The God of Today

“I’d like to console Him, to run through the world, gathering hearts for Him.” This was Chiara Lubich’s first impulse on January 24, 1944 when she became aware of Jesus’s abysmal cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” If that was the moment when he suffered most,” she reasoned, “then it was the moment when he loved us most. Let’s make Him the ideal of our life!”

And to think that back then theology did not take into consideration the abandonment experienced by Jesus! Catholic piety focused its attention on the physical suffering, the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. But World War II and the Holocaust in particular dug a hole in the human conscience that only Jesus’s experience of extreme abandonment could fill.

While still young Chiara chose to love the abandoned Jesus in the innumerable faces of personal and collective human suffering, so that the Abandoned One would not be alone in His abandonment. Very soon, however, she experienced something quite unexpected: “You throw yourself into a sea of pain and find yourself swimming in a sea of love.” The agony subsides into joy and transforms relationships, creating communion: “They are two sides of the same medal. To all the souls I show the face of Unity. For me and the souls that are on the front lines of Unity: the abandoned Jesus is all for us.”

The years 1949-1951 were a well-spring of new intuitions. The wound of the abandonment as the expression of maximum Love becomes for Chiara the keystone of her vision of human history, of life itself and of God. She contemplates His abandonment as “the pupil of God’s Eye [through which he looks] on the world: an Infinite Emptiness through which God looks at us: God’s window thrown open onto the world, and the window through which humanity sees God.”

Years of trial followed as the Church carried out its close examination of the new charism, a time of suspension that Chiara experienced in the light of the Son who was abandoned by the Father, convinced that through it all the Church was being a Mother.

Stage by stage, the book traces the trajectory of Chiara’s spiritual adventure, through her letters, notes, diaries and talks that are compiled in six chapters. Its 160 pages, including an introduction by theologian Hubertus Blausmeiser, could accompany and illuminate our daily life. – and includes an introduction by theologian Hubertus Blaumeiser. 

With the Church’s official approval of the Focolare in early 1960, a new perspective is opened: Abandoned Jesus becomes the motivating drive behind the thrust to move out and face the social challenges, in every form of suffering. He is the “Teacher of dialogue” in the ecumenical and interreligious environment. He presents Himself as the God of today, who is even able to talk to non-believers and be a source of cultural change.

The author takes up the “Holy Journey” with Him, a communitarian journey to holiness that has included hundreds and thousands of people from around the world: “He is the supreme Master of the spiritual life, of detachment from self, detachment from everything, from what is of God, but not God.”

“Loving abandoned Jesus,’ she writes, “we find the reason and the strength to not escape from these evils, these divisions, but to accept them and consume them and bring to them our own personal and collective remedy.” And she states with certitude: “If we manage to encounter Him in every suffering, if we love Him, if we turn to the Father like Jesus on the cross: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk. 23:46), then with Him the night will be a thing of the past, and light will illuminate us.”