The Church’s doctrine is like a tree in blossom that has developed down through the centuries. Our Ideal lends it a new blossoming: almost covering anew the crown of this tree with an utterly new mantle of blossoms, and it seems—and it is—that the whole tree moves towards this blossoming, that it serves it, is for it.
The peak of the spiritual life, before this, was the mystical union of the soul with the Trinity within itself by means of Jesus. Made part of his body, through him we were completely one with the Trinity.
And perfection consisted in this intimate unending conversation of the soul with God. To achieve this: love for silence, for recollection, and for solitude were cultivated, as well as, naturally, the flight from creatures so as to withdraw into one’s inner cell.
It was the height of the perfection of the individual, who, united with God, allowed his Spirit to flow into the soul and became another Christ.
Souls in times past sought God within themselves. They stood as if in a great garden in full bloom, but looking upon and admiring only a single flower. They looked upon it with love, both in its details and as a whole, while God asks us to look at all the flowers because he is in all of them and only by gazing upon them all do we love him more than we do the single flowers.
God who is in me, who has shaped my soul, who rests there as Trinity (with the saints and the angels), is also in the heart of my brothers and sisters. It is not reasonable that I should love him in me alone. Were I to do so, my love would still have something personal, something egoistical: I would love God in me and not God in God, while this is perfection: to love God in God (for he is Unity and Trinity).
Therefore my cell, as souls intimate with God would call it and as we too [would call it], my Heaven, is in me and, just as it is in me, it is in the soul of my brothers and sisters. And just as I love him in me, recollecting myself in this Heaven—when I am alone—I love him in my brother or my sister near me.
And so I will not love silence but the word (expressed or implied), the communication, that is, of God in me with God in my brother or my sister. And if the two Heavens meet, there is but a single Trinity, where the two are like Father and Son and between them is the Holy Spirit.
We should indeed always recollect ourselves also in the presence of a brother or a sister, but not avoiding the created person, but rather recollecting him or her in our own Heaven and recollecting ourselves in the Heaven of the other.
And since this Trinity resides in human bodies, Jesus is there: the God-Man. And between the two is the unity where we are one but not alone. And here is the miracle of the Trinity and the beauty of God who is not alone because he is Love.
Thus darkness and unhappiness with aridity and all bitter things disappear, leaving behind only the full joy promised to the one who has lived Unity.
The cycle is now complete and closed. We must continually create these living cells of the mystical body of Christ—which are made up of brothers and sisters united in his name—to give life to the whole body.
Chiara Lubich
(Taken from “Church,” edited by BrendanLeahy and Hubertrus Blaumeiser, New City Press, Manila 2019, pp. 54-56)
