure you the fullness of joy here below and a life that’s a constant alleluia.

Every true joy will be the fruit of the only two flowers that can perennially blossom in the garden of your soul:

The strong desire to be loved and to love.

Your tiny heart is a mystery of the love of God.

It sings only when it is loved by an Infinite Love and when it can love an Infinite Love.

The Infinite Love loves you. Believe in this.

Whether you love the Infinite Love who is God, I don’t know; I only hope that you do, for your own happiness.

During this Easter pass over to a continual giving of Love.[2]

May my wish for you come true.

 Chiara Lubich (Easter 1945)

(Published in: Chiara Lubich, Early Letters, New City Press, NY 2012)

The young people of Aleppo

29 Mar 2013 | Non categorizzato

‘One day, in Aleppo, the rebels came to the district where a lot of us live. At that moment we were chatting on Facebook. Worry, anger… we all had different feelings. One, full of fear wrote, “You see, even God is against us.” “No, He is crying with us.” “But these people have ruined my life.” “Let’s try to love them too.” “But how?” “By praying that they find love as well.”

In the end we accepted the challenge to love even those who were hurting us.

‘To tell the truth,’ writes Mira from Aleppo, ‘I didn’t always manage to live the Ideal of unity the way I would like to. All the hate around me managed almost to get into my heart, but it didn’t win. I got to the point that my view of life was really pessimistic. I asked myself: how was Chiara Lubich able to live in the middle of the war when the Movement began? But then I said to myself, “If she could do it, then maybe I can too. This made we want to carry on, to start again. Sometimes I feel that we have to try and live as Jesus would in our place in Syria, which is why we are trying to help other people, even though we may only be able to do it in small ways.

‘I would like to ask everyone to pray because, believe me, your prayers give us a lot of strength. I hope that none of you goes through dark moments like these and sees what we see. I’m sorry I’ve written so little, I’m trying to write quickly before the electricity goes off. Let’s ask the Lord to give us peace in our hearts.’

This chain of prayer already involves people across the world. It is the ‘Time Out’, which takes place at 12 noon every day wherever people are. The idea came just before the First World Supercongress (1987), the big get-together of Youth for Unity. It was suggested by a young basketball player.

Chiara Lubich liked the idea so much that during the Gulf War she asked for ‘permission’ to use it for a chorus of prayer for peace. In December 2012 Maria Voce suggested it again, saying, ‘Only God can satisfy humanity’s need for peace. We have to have a truly powerful prayer… with renewed faith that God can do it, that if we ask in unity God will satisfy our need.’

Source: Gen 3 magazine, no. 1/2013

New look for Gen’s Magazine

28 Mar 2013 | Non categorizzato

Its beginnings in 1971 were pioneer days for the new magazine, with two dilapidated typewriters, metal plates for stamping addresses and several moves from one location to another. But the goal of the Gen’s magazine was clear and also quite daring: to place the charism of unity of Chiara Lubich and the Focolare Movement at the service of pastoral ministry so that it might breathe with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council: communion and dialogue that stem from entering always more deeply into the Paschal-Trinitarian mystery of God.

The format of the magazine was designed to offer reflections that could produce effects in daily life and were not linked to the insights of individual persons or specific circumstances, but would highlight attitudes and behaviours that could be applied in many different contexts.

At the origins of the Gens magazine three years earlier was the need to keep seminarians from different lands connected who had found in the life of the Gospel and in the communitarian spirituality of unity a solid foundation for their own lives as well as a motivation for living as a “new generation of priests (sacerdotes)” – hence the name – who, placing God first in their lives, saw the call to the priestly ministry above all as service and witness. A mimeographed magazine began to be printed in 1971, later a printed page and finally the present magazine.

Throughout these busy forty years Gens has become a vibrant living workshop of life and ideas which has seen such signatures on its pages as Chiara Lubich, Pasquale Foresi, Igino Giordani, German bishop and theologian Klaus Hemmerle, as well as other bishops who had begun working for the magazine as seminarians – Italian theologian Piero Coda, Fr. Silvano Cola, Fr. Toni Weber and many others.

Today the Gens magazine continues to build bridges between the Church and the modern world in unison with the Citta Nuova Editorial Group whose vision it shares: Jesus’ dream “that all be one”.

By clicking on the Citta Nuova link you can access the extensive reference material that includes issues of the magazine from 1971 until today. (Click Gruppo CN and then “gens”.)

Over the years, Gens magazine has also been published in other languages in both paper editions and online. In Portuguese as Perspectivas de Comunhão; in English Being One and in German Das Prisma. Other editions are published in India, Argentina and Poland.

The Most Beautiful Easter

27 Mar 2013 | Non categorizzato

© M. Cristina Criscola, ‘Mutual Love’ – Loppiano, 1984

Dearest all, I would like to invite you all to live this Holy Week in the light of a spiritual message of Chiara given in 1981.

Here are some excerpts:

Holy Thursday

“Our celebration. Many years ago – and today too, Jesus gave the new commandment to his disciples, that commandment which is the fundamental law and basis of every other norm for each one of us; today too, Jesus prayed for unity: “that all may be one”; today too, he instituted the Eucharist that makes him present among us and indeed brings about our unity with Him and among us. And today too, he instituted the priesthood that makes the Eucharist possible […]. What would our life be like without the new commandment, without the Eucharist, without the Ideal of unity?”.

Good Friday

“There is no better day to solemnly renew our consecration to him, Jesus Forsaken, thus renewing our commitment to spend the life that we have in loving him always, immediately and with joy.”

Easter Sunday

“He is risen and h is the Resurrection and the Life for all of us too.”

Like Chiara on that occasion, I also wish you with all my heart: Happy Easter to each one of you! May it be the most beautiful Easter ever!

Maria Voce (Emmaus)

The Passion: a God who suffers for us

24 Mar 2013 | Non categorizzato

It was the passion, freely embraced, that displayed to God and human beings the love with which Christ loves us, that is, which gives us life. In suffering, he displayed his humanity. In loving us, he displayed his divinity. From then on, the human is always divinized if it transforms pain into love. This is the unheard-of miracle of a God who suffers, from his birth in a cave to a vagabond life, a horrendous death…

The life of Christ, which he taught us and which we must follow if we want to receive grace-filled life, is to live the Gospel welcoming suffering and with it being conformed to him. That means that loving is not all sweetness and delight. The duty of giving even when giving itself gains bitterness, this is loving as Christ has loved us. If someone, when loving, seeks satisfaction, it means that person is thinking of self, loving self. Such a one loves creatures, not for the sake of creatures and still less for God, but for self.

Love is gift and belongs to sacrifice. Love and pain react with one another. The one makes the other more sensitive – always, naturally, if this is a matter of movements guided by divine grace.

How do you intend building projects of stability on the basis of human beings, when their feelings vary from evening to morning, when your moods, and sometimes your vision of life, vary because of something you have eaten or after something you have read or a conversation? In yourself, in your nerves, in your physical changeability, you are unstable. When you need to act perhaps you are tired, when you need sleep perhaps you have insomnia. And you cannot rely upon your natural gifts, on your culture and affections because these vary as well, alternating trust with distrust, light with shade, peace with anger. And neither do other people offer you a basis; in your family perhaps you come up against characters that do not work together with yours, persons whose existences are closed in on themselves or that open up to other kinds of horizons. You come up against rejoicing when you are sad, mockery for your faith, incomprehension of your sacrifices, changeability, inconsistency…

Going out from your family, then, the ground crumbles under your feet. Money can give bread to feed you, but not peace to give you calm. Among your friends there is betrayal and incomprehension: if you are poor, they flee you; if you are rich, they betray you. When you need it, they have neither the strength nor the desire to support you.

And so your life is about thinking at night to seek some support in the day, it is about seeing the day darken hope under the night of disillusionment. And so time passes away.

You will find truth in God alone. He alone is stability, he alone does not pass away. And the throng outside and the phantasmagoria of landscapes and personages that vary, if God exists, neither shock nor enthral you, for you rest anchored in the Eternal. The scene of this world passes away, God remains.

Igino Giordani, Il Fratello (Città Nuova, April 2011, III edizione Figlie della Chiesa, 1954)

Economy of Communion (EoC): Mission in Serbia/2

21 Mar 2013 | Non categorizzato

Cristina Viano and Jena Debbaneh were the winners of the AIEC scholarship for research on the impact of EoC projects on poverty. Cristina recounts: “The EoC Mission in Serbia turned out to be an excellent place for beginning this study. In fact, in order to enter into the logic of the Economy of Communion it is necessary to understand how these businesses live out the culture of giving each day and what real needs are met with the aid.” Cristina continues: “Three images stand out and represent the variety of meetings with EoC businesses that we have encountered on this trip. A few farm families reminded us of what lies at the basis of the EoC and the simple and familial and communitarian environment in which it can grow and develop, beginning from the cooperation between small producers and by the gift not of profits but livestock A quite different scene. A large company operating in the field of food and commercial agriculture highlighted the challenges and dilemmas involved in reconciling values of communion and of size and growth, share and investment relations with the local community and with the banks.    Finally, there is the image of the EOC with its strong determination to ensure the quality of its products and the jobs of its employees, of expanding its business slowly without borrowing, even offering its customers interest-free loans in a solid mutual trust. It is clear that the Serbian economy still suffers from the consequences of the war. In some areas of the country there is widespread poverty and unemployment is high. For this reason, the spontaneity, consistency and passion that we have encountered in the three examples cited above and in many other regions of Vojvodina provide us with important evidence for the study. It has become even more evident to us that the Economy of Communion does not merely involve an impersonal gift of money, or the application of a particular system of management. It mainly means to live fully immersed in the local scene, finding energy to invent new work from small family production, becoming animators of a community who are able to provide services and be near to those in need.”  Jena Debbaneh adds: “Seeing the reality in person is always very different from ‘reading it’ from the numbers. We have met so many people. All of them were ready to share their stories: how and why they received assistance, for how long and how they used it. It was important for us to understand their stories in order to have a precise idea of what “assistance” really is. But their hopes for the future were also important. Their answers contained hope for the future, which made us think that these people are not prisoners of a ‘poverty trap’. I remember one family living on the Belgrade countryside. The questions we had before meeting them became fewer when we were face to face with the reality of their home. There we found extreme poverty, but also joy and hospitality and sharing of food and drinks. We were offered an abundance of food, but also as much happiness and love. It made us realize that this family gave and shared like the poor widow of the Gospel. They were in fact rich because they understood what a culture of giving means.” Jena concluded: “During this trip I came to understand what Chiara Lubich was talking about when she first launched the Economy of Communion in Brazil (1991): Eliminating poverty and inequality by creating businesses with a new culture. The poor are the final goal of the EoC, and their involvement in the business is the means for evaluating its effectiveness.” By Antonella Ferrucci