MEDITATION FOR YOU – Tomislav Ivančić

BEGGARS OF TENDERNESS

It was the beginning of the month of August. I was standing in front of the house early in the morning. I could hear the voice of a seven or eight-year-old boy from the house next-door. His mother was trying to persuade him to go to the store to buy something for the house.  She put a backpack on his back and repeated what he needed to buy. The boy was sleepy, he did not feel like it.

He left the yard, but with his head down, his hands in his pockets, he muttered something. While he was coming, his mother told him not to forget the way to the store. He told her he knew it. She warned him to be careful not to lose money, and he nodded and replied that he knew everything. She was telling him to come back quickly, and he responded to everything mumbling, with his head down. It could be seen that real trust had not yet been established between him and his mother. The mother looked determined. She told him what to do in a commanding tone of voice. It was as if she pushed her son out of the house, full of self-awareness and a sense of care for the house and the children. The boy looked as if he had been kicked out of the house. There was something burning in him, he felt some injustice, some misunderstanding, something gave him the impression that the two of them were two worlds that did not understand each other. The boy seemed to be listening, but inside he was acting differently.

Parents are the love from which the child emerged and in which he can enter the world. Parents are the tenderness in which the child, like a plant and a tender sprout, can grow. Parents are a place where children’s problems can be relieved and children’s questions answered, where children’s subconscious wants to be expressed and understood. A child has his own world that parents cannot fully understand. Parents usually have their own plan for children. They know exactly how to raise them, how to give them orders, what they should do. They understand the child as a mechanism that needs to be trained to function in life. But a child can apparently be excellently trained, he can do what his parents tell him, but at the same time he can simmer inside, protests and rage can grow in him that will sooner or later show on the surface and then destroy all relationships with people, especially with parents. True upbringing must first listen to the child from the inside, feel where his inner strength and calling lead him, understand the originality of the child as a person, hear his inner maturity.

A child is essentially an independent person. He has his own plans. He has its own ethos and his own dynamism. A child has a Vocation and a plan that God has imprinted in his being. Parents cannot dispose of the child. He does not belong to them; he can only grow up with them and be with them.

I was passing by a children’s playground. A five-year-old boy was standing in the sand and building something. Next to him were the toys that he and his mother had brought. After a while, the boy got up and started stomping on the toys.

It was strange and unusual where such destructive will came from. Meanwhile, the mother was sitting on the bench next to the boy. She was not at all interested in him, in his questions, but read and dealt with her problems. It was clear that taking care of her son was a pain and a duty, not love and pleasure. The boy was experiencing it. Mother and father were rich. They bought him too many toys. But the boy felt that they were buying him toys so that they would entertain him, so that they would not have to deal with him. He felt thrown out of his family. He was a burden to them. He could not express his thoughts to anyone, he could not cry, he could not express his joys to anyone, he had no one to whom he could brag that he succeeded in making a house in the sand, digging a well, making a small railway, a road, a village, or man.

He remained in his own world. He was an exile. His anger and his destructive energy can be understood from this exile. He raged at his toys because he wanted his parents. He does not need dead things, but a living mother to whom he can talk, on whose lap he can sit and express himself, he needs a father whom he would ask and who would explain to him what the world looks like, how to drive a car, why airplanes fly.

The consumerist society regards children and people as an obstacle to collecting treasures and things you can purchase. The most important thing is to accumulate as much money as possible, so that you can buy every little thing in the store and keep it in the house, even though it only collects dust. Children are a burden on that road. That is why many women are furious when the Church and the state start talking about the need to have more children.

Everyone has the right to live their own life, they think. But even children who would like to come to this world have the right to enter the world and live, through us and beside us. How to combine these two needs, these two cries for life?

Without love, there is no life and no answers to all life’s questions, and without sacrifice and putting your back under the burden of Life, there is no love. Only love is the space in which adults and children can survive.

Look for that Love today.

The course of meditation: Gather yourself, sitting on a chair, calm down, relax, and realize that you are standing before God. HERE I AM, HERE I AM, GOD – say it slowly. Then, after deep concentration, look at what you want to give to God today. What truth about you and the world are you hiding from? What do you not accept in yourself? Are you truthful? You cannot fall in love without the truth about yourself. And without love you are not redeemed. Be brave today. Give poverty and receive God. Praise him.