Tomislav Ivančić, from the book ‘Father’
EPHEMERAL AND ETERNAL
Descend into your soul, into the eternal part of yourself.
Time relentlessly reminds you that you are transient. Maybe that sometimes drives anxiety and subconscious fear into your heart. You wonder if there is a space somewhere where time does not exist and where you can preserve your life. In this meditation, try to find places in yourself that are not destroyed by time.
They told you and you believe it, that your soul animates your body. They told you that the soul is immortal and the body is perishable. You get it. However, that truth may not have penetrated your heart yet. Try now to bring that truth down from the head into the depth of your being. When I was a child of a few months, it was me, not someone else. Now I’m grown up, everything about me has changed, but I’m still the same. Everything in me is new, yet I remain the same. I acquired more knowledge, finished school, got to know the world, many people and situations. Still, I remained the same. Every atom of my body has changed, not a single one is left of me from when I was one year old. Everything on me and in me is different, someone else’s, something that wasn’t there before, only I remained the same. Who am I? It doesn’t matter what I do, it doesn’t matter what I eat or drink, what I am, what I will be, whether I have anything or not. I am not conditioned by people, jobs, food, money, health, suffering or happiness. All this is not me and I do not depend on all this. I do not depend on all these conditions. I am more than all that.
I’m not afraid of what people think of me. I am not afraid of war, hunger, disease. I am not afraid of earthquakes, thunder, threats. I am not afraid of failure at work, in the family, at school. I am indestructible. I am eternal as God. I stand in God’s palm.
I feel that I am descending into the depth of myself, that I am relying on this idea that I am all in my “me”, in my spirit. No one can touch me there. Nobody hurt me. People can say whatever they want,their words pass me by like a leaf floating down a river and I remain.
Days and time pass while I stay. Everything changes, I stay. It seems to me that I have descended into the deepest parts of myself. I feel it in the fundamental bones of my body. I’m relaxed. I am calm. Nothing can move or upset me. As if I were in my mother’s lap, that is how I feel in my spirit.
I am security, life, eternity, joy, peace. Nothing can happen to me. I live. I…
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/).
