{"id":328560,"date":"2016-09-18T04:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-09-18T02:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/the-god-of-today\/"},"modified":"2024-05-16T15:05:06","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T13:05:06","slug":"the-god-of-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/the-god-of-today\/","title":{"rendered":"The God of Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ges\u00f9<\/a>\u201cI\u2019d like to console Him, to run through the world, gathering hearts for Him.<\/strong>\u201d This was Chiara Lubich<\/a>\u2019s first impulse on January 24, 1944 when she became aware of Jesus\u2019s abysmal cry from the cross: \u201cMy God, my God, why have you abandoned me?\u201d If that was the moment when he suffered most,\u201d she reasoned, \u201cthen it was the moment when he loved us most. Let\u2019s make Him the ideal of our life!\u201d 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\u2019s experience of extreme abandonment could fill. While still young Chiara chose to love the <\/strong>abandoned Jesus<\/a> in the innumerable faces of personal and collective human suffering,<\/strong> so that the Abandoned One would not be alone in His abandonment. Very soon, however, she experienced something quite unexpected: \u201cYou throw yourself into a sea of pain and find yourself swimming in a sea of love.\u201d The agony subsides into joy and transforms relationships, creating communion: \u201cThey 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.\u201d 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 \u201cthe pupil of God\u2019s Eye [through which he looks] on the world: an Infinite Emptiness through which God looks at us: God\u2019s window thrown open onto the world, and the window through which humanity sees God.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/strong>\u00a0 <\/u> With the Church\u2019s 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 \u201cTeacher of dialogue\u201d 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 \u201cHoly Journey\u201d with Him, a communitarian journey to holiness that has included hundreds and thousands of people from around the world: \u201cHe is the supreme Master of the spiritual life, of detachment from self, detachment from everything, from what is of God, but not God.\u201d \u201cLoving abandoned Jesus,\u2019 she writes, \u201cwe 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.\u201d And she states with certitude: \u201cIf we manage to encounter Him in every suffering, if we love Him, if we turn to the Father like Jesus on the cross: \u201cFather, into your hands I commend my spirit\u201d (Lk. 23:46), then with Him the night will be a thing of the past, and light will illuminate us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published by Citt\u00e0 Nuova, \u201cIl Dio di oggi\u201d (The God of today) is a compilation of texts by Chiara Lubich that spans the arc of her life. It is an invitation to follow Jesus who at the climax of his life on earth experienced the searing pain of feeling separated from the Father. But precisely in that moment he was the architect of unity: a very timely message in these precarious moments of our society that can bring about a rebirth.<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328560","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=328560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}