Odilia Carmen Chirica

THEREFORE YOU ALSO MUST BE READY; FOR THE SON OF MAN IS COMING AT AN HOUR YOU DO NOT EXPECT. -MATTHEW 24:44 " Sooner or later there arises in every human heart the desire for holiness, spirituality, God, call it what you will. One hears mystics speak of a divinity all around them that is within our grasp, that would make our lives meaningful and beautiful and rich, if we could only discover it. People have some sort of a vague idea as to what this thing is and they read books and con­sult gurus, in the attempt to find out what it is that they must do to gain this elusive thing called Holiness or Spirituality. They pick up all sorts of methods, techniques, spiritual exercises, formulas; then after years of fruitless striving they become discouraged and confused and wonder what went wrong. Mostly they blame themselves. If they had practiced their tech­niques more regularly, if they had been more fervent or more generous, they might have made it. But made what? They have no clear ide...

  YOUR EYE IS THE LAMP OF YOUR BODY; WHEN YOUR EYE IS SOUND, YOUR WHOLE BODY IS FULL OF LIGHT; BUT WHEN IT IS NOT SOUND, YOUR BODY I S FULL OF DARK NESS. -LUKE II:34 "We think the world would be saved if only we could generate larger quantities of goodwill and tolerance. That's false. What will save the world is not goodwill and tolerance but clear thinking. Of what use is it to be tolerant of others if you are convinced that you are right and everyone who disagrees with you is wrong? That isn't tol­erance but condescension. That leads not to union of hearts but to division, because you are one up and the others one down. A position that can only lead to a sense of superiority on your part and resentment on your neighbor's, thereby breeding further intolerance. True tolerance only arises from a keen awareness of the abysmal ignorance of everyone as far as truth is concerned. For truth is essen­tially mystery. The mind can sense but cannot grasp it, much less formulate ...

NO ONE WHO PUTS HIS HAND TO THE PLOW AND LOOKS BACK IS FIT FOR THE KINGDOM OF GOD.   -LUKE 9:62 "God's kingdom is love. What does it mean to love? It means to be sensitive to life, to things, to persons, to feel for everything and everyone to the exclusion of nothing and no one. For ex­clusion can only be achieved through a harden­ing of oneself, through closing one's doors. And the moment there is a hardening, sensitivity dies. It won't be hard for you to find examples of this kind of sensitivity in your life. Have you ever stopped to remove a stone or a nail from the road lest someone come to harm? It does not matter that you will never know the person who will benefit from this gesture and you will receive no reward or recognition. You just do it from a feeling of benevolence and kindness. Or have you felt pained at the wanton destruction in another part of the world, of a forest that you will never see and never benefit from? Have you gone to some trouble to help a...

TRULY, I SAY TO YOU, UNLESS YOU TURN AND BECOME LIKE CHILDREN, YOU WILL NEVER ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. -MATTHEW 18:3 " The first quality that strikes one when one looks into the eyes of a child is its innocence: its lovely inability to lie or wear a mask or pretend to be anything other than what it is. In this the child is exactly like the rest of Nature. A dog is a dog; a rose, a rose; a star, a star; everything is quite simply what it is. Only the adult human being is able to be one thing and pretend to be another. When grown-ups punish a child for telling the truth, for revealing what it thinks and feels, the child learns to dissemble and its innocence is destroyed. Soon it will join the ranks of the numberless people who say helplessly, "I do not know who I am," for, having hidden the truth about themselves for so long from others, they end up by hiding it from themselves. How much of the innocence of childhood do you still re­tain, is there anyone today in whose...

BUT YOU ARE NOT TO BE CALLED RABBI, FOR YOU HAVE ONE TEACHER, AND YOU ARE ALL BRETHREN. -MATTHEW 20:8 " You can get someone to teach you things me­chanical or scientific or mathematical like alge­bra or English or riding a cycle or operating a computer. But in the things that really matter, life, love, reality, God, no one can teach you a thing. All they can do is give you formulas. And as soon as you have a formula, you have reality filtered through the mind of someone else. If you take those formulas you will be imprisoned. You will wither and when you come to die you will not have known what it means to see for yourself, to learn. Look at it this way: There have been mo­ments in your life when you had an experience that you know you will have to carry with you to your grave because you are quite unable to find words with which to communicate the ex­perience to anyone. As a matter of fact there simply are no words in any human language to communicate exactly what you experienced...

"TEACHER," THEY SAID, "WE KNOW THAT YOU SPEAK AND TEACH RIGHTLY, AND SHOW NO PARTIALITY." -LUKE 20:21 " Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people. As a result they have a stranglehold on you. See how they control your behaviour by their approval and disapproval. They hold the power to ease your loneliness with their company, to send your spirits soaring with their praise, to bring you down to the depths with their criticism and rejection. Take a look at yourself spending almost every waking minute of your day placating and pleasing peo­ple, whether they are living or dead. You live by their norms, conform to their standards, seek their company, desire their love, dread their rid­icule, long for their applause, meekly submit to the guilt they lay upon you; you are terrified to go against the fashion in the way you dress or speak or act or even think. And observe how even when you control them you depend on them and are enslaved by t...