RAISE YOUR GAZE
Meditation course: Sit or kneel calmly and be relaxed. Immediately begin slowly raising your gaze. But so that you feel comfortable. No straining, no excessive raising of the head. Somehow so that your gaze has been raised above the horizon. Slowly say, „Our Father… you are in heaven.“ You can do it several times. Then calmly, in silence, surrender to the presence of God, who is before you. Let the whole being (without saying a word) tell you, „You are here! Here I am, Father! I am looking at you!“ and the like, as your heart tells you. Stay that way as long as you feel that prayer feeds you. In the beginning, it will be harder, but after a few days, such a prayer will revive you and help you just raise your gaze in every situation and God’s presence to immediately overwhelm and liberate you. God is in heaven, that is how we pray in „The Lord’s Prayer“. Heaven is the space above matter. It is up. The Spirit rules matter, it is above it, superior to it. The matter is therefore down, spirit is up.
God, on the other hand, is the most spiritual being, the most perfect being. So, on the scale of beings, he is at the highest place. That is why one usually prays with their head held high, raising their gaze. Looking down at the floor, something knocks us down, makes us weak, and dispirited, directs us to defeats and limitations of the material world. By raising our gaze, we immediately feel optimism, strength, order, love, and power over every temptation.
Good is up. Evil is down. Good is stronger than evil. Evil has already been defeated. An alliance should be made with the good. The attitude of the raised head, therefore, collects us first, focuses our attention on goodness, the victorious power of justice, on the good outcome of every righteous effort. Jesus always prayed by raising his gaze towards heaven. Why?… –
In this meditation, we learn to pray like Jesus. We will feel the change and power of our prayer.
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/).
