It was 10 days after July 16, 1949, when the first phase of contemplation reached its fullness. Chiara Lubich had experienced the Father, the Word (Jesus) and Mary, but not the Holy Spirit yet. On the afternoon of July 26, 1949, Chiara, as usual, entered the dimly lit church in Tonadico, and, together with her friends, sat silently in front of the altar.

Suddenly, she felt the breath of Jesus in the tabernacle, and from there it reached her face like a light breeze, a puff of air. The Holy Spirit made his presence felt and manifested himself, producing an atmosphere of Paradise.

Chiara did not know it, but in 1439, the Council of Florence had defined the Holy Spirit precisely as the breath of God. Many years later, St. John Paul II affirmed, “The Holy Spirit is the ‘breath’… of the risen one.”

A light breeze? But that indeed is the name of the Holy “Spirit,” ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek. To give the Holy Spirit to his disciples, the risen Lord had breathed upon them (Jn 20:22).

On that July 26, they made no effort to either recall verses from the Bible or engage in theological reflections. This was simply a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and an experience of his presence so strong that He appeared as a dove that flew from the tabernacle and hovered over the heads of the young women.

Made immaculate

The following day, their “stroll in Paradise” entered another phase. After having contemplated the beauty and greatness of Mary, Chiara felt a deep desire to consecrate herself to Mary, together with the whole group sharing her journey. She requested this of Jesus in the Eucharist, immediately after receiving Holy Communion.

That was not simply an act of devotion. Jesus had truly transformed those young women — already all fused into a single “Soul” — into another little Mary. Indeed, this group, the Soul, became aware of acquiring “the immaculatized flesh” that contained Mary.

“Immaculatized?” Isn’t that too audacious? And yet, this was simply the fulfillment of Jesus’ work in the Eucharist and the Holy Spirit, which begins at Baptism. It is the goal to which every Christian is called, as we read in the Letter to the Ephesians: The Father
“chose us … to be holy and blameless before him in love” (Eph 1:3–4).

As St. John Paul II wrote: Following Mary’s footsteps, “we can hope to be totally purified from sin and also become ‘holy and ‘immaculate.’ ” And he continued with a prayer: “O Mary… teach us to believe in the possibility of a full immaculatization.”

Mystical incarnation

“However,” Chiara wrote, “what happened next was even more marvelous.” She was referring to the following day, July 28, when she felt the presence of Jesus come to life within her in a very new way. In fact, the grace of the Immaculate One (Mary) was not an end in itself. Mary could thus become the Mother of God.

Analogously, the grace of that little group of souls around Chiara being made immaculate, fused to form a single Soul, led to a “mystical incarnation,” which transformed the immaculate flesh into divinized flesh. It is the mystical Christ who continues to be formed, of which the Soul is like a prophetic outline of the journey that the Church is called to fulfill in history until she achieves her fullness.

As with other moments of this experience, something in nature accompanied this event. Some months later, Chiara recounted how, on that day, as she and her friends were walking toward the small Alpine church of St. Victor: “The sun was shining directly down upon my head while in the church the priest who had given us communion, unaware of what had happened, was singing the ‘Magnificat,’ as a peal of bells resounded. Leaving the church, we saw Arcangela, the caretaker, closing the gate of the small graveyard by its side. It seemed to be a sign that death had been banished.”

After being made immaculate and divine, the “Soul” became so fully established that it was ready for a new and deeper immersion into the realities of heaven. Having placed unity as the basis of their life, Chiara and her group became “Jesus who journeys.” In them, the Way became the Traveler and, beginning that August, he led the Soul toward ever new insights and experiences.

It is impossible in a few pages to follow Chiara in this intense new phase of her journey. There were about 150 “images,” one after the other, that she called “realities.” She saw the truths of the faith and lived them from a particular perspective: from the One, from the Trinity.

It was a stroll “from one heaven to another,” continually revealing new insights about the kingdom of heaven, because in Paradise, life is not static, but a continuous discovery. It is a prelude, a taste of the glorification that awaits us when “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror,” will be “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18).

Fr. Fabio Ciardi, OMI

A TASTE OF PARADISE ’49

“Having entered into the Kingdom of Heaven, into the Bosom of the Father, we are eternally in the Root, which is the Father; therefore, life is eternal, and the sap that flows through this root is love.”

Heaven and earth, the uncreated and the created, all come from the Father, who is life, and his life is love. Therefore, love is the substance of everything, and in order to live, we must be “grafted” onto the Father, that is, onto love. We have to live according to our “nature” as children of the Father. We need to be love and to love.