Part 1

With a series of articles, the author leads us along the fascinating journey of the “choice of God,” beginning with the discovery of his love.

By Fr. Pascal Foresi

A dazzling discovery lies at the origins of that new spirituality with which the Holy Spirit, through Chiara Lubich and the Focolare Movement, has gifted our time. It is the discovery of a God who, because he is love, loves each one with an infinite, personal love. Chiara repeated this constantly to her first companions as she did to all those she met: “God loves you immensely. God loves us immensely.”

I remember being deeply struck by these words, aware of the fundamental importance and newness of their message for me. Nevertheless, looking back now, I ask myself, “How much was I really aware of it? How much did I really understand the importance of it?”

Our understanding of God and the way God acts is often tied to our own perspectives; it is constrained by our limited thinking, and is expressed through our particular thought categories. In fact, it can happen that, aware of our imperfections and of our unworthiness of the love of God, we transfer, in a certain way, this perception we have onto God and end up by believing that he cannot love us or, at most, can only love us partially. In reality it is not so. God always loves us infinitely and his love is close to us and supports us in every moment of our journey through life.

If we wish to delineate the characteristics of the love of God through images, the first that comes to mind is a familiar image in Sacred Scripture, one that is present in many spiritual works: God loves us as a bridegroom loves his bride. He, like the one who is hopelessly in love, loves beyond the merits themselves of the person loved. He loves to such an extent that he sees that everything in her is beautiful, positive and understandable, and what is not perfect is nevertheless overlooked and compensated for by love.

There is yet another image, one that is just as efficacious, that speaks of God’s love for us. It is the image of a mother who, whatever the situation in which her child finds himself or herself, be it even the most sorrowful and reprehensible, is always there ready to welcome the child back, forgiving everything. This is the inextinguishable, essential element of maternal love. It is the love which Saint Monica showed for her son, Saint Augustine. And yet, Monica’s love pales in comparison to the love of God.

The Gospel reveals it to us in touching and, at times, mysterious passages. The love of God is exemplified in the love of a distraught father who goes out to meet his lost son (see Lk 15:11-32), that leaves the ninety-nine sheep in order to go in search of the one who has gone astray (see Lk 15:4-7), that invites us to pardon our neighbor “seventy times seven” just as God pardons us without limit (see Mt 18:21-22). And there is more: it is the love of the Father who goes so far as to send his Son—who is himself God, one of the Trinity—to assume our human nature and to die for us. Christ, a man like us, redeems us from sin and so leads us into the heavenly banquet of his kingdom. The moment we grasp the reality of so great a love, even if only for an instant, everything changes: the life that is given to us, the world around us and every circumstance of our life, whether happy or sad. Everything becomes a personal gift of God who wants us to be holy as he is holy (see 1 Pet 1:16). This is the foundation of all Christian life: this love of God for each one of us and our duty to respond by giving ourselves to God in a total way.

A response of love

How can we respond? What is the essence of our answer to God’s love?

First of all, we should take into account that the love of God for us is so great that it transforms in God the one who allows him or herself to be totally seized by it. Through it the return of humankind to God becomes, in a certain way, the return of God to himself. This is the highest and truest moment of that which we call prayer. In reality we are accustomed to using this term to indicate the many expressions of prayer, from the prayer of petition to mental prayer, from liturgical prayer to sacramental prayer. They are different ways of expression that help us enter into a relationship with God or to express its intimate reality. These kinds of prayer, nevertheless, never completely coincide with union with God.

Between prayer and formal prayers there is in fact a substantial difference that I will try to illustrate starting with the most unconscious form of prayer.

When at night we raise our eyes to contemplate the starry sky, we see a universe of immense beauty that enchants and amazes us in its silent obedience to a law, the law of life and harmony that established it at the beginning and in every moment sustains it, a law that in and of itself bears witness to the Creator. This is also true of the plants and of the flowers that “know” when to open and to blossom, when to bear fruit and to die. A profound relationship, therefore, binds all created life to God, a relationship that—I dare say—is profound prayer because, just by their very existence, they unconsciously recognize him and, following him, “declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:2).

But this hidden prayer also finds expression—and the highest one because it is conscious and free—in human beings. It is the prayer that arises when, even before entering into “conversation” with God, we recognize him as the Father who has created us and sustains us in our existence and in that of the whole universe. The relationship with God then stands out as the foundation which is both indispensable and healing, a relationship that the human person is called to establish day by day with God or to ask it of him. Some masters of the spiritual life suggest this as an original exegesis of the invocation of the Our Father, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Next month we will look at the different ways in which such a relationship can be developed.

Fr. Pascal Foresi, co-founder of the Focolare Movement, has a Masters in Theology from the Pontifical Lateran University and Masters in Philosophy and Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University. Author of several books, he is a regular contributing editor of Citta Nuova ( Living City’s parent magazine) since 1967. More articles by Foresi can be found in New Humanity Review n. 6-7-10.

Part 2

God Who is Love, and Prayer

We continue with Foresi’s series of articles, in which the author leads us along the fascinating journey of the “choice of God,” beginning with the discovery of his love.

This time we will take a look at the different ways in which our filial relationship with God can be developed through prayer.

There are several forms of prayer. One, from all appearances, may not look like a formal prayer. It is the prayer of offering in which the person who, prostrated by physical or spiritual sufferings, unable to do anything, even to speak, offers to God, even in the space of an instant, his or her entire existence. This form of prayer may be considered the most profound because it engages the soul at that point where the contact with God is immediate and direct.

But work can also take on the form of a prayer of offering. I’m thinking in particular of those whose day is marked by physical fatigue to the extent that it is almost impossible for them to gather the energy necessary to dedicate themselves to prayer. If in the morning they offer their day to God by formulating a simple intention, they too will spend the following hours in a continuous relationship with him, and in the evening, in a moment of silent recollection, they will find union with God. It is this, after all, which humanity today is particularly sensitive to, namely, that the whole universe and all that one accomplishes in it, can be transformed into one great prayer raised unceasingly to God.

On the other hand, those who consecrate their lives to the Lord have the opportunity to dedicate part of their time to explicit dialogue with God through the exercise of certain practices of devotion. For these people, however, there always remains the decisive and fundamental admonition of Jesus: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Mt 7:21) to emphasize that what counts is to have an authentic relationship with God and not just to multiply the number of purely external formulas recited.

Among the various classical forms of prayer, that of the liturgy represents the prayer par excellence, since in it the Church prays. Liturgical prayer has, in fact, a fundamental characteristic: it is communitarian prayer wherein each person together with others enters into a relationship with God. And this happens not simply because everyone gathers together in assembly at the same time, but rather because it is then that the mysterious encounter between humanity -- symbolized by the Church -- and God is once again renewed. It is an encounter that God himself seals with his Presence, culminating in the Eucharist, so as to make us one with each other and with him -- “deifying us.”

Another masterly way of growing in our relationship with God is offered to us through meditation. It is like an itinerary that helps those of us who follow it regularly (aided by spiritual writings) to enter into intimate conversation with Jesus, to sense in the depths of our souls the living presence of God who fills us with himself, who burns away our unworthiness, shows us the direction to take and gives us peace. It is our contact with him that strengthens and heals just as Jesus once healed the woman afflicted with hemorrhages, mentioned in the Gospel, who was sure that if she only touched Jesus’ cloak she would be healed (see Mk 5:25-34). He, in fact, really loves those who come before him in a similar way, even if they are burdened by the weight of the most serious sins.

God, in his astounding love, wished to connect the pouring out of many graces to our prayer of intercession. This is called the prayer of petition. God wants it from us in order to give us the joy of cooperating with him in the salvation of the world. Such prayer becomes highly efficacious when, reliving in ourselves the mystery of the death and resurrection of his incarnate Son, we reach the point of making our own the words of Paul, “In my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church” (Col 1:24).

Vocal prayer is another form of prayer, one that the Church strongly recommends to help us immerse ourselves fully in that spiritual intimacy with God that is a foretaste of Heaven. It finds perhaps its most beautiful expression in the prayer of the rosary in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As John Paul II magnificently affirms, with it voice is given to “that love which tirelessly returns to the person loved with expressions similar in their content but ever fresh in terms of the feeling pervading them.” (1)

In conclusion I would like to point out a particular form of prayer, that which arises when a rapport of true Christian love unites person to person. It is then that Jesus, drawn by that mutual love, mysteriously but truly becomes present in their midst (see Mt 18:20). Every veil seems to fall and the relationship with him becomes almost tangible. One understands, then, why this presence of Jesus reaches the essence of prayer. It is itself prayer, implied but essentially still a prayer. In the family of Nazareth, with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this prayer reached its apex. While we know it is unreachable, it is up to us to draw always closer and closer to that model.

1) The Rosary of the Virgin Mary , n. 26.

Fr. Pascal Foresi , co-founder of the Focolare Movement, has a Masters in Theology from the Pontifical Lateran University and a Masters in Philosophy and Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University. Author of several books, he is a contributing editor of Citta Nuova ( Living City’s parent magazine) since 1967. More articles by Foresi can be found in New Humanity Review n. 6-7-10.