Arts at the heart of Interdependence

 Professor Benjamin Barber,

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends,

I still remember very well the second Interdependence day in Rome. I wish I were with you in Paris, though, I’m present with this message.

This third step along our road places the Arts at the heart of Interdependence, for this way of life can build deep relationships among individuals and among peoples.

The encounter of civilizations, now irreversible, has led us far from our old cultural views. We realize now that they were often inadequate or biased because they were deprived of relationships between peoples. This is very good.

But there’s the other side of the coin: many of us were not ready for these changes. A feeling of insecurity prevailed, together with intolerance, caused by the fear that we might lose both our own way of thinking and our deepest values.

It can’t be so.

Among the material and spiritual ruins of the Second World War, my first companions and I discovered that Love is the only Ideal that always remains. This Love is God, who sustains and gives meaning to everything.

This unique discovery led us to start loving the person next to us. Always and everywhere we got an immediate answer from every man or woman of whatever culture, faith, tradition. This is because the DNA of Love lies in the heart of every person, even if it is sometimes hidden.

Looking at the world in this way, we can see we are brothers and sisters of every man or woman we approach, because we are children of the one God, who is Love. If we look back at history we can identify certain occasions when fraternity has been lived. This is what is happening today, here.

Then we can rely on the strength of Love to take up the present historic challenge of multiculturalism.

Love loves everyone; it moves every heart so that a communion of goods may be achieved. It loves the other’s homeland as well as its own, it builds up new structures so that war, terrorism, quarrels, hunger and the thousands of evils of the world draw back.

Love takes an active part in lively dialogues between people of the most diverse religions, based on the « golden rule » – « do for the others what you’d like them to do for you » – present in all the holy books, and it reconstructs the spiritual history of mankind.

Love makes the men and women of this earth able to embrace the whole world, able to offer their own values as a gift to the others, able to enhance the values of the other cultures, in order to work out a global wisdom, which is so necessary today.

Then humankind will live up to a fraternal interdependence, as one family capable of building structures that can express the movement from unity to diversity and vice versa.

I ask God, the source of Love, to help us make this dream come true.

Chiara Lubich