Chiara Lubich’s consecration to God on December 7, 1943, when she was 23 years old, laid the foundations of the Focolare Movement. Sixty years later she recalled that moment in a telephone linkup, inviting all members of the Movement to give their lives to God once more. … Looking back today, we can understand what the 7^th of December 1943, the year of the Movement’s birth decades ago, can tell us. It tells us that a charism of the Holy Spirit, a new light came down on earth during those days, a light that, in the mind of God, was destined to quench the burning thirst of this world with the water of Wisdom, to warm it with divine love and thus give life to a new people nourished by the Gospel. And God decided to call me, a girl like many others, and hence my consecration to him, my “yes” to God, soon followed by the “yes” said by many other young women and men. That day speaks of light, then, and of people giving their lives to God as instruments in his hands for the achievement of his goals. Light and giving our lives to God: two realities that were extremely useful at that time when there was general confusion, mutual hatred and war. It was a time of darkness, when God’s love, his peace, joy and guidance seemed to be absent from the world, and it seemed that no one was interested in him. Light and giving our lives to God, two words which heaven wants to repeat to us again today, when many wars continue to be waged on our planet and terrorism has appeared as something even more frightening. Light means the Word, the Gospel, which is still too little known and, above all, not lived enough. Giving our lives to God is more necessary and right than ever today, considering that men and women who join causes the pursued by terrorism are ready to give their lives. What then should we Christians do, as followers of a God who was crucified and forsaken in order to bring about a new world, for our salvation and for that Life which will never end? … We should go out again into the world as living Gospels, so as to immerse it in its Light. We can do this by continuing to live God’s will in the present moment … without forgetting the Word of Life, which is taken from Scripture and offered to us month by month. … And, almost as if we were reborn, let’s give ourselves completely to God once more, in the path he has chosen for each one of us. In this way, the present and future that God gives us will also be pleasing to him.

Chiara Lubich

(From a telephone conference call, Rocca di Papa, 25th April 1991)