“What do you think?”, “What would you do if you were me?” People often ask for our help, or we realise they need it, and we are convinced that to help a friend, a brother, a person, we need to “do” something. In the book “Meditations”, a collection of Chiara Lubich’s very first spiritual writings, we find a few lines where she invites us to change our perspective and aim at the life of God in us. Thus, our love for all others would be His love and not ours. There are those who do things ‘for love’. There are those who do things trying to ‘be Love’. Someone who does things ‘for love’ may do them well, but thinking for example that they are doing a great service for their neighbour, who is sick for instance, they may annoy them with their chatter, their advice and their help. Such charity is burdensome and not to the point. Poor thing! They may gain merit, but the other person gains a burden. That is why we must ‘be Love’. Our destiny is like that of the stars: if they revolve, they are; if they do not, they are not. We are, in the sense that not our own life but the life of God lives in us, if we do not stop loving for one moment. Love places us in God and God is Love. But Love, which is God, is light and with the light we see whether our way of approaching and serving our neighbour is according to the heart of God, as our neighbour would wish to be, as they would dream of it being if they had beside them not us, but Jesus.

Chiara Lubich

Text adapted from Meditations, New City London, Dublin, 1989, p. 45