The team that will support the new Focolare presidency for the next five years has been elected. Diversity and communion. The relevance of the term “unity.”
di Michele Zanzucchi – Fonte: Città Nuova
The football metaphor fails to account for the relationships— not only hierarchical but also, and above all, spiritual— that hold the whole team together. I believe we must instead turn to the recollection of the alchemy of those “encounters in the Spirit” that occasionally emerge in the spiritual realm and become universal. Examples include the “retreats at Cassiciacum,” where Augustine and his friends conversed about the Gospel while sharing both table and hearts; or the time lived at Montmartre by Ignatius of Loyola and his first companions; or again the gathering of the diverse yet highly motivated group of the first companions of Chiara Lubich (to remain within the Focolare context), in the Dolomites of Primiero, during what was the Movement’s mystical period par excellence.
But we might also think, in a secular spirit, mutatis mutandis, of the meeting of the founding fathers of modern nuclear physics in Canada, at Pugwash; or of certain gatherings of politicians such as those at Camaldoli; or again, one might think of Herbert von Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra brought together around a musical genius.
These groups had—and have—a central core: a “charismatic” experience that leads one to understand that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is what happens, at least at times, in the many synodal assemblies throughout the world, or in the countless associative meetings within the galaxy of solidarity—occasions in which the common good becomes more important than personal gain. From different positions, sometimes even diametrically opposed, one arrives at a symphony of intentions, which is not uniformity but the valuing of differences brought into unity.
Empty words? Perhaps. Yet they are words that, in the context of the Focolare Assembly, take on meaning, a fragrance of truth. Because truth is also relational. Because the stories of the ecological drama of the Pacific islands alternate with those of the Lebanese under bombardment; the narratives of poverty in the favelas of Florianópolis are followed by the search for meaning in the jungle of artificial intelligence.
In the course of the proceedings, moreover, there was the courage to confront the multifaceted crisis facing the Movement—numerical, vocational, relational, demographic, and economic—seeking to transform it into a conversion of hearts, of language, and of structures. Without yielding to discouragement, in an age in which it seems that only force wins—too often crude and brutal—and that fragility loses on every front.
And so the miracle happens, conversion “takes place,” and fine words become words of beauty, steeped in the Gospel of unity: comfort amid surrounding hostility, possible justice in the face of evident injustice. “The innovative gaze cast on the origin of the charism in the service of unity abhors immobility,” admitted a Dutch participant, “and asks us to walk together in the darkness of the tunnel, knowing that the light will come,” as one of the participants from India put it.