When Focolare founder Chiara Lubich spoke about unity in 1981, she started by looking at the world, as it was then, seeing many divisions, many problems, much social inequality, many wars going on at that time, wars about to start or escalating conflicts. Considering all this, she said, “yes, it’s true, all this is happening, but I see that the world is tending toward unity — we have heard this — the world is tending towards unity. And unity is a sign of the times.” That was 1981.

Now we are in 2015, and 34 years have gone by. So what can we say now, looking at the world we are living in today? We can certainly say that much has changed since then: the Berlin Wall fell, for example. The other day we saw that the American Embassy in Cuba has reopened. There have been changes that show what Chiara foresaw was true about the world tending toward unity, the world stretching toward unity, and this tension toward unity is still a sign of the times.

But we cannot hide the fact that today too — and perhaps more than in 1981 — we are witnessing traumatic events. It is true that the Berlin Wall fell, but so many other walls have been built, concrete ones or ideological ones, walls in people’s minds, in various conflicts, in racism and other things. How many new wars have begun? How much new poverty, new persecutions or new martyrs? We feel powerless in the face of this situation, and at the same time we ask: “What is the solution to all the problems we see in the world? What solution can we offer?”

… We have to start working seriously with concrete actions and political choices made by each country, by each government — we have to make this conversion in order to truly achieve universal brotherhood, which we all want and which would be the solution to all these problems.

But at the same time, I am aware that we are the ones who must make this conversion first. Why? Because we have been called by God and blessed by God with a charism that is precisely the charism of unity, the charism that can bring about universal brotherhood. It is the only thing that can truly be a response and help build up universal brotherhood … I too have started to think deeply about unity and I asked, “What is this charism saying to me today?” And I realized, almost like a discovery, that unity can be seen from three perspectives, from three points of view that are different but linked to each other.

First of all, unity is a gift; then it’s a commitment; then it’s a goal.

Unity is a gift
What does it mean to be a gift? It means that we are not the ones who bring it about. It means that we cannot do it. It is only Jesus who can bring about unity. Not us. It is essentially a work of God.

Chiara says, “Unity is something too great … it is Jesus’ ideal. He came on earth to accomplish unity, the unity of all people with the Father through him, and of people with one another … He is the one who brings about unity.” So we are not the ones who bring about unity.

The Church continues the work Jesus began, it continues to work for the same purpose, for the unity of all people with God and among themselves, and it continues to do it with the grace of God, with the help of Jesus, Jesus who does this work in the Church, Jesus who continues to do this work, and who does it especially by giving us the gift of unity through the Eucharist …

We know that unity is the plan of God for the whole of humanity, because God wants this from humanity. He wants to make humankind into one family, all brothers and sisters. So it is a design that embraces all continents, all ethnicities, all kinds of people, all religions and all centuries: the past, present and future, from when humankind began until the end of time when Jesus will return …

Unity is a commitment 
Unity is brought about by Jesus. However, he does not do this without us. And here we have the second dimension: he wants our commitment. What does our commitment consist of? Chiara wrote in 1996: “Unity is what God wants from us … It can be accomplished only through a special grace, which the Father grants if He finds us prepared, in accordance with a precise and necessary prerequisite which is that we must live out Jesus’ commandment to love one another.”

This is our part, our commitment, to prepare the ground, through our mutual love, so that Jesus can give us the gift of unity, so that we are able to receive this gift. Chiara and her first friends asked God on the feast of Christ the King to teach them how to live unity.

Chiara spoke about this herself at the international school for the focolarini in 1961. She said: “We prayed … all of us focolarine, six or seven of us, and we said: ‘Eternal Father, in the name of Jesus, you who know what Jesus wants…what Jesus meant in his testament — if you want to, make us instruments of the testament of Jesus on earth … If you want to, make us instruments of unity. We are ready.” Rereading what Chiara wrote, I said to myself: “Maybe the first thing we should do is … to say to Jesus, ‘We are ready.’ Let’s offer ourselves again to Jesus so that, if he wants, he can use us, because he wants to bring about unity … So we could be those instruments if we make ourselves available to him.”

Unity is the goal 
If we read the letters of the early times we see how Chiara’s love … reached out to everyone. That is why Chiara wrote letters: to bring this love of God to everyone. And who did she write to? Her dad; her mom; her brother Gino, who was a communist; her sisters; the girls in Catholic Action’ whom she followed; men and women religious; all the people she met. She wrote, spoke, or told them about the love of God, about her discovery. So she loved all those people with the same love, which means that right from the start Chiara truly saw everyone as a candidate for unity. She told us this.

But do we have the same heart, this complete openness to see that everyone, truly everyone is a candidate for unity? … What is God asking of us today? He wants each of us to reach out to the person near us and to involve them in unity, to make ourselves one with them, while being open to all the others. It’s not enough to reach out to the neighbor next to us. The neighbor next to us is just one of the “everyone” we want to reach. So always have this openness. We make ourselves one with the brother or sister close by, with those we meet, for whom we work, to whom we write a letter, day by day, moment by moment in our lives, just as they did at the beginning of the Focolare.

Maria Emmaus Voce

From a talk given in Montet, Switzerland, on August 16, 2015 to members of the Focolare.
(from Living City, USA)