Overview - the Aspects of Life animated by Love

Introduction: Like a Rainbow

Through the charism of unity, the Lord wished to bring about in the Church not only a spirituality but also a so­ciety, which later was given the name Focolare Movement or Work of Mary.

Undoubtedly, this "Work" needs to have a soul (pre­cisely what our communitarian spirituality is), but it also needs to have an order, a structure. And the Lord looked after this too.

If I remember correctly, it was in 1954. The spirituality appeared to be more or less complete. And one thing had become clear to us: we had to become another Jesus.

As early as 1946 we wrote in some notes: "Each of us must aim at being another Jesus as soon as possible. We must act as Jesus here on earth. We must put our human nature at God's disposal so that he can use it to make his beloved Son live again in us."'

But how could we do this? Baptism and the other sac­raments had certainly already brought this about. But our adherence was necessary as well, and this could be sum-

1. Chiara Lubich, Writing, "Unity, " 2 December 1946, quoted in A Call to Love (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1989), p. 29.

marized in one word: love. Love sums up the Christian law. If we love, we are another Jesus. And we are Jesus in all that we do. Our life, therefore, had to be love. If we had wanted to describe what we should be, we would have had to say, "We are love," just as God is love. And if love was our life, love had to be our rule as well.

And here is an idea we had, perhaps an illumination.

Love is light, it is like a ray of light that passes through a drop of water and opens out to display a rainbow, whose seven colors we admire; they are all colors of light, which in turn display an infinite number of shades.

And just as the rainbow is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, love, the life of Jesus in us, is mani­fested in different colors; it is expressed in various ways, each one different from the others.

Love, for example, leads to communion, it is commun­ion. Jesus in us, because he is Love, brings about com­munion.

Love is not closed within itself but by its nature it spreads. Jesus in us, Love, reaches out to others in love.

Love elevates the soul. Jesus in us raises our souls to God. This is union with God, this is prayer.

Love heals. Jesus, Love in our hearts, is the health of our souls.

Love gathers people together in assembly. Jesus in us, because he is Love, joins our hearts.

Love is the source of wisdom. Jesus in us, Love, en­lightens us.

Love gathers many into one, this is unity. Jesus in us fuses us into one.

These are the seven main expressions of love we had to live, and they represent an infinite number of expressions.

These seven expressions of love immediately appeared to us as the standard for our personal life, and they would also constitute the Rule of the Work of Mary as a whole, and later on of its various branches.

Because love is the principle of each of the above ex­pressions, of each aspect (since it is always Jesus who lives in us in every aspect of life), our life would be marked by a wonderful unity.

Everything was to flow from love, be rooted in love;

everything was to be an expression of the life of Jesus in us. And this would make human life attractive, fascinat­ing. Consequently, our lives would not be dull and flat since they would not be made up of bits juxtaposed and disconnected (with the time for lunch, for example, hav­ing nothing to do with the moment for prayer, and with mission set aside only for a specific hour, and so on).

No. Now it would always be Jesus who prayed, Jesus who engaged in mission, Jesus who worked, Jesus who ate, Jesus who rested, and so on. Everything would be an expression of him.

The General Statutes of the Work of Mary and the Guidelines of its different branches² refer to these various expressions of love, that is, of the life of Jesus in us as our Rule, and as such they have been approved by the Church.

We would now like to begin re-examining the aspects of our life (its seven "colors," if we can say this) in order

2. The Focolare Movement or Work of Mary is composed of eighteen branches of which there are:

— two sections of the Focolarini (men and women), which are the

"supporting structure" of the Work of Mary.

— ten branches (men and women Volunteers; Focolarini and Volun­teer priests; Gens; men and women Religious; Gen boys and girls;

Bishops friends of the Focolare).

— six "movements" on a wider scale: New Families, New Humanity, Parish Movement, Diocesan Movement, Youth for a United World, Young for Unity.

The General Statutes of the Work of Mary, approved on 29 June 1990 bv a decree of the Pontifical Council of the Laity, established norms common for all the members. What characterizes each par­ticular branch, on the other hand, is defined by the respective Guide­lines, which are approved by the Movement's own General Assembly.

to see, among other things, if they too contain the "some­thing more" that we discovered in the points of our spiri­tuality, that is, if they are the expression of a life of communion.

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