30 APR 2024 · Focolare Word of Life —May 2024 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love (1 John 4:8). The first letter of John is addressed to all people and it encourages us to restore fellowship because our society is divided by many different doctrines and ways of life. John exhorts us to keep in mind what has been proclaimed from the beginning of Christain teaching when the first disciples experienced living a life with the Lord. By repeating this in the way we live with Jesus in our lives we will be in communion with the first disciples and therefore with Jesus and the Father.#_edn1 . St. John reminds us that it has been revealed that God loved us first by taking upon himself a human existence, in Jesus, with all the limitations and weaknesses. While on the cross, Jesus shared in our separation from the Father through His cry, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” He brought to us healing through the total gift of Himself, by loving us without limits or conditions and His life show us what true love is. Through the example Jesus gives to us, we can understand that loving takes courage, hard work along with the risk of facing adversity and suffering. But, if we can love in this way we will participate in God’s life and experience His freedom and the joy of self-giving. By loving as Jesus loved, we become aware that we are free from ourselves and from the selfishness that closes the door to communion with our brothers and sisters and with God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. The human heart longs to know God, who created us and who knows us in the deepest way possible.   Our faith informs us that God is Love and by loving like him we get a glimpse of the truth of this Love. And if we do make it to love like him we will grow in the knowledge of God because we are essentially living his life and we walk in his light. This is accomplished when love becomes mutual, because if we love one another, ‘God abides in us.’ #_edn2 It’s similar to two electric poles coming together to produce light.   .   Chiara Lubich said, ‘To witness that God is love is the great revolution we are called to offer to the modern world which is experiencing extreme tension just as the early Christians bore testimony to this in the pagan world of their time’. How can we do this? How can we live this love that comes from God? ‘By learning from his Son to put it into practice... in particular, let us focus on serving our neighbors, especially those closest to us, beginning with little things, with the most humble kinds of service. Let us make the effort, following Jesus’ example, to take the initiative in loving, being detached from ourselves and embracing all the small or big crosses that this might entail. In this way, we too will soon reach that experience of God, that communion with him, that fullness of light, peace and inner joy which Jesus wants us to have.’#_edn3 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. Santina often visited a nursing home that was run by a Catholic association. One day, she and Roberta, her colleague, met Aldo, a tall, very cultured and very wealthy man. Aldo looked sternly at the two young women and said, ‘Why do you always come here? What do you want from us? Why don’t you just let us die in peace?’ Santina didn’t lose heart and told him, ‘We are here for you, to spend some time together, to get to know each other and become friends.’ They continued to visit the home regularly. Roberta recounts, ‘That man was particularly closed in on himself and dejected. He did not believe in God. Santina was the only one who was able to get close to him, gently listening to him for hours. She prayed for him and, on one occasion, gave him a rosary which he accepted.’ Later, Santina learned that he had spoken her name as he was dying. The pain of his death was lessened by the fact that he died peacefully, holding the rosary she had given him.’ Prepared by Silvano Malini and the Word of Life Team   #_ednref1 Cf. 1Jn 1:1-3 #_ednref2 Cf 1Jn 4:12 #_ednref3 C. Lubich Word of Life May 1991

16 APR 2024 · In the first experience, Javier Lurch, president of one of the chapters of Saint Vincent de Paul Society in Atlanta Georgia shares how he helped prevent a young woman and her family from being evicted from their home. The second experience is by Maggie Horton from Kansas City. She shares how the Risen Lord is made present within the community of women she is currently living in. And in the third experience, Julie Mundell tells us how her Economy of Communion business assisted a struggling family to purchase a home.

4 APR 2024 · "Share what gives life"

1 APR 2024 · “With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.” (Acts 4:33) This sentence, which is used in the liturgy during the Easter season, invites everyone who has received the message of the Gospel to freely witness to the great event that has changed history forever. It invites us to give witness to Jesus’ resurrection! To fully understand the meaning of this verse taken from the Acts of the Apostles, it is helpful to quote the sentence that precedes it: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.”[1] “With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the  Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.”   The text describes the first Christian community as filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and characterized by a life of communion that motivated each member to proclaim the good news of the Gospel to everyone – namely, that Christ is risen. These are the same people who before Pentecost were alarmed and frightened by the events that had taken place, and yet now had come out into the open and were ready to bear witness even to the point of martyrdom.The power of the Holy Spirit had swept away all their fear and apprehension. They were of one heart and one soul and they practiced mutual love to the point of sharing their possessions. And their way of life attracted an always greater number of people to follow them. Among them were men and women who had known Jesus and heard his words.They had lived alongside him, and with him they had loved and served the sick and those regarded as the least in society.They had seen Jesus’ marvelous deeds with their own eyes. Their lives had changed because they had been called to live according to his new law. They were the first witnesses to God living among people who loved one another. But what does it mean today for the followers of Jesus to be witnesses to the resurrection? “With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the  Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.”   The most effective way to bear witness to the Risen Lord is to show that he is alive, and, in fact, lives among us. "If we keep love for our neighbor alive in our hearts, then the risen Lord will live within each of us. Then if we make a special effort to maintain mutual love among us, the risen Lord will live both in us and in our midst, and will radiate his light and grace around us, transforming our surroundings and producing incalculable fruits. It will be the risen Lord, through his Spirit, who will guide our steps and our activities. He will be the one who will arrange circumstances and provide us with opportunities to bring his life to those in need of him.”[2] “With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the  Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.” Margaret Karram[3] writes: "‘Go into the whole world and proclaim the good news to all of creation‘[4] is the extraordinary task that the apostles received two thousand years ago directly from Jesus and that changed the course of history. Today Jesus addresses the same invitation to us, asking us to bring him into the world with all the creativity, talents and freedom he himself has given us. (...) "It is a proclamation that does not end with his death - on the contrary! It takes on new strength after the resurrection and Pentecost, when the disciples became courageous witnesses to the Gospel. Their mandate then comes down to us today. Through each one of us, God wants to continue to tell his story of love to those with whom we share a short or a long stretch of time in our life."[5] Prepared by Patrizia Mazzola and the Word of Life team [1] Acts 4:32. [2] Chiara Lubich, Word of Life, January 1986. [3] Margaret Karram, current President of the Focolare Movement. [4] Mk 16:15. [5] Margaret Karram, in her talk entitled, Called & Sent, September 15, 2023.

14 MAR 2024 · In the first experience, Liz Balzer from Long Island, New York shares about her effort to forgive her co-worker, and how doing so played an important role in reestablishing a good relationship with her. The second experience is by Jonathon Kelso from Atlanta GA who tells us how being reconciled with God through the sacrament of confession brought about unimaginable fruits. In the last experience, JoAnn Rowley from Texas shares how, despite the difficulty in doing so, she persevered in loving her husband’s grandmother and how this gave her great peace and joy.

11 MAR 2024 ·  "Letting the Light In" 

29 FEB 2024 · “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me.” (Ps 51:10) The phrase of Scripture offered to us during this Lenten season is from Psalm 51. In the tenth verse, we find the poignant and humble invocation, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me.” This psalm is one of the “penitential psalms” in which David asks forgiveness for his sins, acknowledging that only God’s mercy can save him. He begins by recognizing that he has “done evil in your sight,” in the most hidden places of his heart, and that God is justified in his sentence. But at the same time he expressed his insatiable yearning for full communion with God, the source of every grace and mercy, asking him to “restore me to the joy of your salvation.” “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me.” The psalm is written after a well-known episode in David's life. He had been called by God to care for the people of Israel and to lead them on the path of obedience to the covenant. And yet he violated his mission. After committing adultery with Bathsheba, he ensured that her husband, Uriah the Hittite, an officer in his army, would be killed in battle. The prophet Nathan shows him the seriousness of his guilt and helps him acknowledge it. This is the moment when he confesses his sin and is reconciled with God. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me.” In this psalm David uses heartfelt forms of invocation, which come from his deep sense of repentance and total trust in divine forgiveness. “Purge me,” he says, “wash me,” “blot out all my iniquities.” In particular, in the verse we have taken for this month, he uses the verb “create” to indicate that complete deliverance from human weakness is possible only from God. It expresses the realization that only God can make us truly “new,” with “clean hearts,” filling us with his life-giving spirit, giving us true joy and radically transforming our relationship with him, with other people, and with nature and the cosmos, by giving us a “steadfast spirit.” “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me.” How can we put this Word of Life into practice? The first step is to recognize that we are sinners, in need of God's forgiveness, and to have immense trust in his mercy. Maybe our repeated mistakes make us feel discouraged and tempt us to close in on ourselves. When this happens, we should try to keep the door of our heart open, at least a little. In the early 1940s, Chiara Lubich wrote to someone who felt unable to go beyond the fact that she had sinned mirerably. Chiara told her: “We need to remove every other thought from our mind and believe that Jesus is attracted to us precisely because of our humble, honest and loving confession of our sins. In and of ourselves, whatever we have and do is despicable. Instead, God, on his part, has no other attitude toward us than mercy. Our souls can be united to him only by offering him as our gift, as our only gift, not our virtues but our sins! (...) If Jesus came to earth, if he became man, if he longed for one thing alone (...), it was to be a saviour, to be a physician! He desired nothing else.”[1] “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me.” Then, once freed and forgiven, and mindful of the help we receive from others, since Christians find strength in their community, let us start loving in concrete ways every neighbor, whoever they may be. In another place, Chiara wrote: “What is asked of us is mutual love, made of service and understanding, of sharing in the sufferings, anxieties and joys of our brothers and sisters. This is a love that covers over everything, forgives everything, the love that is the typical of a Christian.”[2] Finally, Pope Francis tells us: “God’s forgiveness (...) is the greatest sign of his mercy. It is a gift that every forgiven sinner is called to share with every person they meet. All those whom the Lord has placed beside us - family, friends, coworkers, parishioners - everyone needs, as we do, the mercy of God. It is beautiful to be forgiven, but you too, if you want to be forgiven, forgive in turn. Forgive! (...) Be witnesses to his forgiveness, which purifies the heart and transforms life.“[3] Prepared by Augusto Parody Reyes & the Word of Life Team [1] Chiara Lubich, Letters 1943-1960, Citta Nuova, 2022. [2] Chiara Lubich, Word of Life, May 2002. [3] Pope Francis, General Audience, March 30, 2016.

27 FEB 2024 · In the first experience, Susan Staffier from San Antonio, TX tells us about the task of managing her mother’s will and a challenging time with her brother. The second experience is by John Mundell from Indiana who shares how his small act of love in the office had a big impact among his employees. The last experience comes to us from Toronto, Canada. Dick who is 98 years old and Shirley Tetreau tell us about the mutual love between them and the community.

7 FEB 2024 · "Are you wearing love today?"

30 JAN 2024