{"id":305810,"date":"2018-01-18T01:10:49","date_gmt":"2018-01-18T00:10:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/ecumenism-mirvets-choice\/"},"modified":"2024-05-15T20:36:12","modified_gmt":"2024-05-15T18:36:12","slug":"ecumenism-mirvets-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/ecumenism-mirvets-choice\/","title":{"rendered":"Ecumenism: Mirvet\u2019s Choice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"syria-1886425_Pixabay\"Mirvet Kelly\u2019s grandfather was a deacon<\/strong>: \u201cI remember going with him every Sunday to the Syro-Orthodox Divine Liturgy. I was proud to watch him all dressed in white as he recited his portion of the prayers at the altar.\u201d There are several Christian Churches in Homs, Syria, where Mirvet grew up<\/strong>: Armenian Apostolic, Greek Orthodox and various Catholic Rites, Maronite, Melkite and Syro-Catholic. Before the war, even though we were linked to our own Churches, the faithful attended other Churches without any problem. \u201cAs I grew older,\u201d she went on to say,<\/strong> \u201ca lot of things changed: Grandfather died and the Divine Liturgy seemed long and outdated. I was the only Christian at school in the midst a lot of Muslims. At Christmas and Easter I\u2019d be the only one absent and, when I returned, I was bombarded with questions: \u2018Why are there so many Churches? Why was your Jesus crucified and rising from the dead on different dates in different Churches? Some friends and I decided to no longer belong to one Church or another, but to be Christians and that\u2019s all. Like many of them, I stopped going to my own Church.\u201d A<\/strong>\"20180118-01\"<\/a><\/strong>fter a while, Mirvet met a group that was trying to live the Gospel according to the <\/strong>Focolare spirituality<\/a>.<\/strong> \u201cThrough them, I discovered that God is the Father of everyone and that we\u2019re all loved by Him as sons and daughters. My life began to change. Every time I tried to love, going to visit an elderly person or a poor person, for example, my heart would be overcome with peace and joy. One day, I came across a sentence in one of <\/strong>Chiara Lubich\u2019<\/a>s writings:<\/strong> \u2018We should love the other person\u2019s Church as our own.\u2019<\/strong> \u00a0Not only did I not love the other person\u2019s Church \u2013 I didn\u2019t even love my own Church, which I had criticized and abandoned. At that point, Mirvet\u2019s life, which was already very fruitful both personally and ecumenically, took a new leap<\/strong>. She felt God calling her to give herself entirely to Him. \u201cIn the Focolare communities I\u2019ve lived in,\u201d she explained, \u201cI found myself to be the only Orthodox among Catholics of all ages, countries, languages, cultures, Churches and ways of thinking. Trying to live in unity with all the different ideas about things is always a challenge, because each of us has her own tastes and ideas down to the smallest details. \"MirvetKelly._01\"<\/strong>But when we try to appropriate the other person\u2019s reality as our own, we experience that the differences become an enrichment. We often pray for each other\u2019s Churches, in an ongoing growth in the faith and in the relationship with God. And almost without realizing it, we bring the fruit of our communion into our respective Churches, to our jobs and into our daily lives. It seems like a drop in the ocean, but even the tiniest steps united to those of many others in the world, can make a difference. In the countries of the Middle East where I lived, for example, I saw priests helping people, without ever asking what Church they belonged to. They did projects to help out different Churches, to help them meet their needs whether they were Christian \u2013 or even Muslim. Last year, Catholics and Orthodox celebrated Easter on the same day. Two Syrian friends who now live in Vienna, Austria, recently reported to me how they and many other Syrians have been helped by a parish priest and some Catholic women focolarini to look for a house, medicine and work. They formed a group in which they live and help each other to share their common Christian experience. In the United States there are more than fifty Syro-Orthodox Christians who meet regularly, once in the Orthodox churches and once in the Catholic churches. They experience that God is always with us and that we have to pray, to live and to love so that Jesus\u2019s testament \u2018that all may be one\u2019<\/em> is fulfilled as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (January 18-25) is provides an excellent opportunity to know one another better. The story of a young Syro-Orthodox Christian who discovers in the Focolare a way to contribute toward unity with her own life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[893],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-focolare-worldwide-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}