Live first, then speak

Source: New City Philippines

Mutual love can encourage people to reach out

Question: We frequently come in contact with an anti-clerical culture. Although we try to present our faith in a way understandable to everyone, in some environments “attacks” come at the mere mention of religious membership. How can we go beyond these walls and present the light from the charism of unity with the full impact of its newness and universality?

However difficult our situations may be – this is a widespread situation – there were much worse situations during the times of the early Christians. There were persecutions, people were killed, there were martyrs, and people were forced to adore other gods. Today they might reject you, look down upon you, but they don’t force you to adore another god.

That was a terrible period, and yet the early Christians were able to live out their beliefs. In fact, Tertullian, who lived during those early days, made that famous statement, “We were born yesterday, and we are already all over the world.” In one way or another, those soldiers, merchants and women… went out and brought their religion into the known world at that time, into the Mediterranean world.

So let’s remember that some environments are even more difficult [than ours]. What urged Christians to be so authentic, so radical and so capable of making a breakthrough? First of all, the fact that Jesus had just recently lived on Earth. Think what it was like: at a certain point, a man comes and says that he is God, and it’s true – proven by miracles, by his resurrection.

It’s not something that leaves you indifferent. It’s something enormous! So they believed, they saw, observed, admired, and so on. The Gospel message was quite new. Jesus had just spread the good news, and they understood that first of all, they had to live what he said and then speak about it.

The Gospel repeats: above all, mutual and constant charity, and they practiced it. Above all, they loved one another and built Christian communities. They loved one another to the point that the people around them would exclaim, “Look how they love one another and how they are ready to die for one another.”

Their love was not a matter of hugging one another, but of giving their life for each other, of being united, of making themselves one with the other person. And then they spoke. We too must be as courageous as the early Christians.

Once we bear witness, once Christ is in our midst, we have to speak out, allow Jesus in our midst to “speak.” They spoke, they spoke of the “good news” – that God came, that he came to save us. They spoke, they evangelized. By evangelizing and speaking, they converted people to God, and they built up the community.

All of Paul’s story can be summed up by saying that he helped people to live this new way of life. He loved, they loved one another; they spoke, he spoke, he built up the communities.

What did these communities do? They created another world, the world that Christians need, because Jesus said, “You are in the world, but not of the world” (cf. Jn 17:14-15). So then where should we go? Up on a mountain all by ourselves? In the clouds? Where should we go? There must be a world for us, too, because we have our feet on the ground.

The Gospel, the Christian revolution, created a world for us. Jesus in our midst creates our environment, our community, our world, and we should realize that this is our world, not some other world. The other world is the one to which we should not belong.

We are not of that world. We should be of this world. And when we are out in the world and are disturbed by other people’s ideas about purity, for example, or by other ideas, then we should return to our world. We’ll be reinforced in faith, in strength. We’ll have the ardor to go ahead and spread our world more and more. Then, little by little, that other world will change.

Yes, we should never feel intimidated by anything or by anyone. Many times people ask me, “Here in India there are millions of people. What can we possibly do? There are only two small focolare communities here, one in Mumbai…” That should not be our approach. Before starting to do his work, Jesus didn’t stop to consider how many people were in the Roman Empire! He didn’t even look at the number of people in Palestine. He simply began.

Statistics can be our ruin, they can discourage us. If we have two people with Jesus in our midst, we have the world with us, because we have Christ – we have the one who conquered the world.

Chiara Lubich

Excerpts from an answer of Chiara Lubich to the Focolare community in Florence, Italy, on September 17, 2000.