In chapter 5, “The Key to Unity,” Chiara reflects on where saints like Clare of Assisi, Bonaventure, or Catherine of Siena had found God who is Love—in Jesus’ passion. And Jesus suffered most, she explains, at the moment on Calvary when he cried out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). If that is when he suffered most, then that is when he loved most. Those who live the Ideal respond to that cry by searching out every “face” of Jesus Forsaken, to be found “within us and around us everywhere in the world, and whom we want to comfort and console.”
During the war, Chiara and her compan- ions discovered that if “Jesus was the Truth, and if we wished to find the Truth we had to follow him, the Word Incarnate.” They found that Truth by living the gospel “verse by verse, word by word,” a practice known as “The Word of Life.