In the Primiero valley, the days were growing shorter and the leaves of the trees began turning yellow. The hot summer was giving way to the fast-approaching autumn. Nature was changing its appearance, but it seemed that Chiara was not aware of this. Being immersed in the contemplation of heaven, she lived within, rather than outside of it.

Igino Giordani related that when he went to see her in those days, he found her so immersed in God, in her interior life, that he was worried about her health. She wasn’t even eating the simple meals cooked in the cabin. One evening, while they were returning from a walk in the woods, he found the courage to tell her: “Haven’t you taught us that the supreme love is Jesus Forsaken? Now, for his sake, leave God for God, leave Paradise and come back on earth, where you can lead many people to heaven.

Leave the angels for a while and come back among us humans. For the love of Jesus Forsaken.” Chiara burst into tears: “Do I have to leave Paradise?” “Yes, Chiara,” Giordani told her, “this is what your children are asking of you.” She went to her room, and, alone with God, she wrote down that declaration of love that is the quintessence of her spirituality. “I have only one Spouse on earth: Jesus Forsaken. I have no other God but him. In him is the whole of Paradise with the Trinity and all the earth with Humanity.” It was on September 20, 1949, that Chiara left the Dolomites to return to Rome.

A careful reading of the text of Paradise ’49 reveals that in the preceding days, she had already felt an attraction and a calling toward “suffering humanity.” Indeed, the prayer written on the first day of September is significant: “Lord, give me all who are lonely. I have felt in my heart the passion that fills your heart for all the forsakenness in which the whole world is drifting. I love every being that is sick and alone. Even suffering plants cause me pain, even animals that are alone. Who consoles their weeping? Who mourns their slow death? Who presses to their own heart, the heart in despair? My God, let me be in this world the tangible sacrament of your Love, of your being ‘love.’ Let me be your arms that embrace and consume in love all the loneliness of the world.”

This was, after all, the experience of all the great mystics. The more one approaches God, the more one feels love for humanity. The higher one goes, the greater is the urge to come down again, following in the footsteps of the Son of God, who renounced equality with God to come and dwell in our midst. Even though it was painful for her, Chiara understood that, for herself and for those who shared in the same gift and had thus become one Soul, the “legacy, the gift of God to the Soul had now entered totally into each one of us.

We had to return to the world to build up the Work of God, each one bearing in his or her heart the whole of that Heaven.”

Chiara left Tonadico, but not Paradise, or better still, Paradise did not leave her. The experience of divine light lived up in the mountains continued, even in Rome. The text she wrote on September 20, 1949 —“I have only one Spouse on earth”—which is normally thought to be the conclusion of that period of light, is found halfway through the period of Paradise ’49, which Chiara, in order to narrate her experiences, kept setting down in writing until September 22, 1951. At that point, influenced by the harsh realities of daily life in the difficult post-war period, a new way of living the realities of Heaven began.

Rome exemplified the social conditions of that time: lack of housing and unemployment even as hundreds of people migrated into the city, especially from southern Italy, but there was no plan to respond to these challenges. Indeed, the city was rundown not only from a material point of view but also morally speaking. A few days after returning to the city, Chiara wrote: “If I look at this city of Rome as it is, my Ideal seems far away. …The world, with its filth and vanities, dominates its streets and even more so, the hidden recesses of every home, where anger and every kind of sin and agitation lurk.”

This external vision, however, was covered over by a loving gaze that came from the light of Paradise and that made her believe that the resurrection of Rome and of all humanity was still possible, if flooded by the river of fire of God’s love. This was a new phase in her “journey through Paradise.” It was the fulfillment of what she had contemplated as she said herself: “Now, down here [Rome], I’m living with even greater fullness the Heaven I saw and lived up there [Tonadico] this summer.

Then, it was more of a vision than life, or, it was a vision as much as it was life, it was all one, but not as one as it is now. Now it is ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ The earth is my Heaven.”

Fr. Fabio Ciardi, OMI
(Living City, USA)

A TASTE OF PARADISE ’49

“We have to allow God to be reborn in us, keep Him alive, and make Him overflow onto others as torrents of Life, resurrecting the dead. And keep Him alive among us by loving one another. …Then everything is revolutionized: politics and art, schools and religion, private life and entertainment. Everything.”

Christian life, even in its highest contemplation, is a concrete commitment to restore true meaning to all that is human, to every part of society. This entails allowing God to live within us and among us so that he can resurrect all things and bring them to fulfillment.