SAILING IN THE WINTER SUN: JOURNAL OF AN OLD MAN AT THE END OF LIFE:
✑Anyone who fervently and fanatically believes something that is demonstrably false is capable of any extreme, even murder.
✑ABOUT FAST PERIODS: We should speak out of the fulness of our own hearts, and not from bondage to fear, to rules and regulations. Those who are well fast as well as they are able, those who are weak, fast as they are able. Those who are ill fast little. But if the exercise does not come from the heart, no matter how little or how much, it is of no benefit and remains meaningless.
✑The only acceptable theocracy is a theocracy of the heart, not a theoretical political construct. God does not force His will on the unwilling. When we pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we should understand, “Let your kingdom enter in and reign in my heart, Lord, for I am willing. Let your will be done in my heart as it is done in heaven, for I am willing.”
✑Until love is embraced as the only commodity of genuine value, we humans will be programmed to fear and, in turn , have that fear sold back to us as freedom.
✑The preaching of the Gospel was never meant to be a means of colonizing people’s minds with fear. Nevertheless, this has become a primary element of far too many Christian preachers, and it has clearly contributed to the rise of atheism, which often results from the effort to de-colonize the mind. The colonialism of fear no longer works except in a neurotic mind. If we do not wish to, in the words of Pope Francis, “inoculate young people against faith” we have to stop making it fear-based and restore it to Christ’s message of hope, love and joy.
Odd how often we spend so many years weaving it, only to see the fabric of our lives shredded by our own folly, or choices made in haste, or governed by passions. Instants and seconds rather than days and years can unravel the fabric of our lives. Sometimes, we are left only with the residue of aspirations, of hopes and dreams diffused like ashes in the reality of our own inability to perceive reality. Perhaps when one falls to the temptation of thinking that one’s life no longer has meaning, we have actually fallen prey to the fear and arrogance of believing that our lives ought to have some extraordinary meaning. In reality, the actual meaning and purpose of life is to love and be loved. To be needed and adulated destroys, rather than enhances, the true meaning to our lives.
In Christ, Vladika Lazar.