Like Clare of Assisi

When we were young like you, like the majority of you, we were always greatly struck by a phrase that Saint Clare told St Francis when the latter practically drew her to follow his way. St Francis asked her: “My child, what do you want?” One could expect all kinds of answers, like: “I would like to follow you in the way of poverty, I want to become a nun, I want to enter a convent,” and so on. Instead she truly got it right. “My child, what do you want?” and she answered: “God”. She wanted God because she was choosing God as God had chosen her.

It’s the same choice that we also made at the beginning of the Movement, we made only one choice: God! Beyond the bombings and everything else, God emerged. We believed in God and we made God the ideal of our life. We see that this choice is always new because this choice of God makes us put aside nearly all those riches that we perhaps accumulate even without realizing it. Perhaps we are rich of the focolare, we are rich with things, we are rich in intelligence, of our studies, we are rich, I don’t know, of our relatives. We are perhaps rich of our priesthood, or perhaps of something more. Our ideal which is Jesus Forsaken, who is nothing, who made himself nothing, makes us put all of this aside so as to have God first and do all the rest as the will of God. This is what Saint Clare reminds us again today. She did it by choosing the way of poverty; we do it by choosing the way of unity, always having Jesus in our midst, the Risen One and Jesus in us through our love for Jesus Forsaken.

Chiara Lubich
Mollens (Switzerland), 11 August 1987

Source: www.centrochiaralubich.org