Seeking love and fleeing from pain: this is an almost natural mechanism of human existence. With the message of the cross, however, Christianity teaches that true and deep love passes through pain. Whoever understands the cross well – says Chiara Lubich in the following text – finds in it a key to the fullness of life. “Let them take up their cross . . .” (Mt 16:24). So strange and unique are these words. Like all the words said by Jesus, they have something in them of a light that this world does not know. They are so bright that the dull eyes of human beings, including those of apathetic Christians, are dazzled and therefore made blind. … And perhaps the whole mistake lies here: in the world, love is not understood. Love is the finest of words, but it is also the most deformed and debased. … Perhaps maternal love can give us an inkling of it. For the love of a mother is not only hugs and kisses; it is above all sacrifice. Thus it is with Jesus: love impelled him to the cross, considered foolishness by many. But only this foolishness has saved humanity and has formed the saints. Saints, in fact, are people who are able to understand the cross. They are men and women who, following Jesus, the God-Man, have taken up their daily cross as the most precious thing on earth. At times they have brandished it like a weapon, as soldiers of God. They have loved it all their lives, and they have known and experienced that the cross is the key, the only key to a treasure, the treasure. The cross gradually opens souls to union with God. Then, through human beings, God once more reappears on the scene of this earth. He repeats—although in a way that is infinitely lesser, yet similar — the actions that he himself once performed when, as one human being among others, he blessed those who cursed him, forgave those who insulted him, saved, healed, preached the words of heaven, fed the hungry, founded a new society based on the law of love, and revealed the power of the One who sent him. In short, the cross is the necessary instrument by which the divine penetrates the human, and a human being participates more fully in the life of God, and is raised up from the kingdom of this world to the kingdom of heaven. But we must “take up our cross…,” wake up in the morning expecting it, and knowing that only by means of it can we receive those gifts which the world does not know: that peace, that joy, that knowledge of the things of heaven, unknown to most. … The cross, the badge of the Christian, is unwanted by the world because it believes that by fleeing it, suffering can be escaped. The world does not know that the cross opens wide the soul of the person who has understood it to the kingdom of Light and of Love: that Love which the world seeks so much, but does not have.

                                                                                                          Chiara Lubich

 Chiara Lubich, Essential Writings, New city Press, Hyde Park, New York, 2007,  pp. 189.