World of Life audio mp3Giving an amnesty to one another, forgiving one another totally and each day, we can grow in thekindness that mirrors God’s mercy to us. There is nothing more wonderful than hearing someone say to you: ‘I love you.’ When someone loves us we don’t feel alone, we walk secure, we are able also to face difficulties and critical situations. If then our being loved becomes mutual, hope and trust are reinforced, and we feel protected. We all know that children, to grow well, need to be surrounded by an environment that is full of love, and to have someone who loves them. But this is true at any age. For this reason the Word of Life invites us to be ‘kind’ to one another, which is to say to love one another, and it gives God himself as a model. It is precisely his example that reminds us that loving one another is not mere sentiment. It is an extremely concrete and demanding ‘desire for the good of the other’. In Jesus God has come close to the sick and the poor, has felt compassion for the crowds, has had mercy on sinners, and has forgiven those who crucified him. For us, too, wanting the good of others means listening to them, showing them sincere attention, sharing their joys and trials, taking care of them, walking with them along their way. The other person is never a stranger, but a brother or sister who belongs to me, who I wish to serve. The exact opposite of what happens when we see others as rivals, competitors, enemies, to the point of wanting their harm, to the point of crushing them, even eliminating them, as sadly we are told in the news happens day by day. Even though we may not go so far, don’t we also accumulate grudges, distrust, hostility or simple indifference towards persons who have hurt us or who we find unpleasant or who do not belong to our social circle? Wanting the good of one another, the Word of Life teaches us, means following the path of mercy, ready to forgive one another every time we slip up. Talking of this, Chiara Lubich tells us about the experience at the beginning of her new Christian community. In order to put Jesus’s command into practice, she and her first companions made a pact of mutual love. And yet, despite this, ‘especially in the early times it was not always easy for a group of girls to live the love radically. We were people like anyone else, even if we were sustained by a special gift of God and, among us, on our relationships, dust could gather and unity could weaken. This is what happened, for example, when we realized the shortcomings, the imperfections, of the others and we judged them, so that the current of mutual love grew cold. ‘In reaction to this situation one day we thought would make pact among us that we called the “pact of mercy”. We decided every morning to see each neighbour we met – in our focolare house, at school, at work and so on – as new, as really new, without remembering at all the other’s flaws, the other’s defects, but covering everything with love. It was a matter of meeting everyone with this complete amnesty in our hearts, with this universal pardon. It was a powerful commitment, taken by all of us together, that helped us always to be the first in loving in imitation of God who is merciful, who forgives and forgets.1 A pact of mercy! Could not this be a way of growing in kindness? Fabio Ciardi 1 Love of neighbour, Talk given to Muslim friends, Castel Gandolfo, 1 November 2002.
How welcome, in the midst of the conflicts that harm humanity in many parts of the world, is this invitation by Jesus to peace! It keeps hope alive when we realize that that he himself is peace and that he has promised to give us his peace. Mark’s gospel places these words of Jesus at the end of a series of things said to his disciples, meeting at home in Capernaum, where he explains how they should live as his community. The conclusion is clear: everything must lead to peace, which contains every good. It is a peace we are called to experience in our daily lives: in our families, at work, with those who have other ideas politically. It is a peace that is not afraid to face contrary opinions, which we need to speak about openly if we want a unity that is always more true and deep. It is a peace that, at the same time, demands that we should take care that our relationship of love never dwindles, because the other person is more valuable than any differences that may exist between us. ‘Wherever unity and mutual love come to be,’ Chiara Lubich once said, ‘there is peace, indeed, true peace. Because where there is mutual love, there is a certain presence of Jesus among us, and he truly is peace, peace par excellence.’1 Chiara’s ‘ideal of unity’ was born during World War II and it immediately looked like the antidote to hatred and ruptures in society. From then on, when faced with any conflict, Chiara persistently continued putting forward the Gospel logic of love. When, for example, war exploded in Iraq in 1990, she expressed bitter surprise at hearing ‘words that we thought had been buried, such as: “the enemy”, “our enemies”, “hostilities are beginning”, and the war bulletins, prisoners, defeats.… We realized with dismay that this was a body blow to the fundamental Christian principle of Jesus’s “commandment” par excellence, his “New Commandment”.… Instead of loving one another, instead of being ready to die for one another’ here is humankind again ‘in the abyss of hatred’: contempt, torture, killing.2 How can we escape? she asked herself. ‘We must knit together, wherever possible, new relationships or a deepening of those that already exist, between those of us who are Christians and the followers of other monotheistic faiths: Muslims and Jews,’ 3 in other words, those engaged in the conflict. The same is true when faced with any kind of conflict. We must knit together among individuals and peoples relationships of listening, of love, as Chiara would also say, to the point of ‘being ready to die for one another.’ It is necessary to set aside one’s own positions in order to understand the other’s, even though we know that we will not always manage to understand them completely. The other too can do the same with me and at times neither will the other, perhaps, understand me and my positions. But we want nonetheless to stay open to the other, even when there is difference and incomprehension, before all else saving our relationship. The Gospel makes it a command: ‘Be at peace.’ Making it a command is a sign that serious and tough commitment is demanded. It is one of the most essential expressions of the love and mercy we are called to have for one another. Fabio Ciardi ___________________________________
On Bavarian television, 16 September 1
28 February 1991, see Santi insieme,(Città Nuova: Rome, 1994), pp. 63-6
God has always wanted this: to dwell with us, his people. Already the first pages of the Bible show it as God comes down from heaven, walks in the garden and talks with Adam and Eve. Didn’t he create us for this? What does a lover want if not to be with the beloved? The Book of Revelation, which investigates God’s plan in history, gives us the certainty that God’s desire will be fully fulfilled. With the coming of Jesus, Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, he already started living in our midst. And now that Jesus is risen his presence is no longer limited to one place or one time, and he has spread it to the entire world. With Jesus has begun the building of a new and highly original community, a people made up of many peoples. God does not wish to dwell only in my soul, in my family, in my people, but among all peoples called to form one people. At the same time, the current experience of human mobility is changing the idea of what it is to be a people. In many nations, the people are made up of many ethnic groups. We are so different from one another in the colour of our skin, our culture, our religion. We often look at one another with distrust, suspicion or fear. We make war upon each other. And yet God is Father of all, and loves all and each of us. He does not want to live with one people (‘Ours, of course,’ would be our first thought) and leave the others behind. For him we are all his sons and daughters, a single family. Let’s make the effort, therefore, guided by the Word of Life this month, to appreciate diversity, respect the other, look at him or her as someone who belongs to me: I am the other, the other is me; the other lives in me, I live in the other. And let’s begin with those we share our life with every day. Like this we can make space for the presence of God among us. It will be he who constructs unity, who safeguards the identity of each people, who creates a new way of being society. In 1959 Chiara Lubich had already had this insight. She wrote a passage that is extremely up- to-date and an amazing prophecy: ‘If one day all people, not as individuals but as nations, would learn to put themselves aside… and if they would do this as the expression of the mutual love between states that God asks for, just as he asks for mutual love among individuals, that day would mark the beginning of a new era. For on that day…. Jesus will be alive and present among peoples … ‘Now is the time for every people to go beyond its own borders, to look farther. Now is the time to love the other countries as our own, to acquire a new purity of vision. To be Christians it is not enough to be detached from ourselves. The times we live in demand from the followers of Christ something more: the awareness of Christianity’s social dimension…. ‘And we hope that the Lord may have mercy on this divided and confused world, on peoples closed within their shells contemplating their own beauty – the only beauty that exists for them (though it is both limiting and unsatisfying). They strain to hold on to their treasures against all odds, the very treasures that could help other peoples who are dying of hunger. May the Lord cause all barriers to fall, and allow love to run uninterrupted through all lands, flooding them with spiritual and material goods. ‘Let us hope that the Lord brings about a new order in the world. Only he can make humanity a family and cultivate the unique characteristics of each people so that the splendour of each, placed at the service of others, may shine with the one light of life. This light of life in making beautiful each earthly country will make it the antechamber of the Eternal Country.’1
Fabio Cardi
1 Chiara Lubich, Essential Writings (New York and London, 2006), 231-2
Why are these words of Jesus so dear to us and why do they come back time and again in the Words of Life we choose each month? Perhaps it’s because they are the heart of the Gospel. They are what the Lord will ask us when in the end we find ourselves in front of him. On these words will hinge the most important exam of our lives; and we can get ready for it every single day. The Lord will ask whether we have given food and drink to whoever was hungry and thirsty, whether we have welcomed the stranger, whether we have clothed the naked, visited the sick and the prisoner… It is a question of little acts, which yet have the value of eternity. Nothing is small if done for love, if done for him. Jesus indeed did not just come close to the poor and marginalized; he healed the sick and comforted the suffering. But he loved them with a preferential love, to the point of calling them members of his family, of identifying himself with them in a mysterious solidarity. Today too Jesus is still present in whoever suffers injustice and violence, in whoever is looking for work or living in a risky situation, in whoever is forced to leave his or her homeland because of war. How many people are in pain around us for all sorts of other reasons and call out, even without words, for our help! They are Jesus who asks for concrete love, a love capable of inventing new ‘works of mercy’ in keeping with new needs. No one is excluded. If a person who is old or sick is Jesus, how can we not seek what could give the necessary relief? If I teach my language to an immigrant child, I teach Jesus. If I help my mother clean the house, I help Jesus. If I bring hope to a prisoner or consolation to someone who is afflicted or forgiveness to someone who has hurt me, I build a relationship with Jesus. And every time the fruit will be not only giving joy to the other person, but I too will feel a great joy. By giving we receive, we sense an inner fullness, we feel happy because, even though we do not know it, we have met Jesus. The other person, as Chiara Lubich wrote, is the archway we pass under to reach God. This is how she recalls the impact of this Word of Life from the first moments of her experience: The whole of our old way of thinking about our neighbours and loving them collapsed. If Christ was in some way in everyone, we could not discriminate, we could not have preferences. Our human notions that classified others were thrown up into the air: compatriot or foreigner, old or young, good-looking or ugly, nice or nasty, rich or poor, Christ was behind each one, Christ was in each one. And in reality each brother or sister was ‘another Christ’…. Living like this we realized that our neighbour was for us the path to God. Or rather, our brother or sister was like an archway that we had to go under to meet God. We experienced this from the earliest days. What union with God in the evening, when we prayed, or when we recollected ourselves after having loved him all day in our brothers and sisters! Who gave us that consolation, that inner union that was so new, so heavenly, if not Christ who lived the ‘give, and it will be given to you’ (Lk 6:38)of his Gospel? We had loved him all day in our brothers and sisters and here he was now loving us.’1 Fabio Ciardi 1 Chiara Lubich Scritti spirituali, vol. 4, (Rom3, 1995), 204-5.
God’s kingdom is Jesus present among us. We experience this when we love one another. He is almighty and conquers every evil.
This is what the Jews of the time of Jesus were waiting for: the arrival of God’s kingdom. As soon as he began going around the villages and towns, Jesus started to proclaim: ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’ (Lk 10:9). Then immediately after that: ‘ The kingdom of God has come to you’; ‘the kingdom of God is among you’ (Lk 17:21).
In the person of Jesus, God’s very self had come into the midst of God’s people and, decisively and with strength, taken back control of history so as to lead it to its goal. Jesus’s miracles were a sign of this. In the person of Jesus, God’s very self had come into the midst of God’s people and, decisively and with strength, taken back control of history so as to lead it to its goal. Jesus’s miracles were a sign of this.
In the Gospel passage that this Word of Life comes from, Jesus had just healed a man who was mute, freeing him from the devil who held him prisoner. It was the demonstration that he had come to conquer evil, every evil, and finally establish the kingdom of God. This term ‘the kingdom of God’ was the Jewish people’s way of saying that God acted for the sake of Israel, freeing the people from every form of slavery and evil, guiding them to justice and peace, flooding them with joy and good things. This was the act of that God who Jesus revealed as ‘Father’ – mysterious, loving and full of compassion, aware of the needs and sufferings of each of his children. We too need to hear Jesus’s proclamation: ‘The kingdom of God has come to you.’ Looking around us we often have the impression that the world is dominated by evil, that the violent and the corrupt have the upper hand. At times we feel ourselves at the mercy of hostile forces, of dangerous events stronger than we are. We feel impotent in the face of wars and environmental calamity, of massacres and climate change, of migration and financial and economic crises. Yet this is where Jesus’s proclamation is set. It invites us to believe that he, right now, is conquering evil and is establishing a new world. In the month of March twenty five years ago, speaking to thousands of young people, Chiara Lubich entrusted them with her dream, ‘it is possible to make the world a better place…. almost a single family, as if belonging to just one country.’ Then as now this looked like a utopia. For the dream to become reality, however, she invited them to live mutual love, in the certainty that acting like this they would have had ‘Christ among you, Christ himself, the Almighty, and from him you can hope for all things.’ Yes, it is he who is the kingdom of God. And so, what do we do? Act in such a way as to have him always in our midst. Chiara went on to say: He himself will work with you in your countries because he will, in a certain way, come again into the world wherever you meet, because you will make him present through your mutual love, through your unity. And he will enlighten you about all that is to be done. He will guide you, he will sustain you, he will be your strength, your fervour, your joy. Because of him, the world around you will be converted to living in harmony; every division will be healed…. Love, therefore, love among you and love sown in many corners of the earth among individuals, among groups, among nations; love sown by every means possible so that the invasion of love, of which we have spoken at times in the past, may become a reality and so that, also through your contribution, the civilization of love we all await may begin to take on solid form. You have been called to this, and you will see great things.[1]. Fabio Ciardi[1]. Address to the fourth international youth festival (Genfest) of ‘Youth for a United World,’Paleur sports stadium, Rome, 31 March 1990 in Chiara Lubich, Essential Writings, (London and New York, 2007), 366.
This Word of Life is an invitation to believe in God’s loving action even where his presence is not felt. It is a proclamation of hope and challenge that we too might we become instruments of consolation. Who hasn’t seen a crying child throw itself into its mother’s arms? Whatever the matter is, important or not, the mother dries its tears, covers it with tenderness and, bit by bit, it starts to smile again. Her presence and loving kindness are enough. God behaves like this with us, and compares himself to a mother. These words are how God speaks to his people on their return from exile in Babylon. They had seen their homes and the Temple demolished and had been deported to a foreign land where they felt lost and grief-stricken; now, returning to their homeland, the people had to rebuild from the rubble of destruction. The tragedy Israel had lived through is repeated by many war-torn peoples, victims of terrorist atrocities or inhuman exploitation. Houses and streets ripped apart, sites symbolic of a cultural identity razed to the ground, goods pillaged, places of worship destroyed. How many people kidnapped, millions forced to flee, thousands dying in deserts or at sea! It looks like an apocalypse. This Word of Life is an invitation to believe in God’s loving action also where his presence is not felt. It is a proclamation of hope. He is beside the one who suffers persecution, injustice, exile.
He is with us, with our family, with our people. He knows our personal pain and that of the whole human race. He became one of us, to the point of dying on a cross. This is why he knows how to understand us and comfort us. Just like a mother who takes her child onto her lap and comforts it. We need to open our eyes and hearts to ‘see him’. To the extent that we experience the tenderness of his love, we will be able to transmit it to those who live in pain and under trial, so that we become instruments of consolation. Paul, too, suggests it to the Corinthians: ‘console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God’ (2 Cor. 1:4).
This was also a deeply personal and specific experience of Chiara Lubich: ‘Lord, give me all who are lonely … I have felt in my heart the passion that fills your heart for all of the forsakenness in which the whole of the world is drifting. I love everyone who is sick and alone. Who consoles their weeping? Who mourns their slow death? Who presses to their own heart, the heart in despair? My God, let me be in this world the tangible sacrament of your love; let me be your arms that press to themselves and consume in love all the loneliness of the world.’ 1
Edited by Fabio Ciardi
This Word of Life was chosen by an ecumenical group in Germany. We are living it together with brothers and sisters from many different Churches. Our hope is that our lives throughout the year may be accompanied by the promise from God that it contains. 1 Chiara Lubich, Meditations (London : New City, 2005), 24
