Taken from the print version of the Hagio.hr-a magazine
The course of meditation:
Relaxed and calm go to the One who speaks through conscience. Conscience is a sacred and fundamental center of your personality. Let all the deeds from your life so far ‘march’ before your eyes. How do they make you feel before your conscience? Don’t make excuses, let your conscience speak for itself.
Look God ‘in the eye’ and choose that better half.
Man’s conscience clearly tells us that we must not do evil and that we must do good. All people agree on that fundamental ethical principle. It is instilled in the core of man’s being. Who set it up like that?
If we do evil, we feel guilty. We are afraid. We stand before an invisible but real and concrete court. Who is judging us?
To whom do we have to answer for our actions? To ourselves?
Then why can’t we justify any evil? We cannot control our conscience.
Are we responsible to people?
Then why are we tormented by secret sins that people will never know about? Maybe we are responsible to the history of mankind? Who is that history? And then why do people work against the beliefs of the entire history of mankind when their conscience demands it? Conscience is above the history of people and above the beliefs of a group of people and above opinion.
People give their lives for conscience. Doing good is more important than life. People give their lives for freedom, for love, for peace, for others, for justice. Conscience transports us to the afterlife, to transcendence. Who judges us so unfailingly and draws us to do what is just and good?
When a man tramples his conscience, he becomes a non-man. All he does is in vain and his stay on Earth is in vain. When, on the contrary, he does what is good and just, he is happy even when he has nothing but bread and clothes.
Conscience is an open path to the Primordial, to the Source. Conscience is direct communication with God even when we are not aware of it. He who does good is with God. He who does evil is ungodly even if he acknowledges God with words.
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/).
