Chiara Luce: “Wrapped Into a Wonderful Design”

October 29th commemorates Blessed Chiara "Luce" Badano, an Italian girl who died of osteosarcoma (bone cancer) in 1990, a few weeks short of her 19th birthday. She was declared "blessed" in 2010. 

Chiara Luce was a young person of my generation, which means she was a “modern girl” in terms of the sensibilities of this emerging new epoch, and her life has much in common with young people today. She had a great passion for life, and was full of aspirations. She loved to sing, play tennis, and swim. She enjoyed popular music, and even had an appreciation of Bruce Springsteen. She was a bright and thoughtful student who loved literature but had a hard time with math. She had a boyfriend and experienced heartbreak, like countless other teenage girls. She cherished her family and friends, and had a great heart for people going through physical or spiritual troubles. She was shocked when the pain she thought was a tennis injury turned out to be bone cancer. The possibility that she might die at such a young age was very hard for her. She wanted to live. In the long odyssey of her cancer treatments, she knew the force of her own human hopes that she might be cured. 
But Chiara Luce was also a girl of great faith. Shaped since childhood by the charism of the Focolare movement, she recognized in her illness a deeper calling from her suffering Lord. She accepted and even embraced this new, arduous, painful path, and offered her life in union with Jesus's cry of abandonment on the Cross. She said:

"I offer everything, my failures, my pains and joys to Him, starting again every time the Cross makes me feel all its weight. The important thing is to do God’s will. I might have had plans about myself but God came up with this. The sickness came to me at the right time... [and] now I feel like I am wrapped into a wonderful design that is slowly unfolding itself to me."

She was able to endure beyond her own capacity for endurance, because she trusted in Jesus, because deeper than all the very real pain was the mystery of relationship with Him.

"What a free and immense gift life is and how important it is to live every instant in the fullness of God. I feel so little and the road ahead is so arduous that I often feel overwhelmed with pain! But that’s the Spouse coming to meet me. Yes, I repeat it: 'If you want it Jesus, so do I!'"