We are just beginning Holy Week and at its heart is Holy Thursday when we re-enact the moment when Jesus washed the feet of his apostles. He carried out this act of love putting himself in the last place. In the following text, Chiara Lubich draws us in to the essence of Christian love, which has to be lived in our practical way of behaving and which then generates reciprocity and peace. The unity, given by Christ, has to be constantly renewed and should be expressed concretely through our behavior which should be totally motivated by reciprocal love. This is the basis for the following suggestions about how to live our relationships with one another. Kindness: wanting the good of others. This means “making ourselves one” with them, approaching them being completely empty of ourselves, of our own interests, our own ideas, of the many preconceived notions that often cloud our vision. In this way we can take on ourselves their burdens, their needs, their sufferings, and we can share in their joys. It means entering into the hearts of the people we meet in order to understand their mentality, their culture and their traditions, so as to make these, in a certain sense, our own. In this way, we can really understand what they most need and we can discern in them the values God has placed in every person’s heart. In a word: kindness means to live for whoever is next to us. Mercy: welcoming others as they are, not as we would like them to be, for example, we would like them to have a different character, or to share our political views or our religious convictions, or not to have those faults and habits that annoy us so much. No, we need to enlarge our hearts and welcome everyone, with all their differences, their limitations and their problems. Forgiveness: always seeing the other person with new eyes. Even in the most beautiful and peaceful environments – in the family, at school or at work – there are inevitably moments of friction, differences of opinion, clashes. We might reach the point of totally avoiding someone or refusing to speak to them, not to mention actually nurturing an attitude of hatred towards those who don’t think as we do. Instead, we need to make a strong and determined decision to try to see each brother or sister every day as though they were new, completely new, with no memory of how they may have hurt us, covering over everything with love. We need to have an absolute amnesty in our hearts, imitating God who forgives and forgets. Furthermore, true peace and unity can be attained when kindness, mercy and forgiveness are lived not only by individuals, but together with others in a reciprocal relationship. Just as the embers in a fireplace need to be stirred up every now and then, to prevent them from being smothered by the ashes, so too from time to time it’s necessary to revive our mutual love intentionally, to revive our relationships with everyone, so that they won’t be smothered by the ashes of indifference, of apathy and of selfishness. These attitudes need to be put into practice in concrete ways. Jesus himself showed us what love is when he healed the sick and fed the crowds, when he brought the dead back to life and washed the feet of his apostles. Actions, concrete actions: this is what it means to love. We too can fill our days with concrete, humble and intelligent acts of service that express our love toward others. And we will see fraternity and peace spread around us.

Chiara Lubich

(Chiara Lubich, in Parole di Vita [Words of Life], Città Nuova 2017, pages 786/8