TO BECOME LOVE
Meditation course: Collect yourself, sitting on a chair, calm down, relax and become aware that you are standing before God. HERE I AM, I AM HERE, GOD – say it slowly. Then, after deep contemplation, look at what you want to give to God today. What truth about yourself and the world are you hiding from? What do you not accept in yourself? Are you true? Without the truth about yourself, you cannot enter into love. And without love you are not redeemed. Be brave today. Give poverty and receive God. Praise him.
Man was created free by God. This freedom is not absolute, because only God is absolutely free, but it is relative. Man is free to choose his salvation or to oppose it. God does not save man without his participation. God is omnipotent. But he respects man’s relative freedom. He cannot force man to love him (and that is salvation), because then he would abolish man’s freedom and make a machine of him, an instinctive and not a free being. God thus dwells everywhere except somehow in man’s freedom (if man does not allow it). God can do everything, but He cannot change man’s freedom. This, however, does not abolish but further affirms God’s omnipotence and freedom.
Namely, God saves man in spite of his freedom or precisely through it, and only through love. He calls and attracts him. That is why we can give ourselves to God or shut ourselves up in egoism. The first thing God wants from man is to give himself. To people and to God. He first asks: What do you have to give me? In order to receive something from God, we must first give. To convert, to turn to God, to give him your sins and helplessness. To become humble, to give freedom in order to get everything, even greater freedom and God himself. For salvation is in union with God. Solutions to world problems too. That is, love is the basic need and the greatest aspiration of man and the world. Prayer is true only if it is in love. This means that the first step in prayer is giving to God and to people. And that means first accepting my freedom, my poverty, my limitations, my helplessness, my sins, my curse, my whole self just the way I am, and then bringing it before God.
Forgive others, yourself and God. Only in this way can God redeem, transform and make us rich to be like our Father whose adopted children we are. Not to shut yourself off from any man, or the truth, or the most tragic and desperate situation. Because God is omnipotent.
He was born in Davor in 1938. After studying philosophy and theology in Zagreb and Rome, he was ordained a priest of the Zagreb Archdiocese in 1966. After achieving a master’s degree in philosophy and a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, he returned to Zagreb in 1971, where he became a professor at the Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb. He is the head of the Chair of Fundamental Theology, and was one of the editors of the Theological Review. Areas of his scientific work are philosophy, theology and literature. He explores the relationship between philosophy and theology, faith and science, atheism and religiosity, revelation and faith, the Church and ecclesial communities, Christianity and religion, the phenomenon of sects and issues of theological epistemology. His special field of interest is the study of man’s existential-spiritual dimension, where he discovers the way of modern evangelization and the necessity of the development of spiritual medicine, which, along with somatic and psychological, is indispensable in the complete healing of man, especially in the healing of spiritual diseases and addictions. For this purpose, he developed the method of hagiotherapy and founded in 1990 in Zagreb the Center for Spiritual Help, of which he is the head. From 1971, in addition to working at the faculty, he was a student religious teacher in Zagreb, the initiator of the prayer movement within the Church of the Croats, the founder of a religious society called the Prayer and Word Community(MiR), and the leader of numerous seminars for spiritual renewal and evangelization at home and abroad. After completing his studies and scientific doctorate in fundamental theology at … (Read more at https://hagio.hr/tomislav-ivancic/).
