I AM NOT AFRAID ANYMORE – GOD’S PROVIDENCE
The course of the meditation: Sit down, look up at the cross or the sky. Let your heart and your mouth say: YOU ARE FREEDOM AND SECURITY. Say it until you feel peace and gentleness overflowing your womb. Look at Jesus. Persevere in that collected gaze for at least five minutes. Then surrender as if you are falling into the void, with the conviction: Jesus will welcome you with His hands. You cannot fail, you cannot get lost. It is like jumping off a plane before you open a parachute. Look at the cross and let the words of Jesus resound in you: Come to me, all you who are burdened. Give Jesus your fears. Give Jesus your fears, one by one. Reach out to Him in a gesture of giving and receiving freedom full of courage and bravery. Then thank Jesus for every fear. And peace and joy will embrace you.
Fear paralyses man’s action. Fear destroys the psyche. Fear, however, is a natural result of man’s sinful situation. Man feels threatened. Wars, unsuccessful attempts of disarmament, new terrorist attacks, the Cold War of the East and West, shortages, mistrust, quarrles, failures, threats, new diseases, sudden deaths, unemployment, hatred, ideological and religious wars, drugs and alcohol alienation, futile pleasure-seeking, wandering for meaning – all this creates an atmosphere of fear.
After all, a burdened conscience, consciously or subconsciously, hurts and destroys the most. Fear – the beginning of the illness and trouble. Is there a way out? Who leads this world? In whose hands is your day and night? On whose palm is your future foged? Who stands beneath everything that scares and upsets us? Is there a shoulder we can rely on without being betrayed, exiled and left behind? There is – Jesus of Nazareth. Is that true? Those who have relied on it know this. And no one can dissuade them anymore. They walk safely. They look at life much wider than the narrow walls between birth and death. And in death is life, because life is Jesus Christ.
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/).
