Odilia Carmen Chirica

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...