As soon as Chiara Lubich saw Igino Giordani coming out of the friars’ convent, she invited him to follow her along a short path that led to the Canali stream. She stopped and sat on a red bench on the bank and signaled to him to sit beside her. “Do you know where we are?” she asked him.

Igino Giordani could have answered that they were at Tonadico, on the Dolomites, sitting on a red bench enjoying the early morning sun. Instead, he intuited that she was about to tell him something important. Something must have happened during the Mass they had attended in the church of St. Anthony, just a few meters away.

Only the previous day, he had confided in her. A desire had been slowly maturing in him since he had met her for the first time, when she came to his office in the Italian parliament. He had then listened to her evangelical experience and heard about the group that was growing around her in Trent.

Until then, Giordani had envied the “merry brigade,” the men and women from all walks of life who, in the fourteenth century, had decided to become followers of St. Catherine of Siena. He would have loved to have been born in that era and to have been one of them.

Now, in Parliament, of all places, at last he had found the person for whom he had waited so long. On July 15, 1949, but a few months after that first meeting, he had asked Chiara that he “be bound closely to her,” as the followers of St.

Catherine have been to the latter. He proposed to do this through a vow of obedience, so that she might guide him along the way of perfection.

For her part, Chiara Lubich suggested that they leave it up to God to indicate the kind of bond he wanted between them. She was proposing to leave it in the hands of Jesus in the Eucharist, whom they were to receive the following day, to stipulate between them a “pact of unity.” Jesus then, coming into her as in an empty chalice, would have sealed the pact with Jesus in Giordani, who had to be in the same attitude of total openness and willingness.

And this is exactly what happened upon her “nothingness,” since she had decided to become an “emptiness of love” to welcome Jesus-Love, and upon his “nothingness,” like her, what remained was only Jesus. The two of them had become one Jesus. The Eucharist had fully effected what it was instituted for. At the end of the Mass, both left the church — Chiara to her home and Giordani to the convent to give a talk.

However, Chiara felt the urge to return to the church. Once again, before the tabernacle, she would have wanted to call Jesus by name, but she found it impossible to pronounce that word. She was making the same experience as the Apostle Paul who declared: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). She was Jesus, one with him, and Jesus could not call himself.

Therefore, Chiara uttered the word with which Jesus prayed: “Abba, Father.” However, it was not just a word, but also a reality. It was the Spirit who had put that name on her lips (Rom 8:15).

She found herself in another dimension, in the “bosom of the Father,” as she herself narrates: “I had, therefore, entered into the bosom of the Father, which appeared to the eyes of my soul (but it was as if I saw it with my physical eyes) as an abyss that was immense, cosmic. And it was all gold and flames – above, below, to the right and to the left. It was infinite, but I felt at home.”

Now seated on the red bench, before narrating to Igino Giordani the extraordinary event she had experienced, she asked him: “Do you know where we are?” Someone else might have said, “Do you know where I am?” and would have spoken about her personal perception of being in the Father’s bosom.

Instead Chiara used the plural, “Do you know where we are?” because that happening took place after the pact of unity sealed with Giordani. Their two souls had become one Soul, that of Christ, and it was this one Soul that entered within the Father’s bosom.

By the working of a grace that was charismatic in nature, she “knew” where they were; while he had no idea. Nevertheless, Chiara, right on that bench, made him realize the new place they occupied.

The day after, she invited her companions to make the same pact of unity, and later communicated to them, as she had done with Giordani, the new contemplations. “I described each thing so precisely to the focolarinas that they too ‘saw’ in the same way,” she said. Thus they too participated in the realities of heaven that were being revealed day after day.

That mystical experience belonged not only to one person, but also to a group, as Chiara continues to relate: “I had the impression of seeing a small company in the bosom of the Father: we were that group.”

At Tonadico, back on July 16, 1949, that “we” was a very small group of people. Even today, anyone may become part of that “we.” That special way of “seeing” and “knowing” the life of Paradise was given to Chiara so that, through a mystical grace, she might introduce many others to the same reality, allowing them to be aware of “where we are.”

Fr. Fabio Ciardi, OMI

A TASTE OF PARADISE

“And we were no longer ourselves, but he in us. He, the divine fire, consummated our two very different souls in a third soul — his own, all Fire.”

This is the wonder that the Eucharist performs, even today, when it enters persons willing to live the commandment of mutual love among themselves. Each makes room for the other, through a total gift of self — as Jesus did in his forsakenness on the cross — and this space is filled by Jesus who, with his love, the fire, transforms everyone into him, into the only Jesus. He lives our life in us and operates in us.