I have found you in so many places, Lord!

I have felt you beating in the perfect stillness of a little Alpine church, in the shadow of the tabernacle of an empty cathedral, in the breathing as one soul of a crowd who love you and who fill the arches of your church with songs and love.

I have found you in joy. I have spoken to you beyond the starry firmament, when in the evening, in silence, I was returning home from work.

I seek you and often I find you.

But where I always find you is in suffering.

A suffering, any sort of suffering, is like the sound of a bell that summons God’s bride to prayer. When the shadow of the cross appears the soul recollects itself in the tabernacle of its heart and forgetting the tinkling of the bell it “sees” you and speaks to you.

It is you who come to visit me. It is I who answer you: “Here I am, Lord, I desire you, I have always desired you.”

And in this meeting my soul does not feel its suffering, but is as if inebriated with your love: filled with you, imbued with you: I in you and you in me, that we may be one.

And then I reopen my eyes to life, to the less real life, divinely trained to wage your war.

Chiara Lubich
in Meditations, New City, London 2005, pages 74-75