Continuing our series of texts on biblical couples, we find ourselves facing a real challenge. Next in line is Noah, the tenth biblical patriarch after Adam. However, the aim - and at the same time the challenge - of this text is to get to know Noah's life companion. Let us take things in order.
While we are forced to be by one another's side more than usual, conflicts don't knock at the door - they barge in uninvited. Perhaps now is the right time to "welcome" them, to sit them down at the table with us, and finally set some rules of conduct to protect ourselves from their destructive intrusion into our lives.
In the Bible, family and marital disputes are almost identical to our own times. Even then, the patterns of marital behaviour in disputes were already very topical and well known. These patterns can be summarised according to the following types of behaviour of marriage partners:
- 'shifting the blame onto the other spouse' ('it's not me, it's...')
- 'outbursts of jealousy' ('where were you?')
- 'children as a source of marital problems' ('never anything from him/her'')
- 'infertility of husband or wife' ('we're left on our own')
- 'macho man and good woman' ('wise woman and foolish husband').
We shall find all this, and more, in the marital stories of today. We have chosen several characteristic biblical stories of marital disputes which have left a deep mark on the biblical narrative and on history, that is, several biblical married couples together with a kind of 'motto' of the disputes that ran through their conflicts: Adam and Eve ('it wasn't me'); Sarah and Abraham ('we are left alone'); Isaac and Rebekah ('big children, big worries'); Rachel and Jacob ('I have had enough of everything'); Nabal and Abigail ('beauty and the fool').
The greatness and holiness of her life has prompted many to research and occupy themselves with her life. So allow me to write about something little known, and a small personal experience connected with devotion to St Mother Teresa.
Although I myself am a mother of many children, I want to reflect on the theme of motherhood — on her example and on my own experience.
While they were dying, their mother could not be near them".
Lucia Pisapia Apicella
"O wind from the Tyrrhenian Sea, you who know my name,
kiss my mother, who is far away, in my place".
This is the story of Lucia Pisapia Apicella, from the town of Cava de' Tirreni, not far from Naples in Italy. She was called the "mother of the dead" soldiers, whose bodies she sought out, identified and buried with dignity, or arranged to have returned to their families. Although a mother herself, she found the time and the means to carry out this extraordinary work of mercy. She found and gave a dignified burial to more than 700 bodies of dead soldiers, all with her own bare hands. The hands of a mother who loved unknown sons, mostly of the enemy army, as her own. That is why she was called "Die Mutter der Toten - Mother of the Dead".
"Thank you, women who are mothers! You have sheltered human beings within yourselves in a unique experience of joy and travail."
With this message, addressed to women throughout the world as a sign of his gratitude and solidarity, St John Paul II expressed three fundamental truths about motherhood: Every woman is called to be a mother, a mother is one who shelters human beings, motherhood is joy and travail.
Mother's Day is, in a wider sense, dedicated to all women, because every woman carries within her a unique capacity for motherly love and complete self-giving, which she is called to live out in her relationships with others.
According to God’s providence, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the year 1920, the Congregation of the Daughters of Mercy, Third Order Regular of St Francis, was established in Blato na Korčuli. In establishing it, the good Lord made use of Miss Marija Petković-Kovač, daughter of the late Antun from Blato on the island of Korčula, and of the then Bishop of Dubrovnik, Dr Josip Marčelić. Thus Marija of the Crucified Petković – both in her homeland and throughout the world, together with her Congregation – became all things to all people in life-giving goodness, bearing witness to Christ’s presence in the world until he comes. She founded and set in motion her small community so that it might do good among the most vulnerable, and so that this community might become a sower and witness of good in this joyless world, this true valley of tears.
Marija had exemplary parents, and she loved her father in particular, whom she regarded as a "living saint". In childhood, surrounded by his love and by the good Christian upbringing of her mother, within a family atmosphere that the Second Vatican Council, some sixty years later, would call a "domestic Church", Marija showed an unusual piety and inclination towards meditation, yet she also happily kept company with the poorest girls from the neighbourhood and secretly helped them.
I confess that the two of us are struggling against one another.
The two of us were so different, and in that difference so dangerous to one another.
I needed a little encouragement, a little kindness, to open the way for me, and instead you blocked it for me, with good intentions, of course.
In Letter to His Father Franz Kafka recounts, in the form of a letter, a life fundamentally marked by disputes and misunderstanding with his father. The letter was meant to show everything that had gone wrong between them, since they could no longer talk to one another. He wrote this letter in 1919, when he was 36 years old, but he never handed it to his father. The occasion for the Letter was his father's question as to why Franz was so afraid of him: "You asked me recently why I maintain that I feel fear in your presence. As usual, I did not know how to answer you, partly for the very reason that this same fear is what I feel in your presence." Fear so overpowered him that it turned into a feeling of guilt: "In your presence I lost my self-confidence and exchanged it for a boundless sense of guilt." In this situation Franz feels weak and powerless, unprotected. He always feels guilty, because he can never be in the right: "No one else was allowed to gnaw the bones, only you. No one else was allowed to slurp vinegar, only you." He became an insecure child, and that insecurity opened the door to further fears.
In the monastery of the Discalced Carmelite nuns in Đakovačka Breznica I was leading a novena to St Joseph, where I saw this image of St Joseph with Jesus sleeping on his chest. I had never before seen a depiction that radiates so much love and tenderness between Jesus and Joseph. I was so moved by this image that I went looking for it on the internet, and found that the original icon is kept in the chapel of a religious community in Spain. Anyone who wants more information can visit the website: https://www.hogardelamadre.org/es/.
When we contemplate a sacred image, dwell on its content and enter into the scenes it depicts, we are in fact meditating, and meditation is prayer. We shall meditate on the life of St Joseph, whose life is inseparable from the life of the Most Holy Trinity itself, and from the life of Jesus and Mary. That means we shall be with God and with the Holy Family.
My father always treated everyone the same, whether that was the queen or the street sweeper and he really believed that all human beings were equal. I apply that same value to everything that I do in my life.
My father was a man of courage and vision.
He really believed in the power of unity and that if people all over the world came together, they would strike a blow to any form of injustice.
He was truly authentic to what he believed in and there were core values that formed his life: humility, perseverance, honesty and forgiveness.
Almost a decade since his death on 5 December 2013, Nelson Mandela continues to inspire millions of people throughout the world in their non-violent commitment against every form of racism. Still today, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate is a reference point well beyond the borders of South Africa.
Among those who walk in the footsteps of the South African leader, is his daughter, Makaziwe Mandela, who is involved with various charitable works and is the founder and president of “House of Mandela”, a company that through clothing — especially for young people — carries on the anti-racist message of her father.
Look at me, look at me, I've been here for four months already…
Look at me! Right in the eyes – inside!
Let me see myself in your eyes!
These eyes were not looking for themselves;
they were no longer mine, nor did they look at themselves!
They were …in yours, always – so that they might be born in them,
from your eyes alone my image, just as you see me!
A view of all things, of the whole world, just as you see it.
Here I am now – just as you want me.
As soon as a child is born, the visual-motor system (looking and seeing) immediately becomes the most important system for its growth, that is, the way the child communicates from the very beginning. What it will most likely look at and see is its mother's face, especially her eyes. The mother's face and eyes become the centre of its observation.
Children know how to be joyful regardless of circumstances
Children allow beauty to delight them
Children are teachable
Children are sincere seekers of truth
Today, 20 November, marks World Children's Day with the aim of raising awareness of the importance of caring for the wellbeing and protection of children around the world. How can marking this day help adults live their everyday lives more fully? What life lessons can we learn from children?
In the situation in which we found ourselves over the past months, it was certainly not easy to give up the everyday life filled with social interaction, both for us and for the youngest among us, who were forced to leave behind their school desks, friendships, hobbies and various other activities.
These specific circumstances have perhaps helped us understand better the value of the sibling bond, which provides an enormous number of factors that foster healthy psycho-physical and social development.
We bring an article from the book dedicated to Prof. Ante Vukasović, For Better Upbringing and a More Successful Married and Family Life, on the beauty, importance and challenge of childbearing and posterity for Kučići, for Croatia and for the whole world.
"The world belongs to the young" - so runs the old folk saying. The young carry on the work of their forebears - their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. This is a condition of human survival, a lawful process that makes possible the continuity of life, of humanity's preservation and development. Descendants mean the continuation of the life of the family, of the nation, of humankind. They build family trees, search out their roots, carry forward what has already begun, extend what is unfinished, bring about what has not yet been achieved. They join together decades, centuries and millennia. They make possible the development of human culture and civilisation. They will carry forward our work too. They will make possible the further development of the human race and its culture in the future.
Claudia Messing, a psychologist, sociologist and president of the Argentine Society for Family Therapy, in her latest book "How Children Think and Feel Today", says that in our time "a structural change is taking place at the social level in the parent/adult–child relationship, called the 'symmetry of the child with the adult'. Children imitate their parents and adults to such an extent that they repeat their sentences, their way of thinking, their attitudes, knowledge, anxieties and fears, and also imitate their unresolved life stories. In this way they place themselves on the same level - as if they were adults".
"The demands of growing up are becoming increasingly difficult. Children and young people become blocked, demoralised, and quickly abandon their interests. That is why the question of vocation and profession is so hard today: they must, and want to, choose an occupation that guarantees them satisfaction and success, and they must not make a mistake. We have to teach them, and show them by example, how to gradually discover their own interests and talents. Otherwise, this is something that can be paralysing, where the pleasure of discovery is suppressed and the security they are looking for is very hard to find."
Claudia Messing
We speak of a double when, within a single spatio-temporal context – that is, within a single possible world created by literary, digital or some other fiction – the identity of a character is duplicated: one becomes two; the character therefore has two incarnations: two bodies corresponding to the same identity and often to the same name.
We bring you an interesting account of volunteering at an orphanage in Tanzania, from Grgur Vugdelija, a young man from Metković.
I don’t know exactly how I came up with the idea of going to volunteer, and in Tanzania of all places. The opportunity simply presented itself. I had always wanted to go to Africa. For as long as I can remember, it had always been my wish. And so I went.
And I was alive and beautiful. I filled Rama with joy. But he wanted something that I was not. And when he killed me, he touched nothing of what I truly am.
I have lain here for centuries in the Vran mountains, free with an untouchable freedom, and loved with a love that gives new birth.
For three centuries now, the Croatian people of Rama and Herzegovina have venerated a lone grave at Kedžara, in the heart of the Vran mountains, as a holy place. There, according to tradition, lies the body of Diva Grabovčeva, who, in the flower of her youth, was killed by a dissolute Turkish nobleman because she resisted his lust. Diva truly becomes a beauty and the collective sister of everyone in Rama the moment she speaks with the soul of a free woman, choosing death rather than life with the wealthy bey Kopčić.
Diva was the daughter of Luka Grabovac and his wife Luca, who for a long time had been unable to have children, until, only in their old age, God took pity on Luca's fervent prayers, and granted them a lovely little daughter, Dijeva (Virgin - Virginia), or, as the people of that region pronounced it in their thoroughgoing ikavian dialect, Diva Grabovčeva.
All the couples and spouses who, in these difficult days, are separated because of all kinds of circumstances, must surely be wondering how they will get through this hard time. Indeed, many of them are healthcare workers, many are in self-isolation, or find themselves in different cities. We have written this text for them, as a help and a hope for a better tomorrow.
To convey the message we wish to send, we will draw on a story by J. R. R. Tolkien from his trilogy The Lord of the Rings.
Karol Wojtyła, as auxiliary bishop of Kraków, writing under the pen name Andrzej Jawień, wrote a drama in three acts, The Jeweller's Shop (Przed sklepem jubilera), about the lives of three couples. In fact, it is "about love as an enduring challenge", for "love determines the future", of each of the three couples, and of each of us. It is full of symbolism and can speak powerfully to each of us, regardless of age or sex.
If you are among the many people who struggle every day, keep in mind that my own struggles brought me to the purpose of my life, which was waiting for me.
And that purpose was far, far beyond anything I could ever have imagined.
I want you to experience all the joy and all the fulfilment that He has intended for you.
I am beginning this story because the person I am going to write about had a great influence on my life, at the time of a crisis I once overcame. At the centre of it all is, in truth, the great love of Christ, which He has for every person in His own way.
Nick Vujicic was born in 1982 in Australia, the first child in his family; yet he came into the world without arms or legs, with no medical explanation whatsoever. At the birth, his father and mother went through a great crisis, to the point that his mother did not want to hold or breastfeed him for the first four months of his life. It took them a long time to believe that God had not made a mistake. After Nick, they raised two more children, both born completely healthy.
"Man has been given freedom and an ideal. Freedom, to feel himself master of what is his, freely to seek truth and new paths. An ideal, to climb towards it, to have a goal towards which he moves."
Ivo Mašina was born in Preko in 1927 to his parents Ivo and Marica. He came from a large family of nine children. He lived, as Mladen Dorkin puts it, "for a world in freedom, for a world in beauty. In his heart there was no room for selfishness, darkness, hatred or revenge. He lived for the ideal of Love and Freedom. In his vision, that ideal was Jesus Christ, perfect God and man. That is why he strove to offer himself as a perfect sacrifice, one he would offer with a pure heart for the freedom of the Homeland, for the right to dreams and to a faith that can and must be fulfilled, as a victory of good over evil, of light over darkness. Ivo Mašina’s dream is of a whole and happy man, free in his thoughts, longings and desires, divinely upright in dignity, within a nation equally free and happy, sovereign and proud in its dignity".
Inland from the town of Morondava in Madagascar lies the famous "Avenue of the Baobabs". A little further on stand some very particular baobabs - "les Baobabs amoureux" (the baobabs in love) - which seem to grow from a single root. In fact, it is one baobab tree with two trunks wound spirally around each other in an endless embrace.
The trunk of the baobab is soft, and it takes many years for the tree to grow. The trees can reach up to 25 metres in height and live for thousands of years. Only after 20 years does the tree flower and bear fruit for the first time. Because of its slow growth and softness, it is compared to Malagasy women. In the southern part of Madagascar, tamarind trees are often deliberately planted beside baobabs to form a pair, since tamarind trees, with their fast growth and hard bark, represent manliness, speed and efficiency. Even today, rituals are held on the western coast of Madagascar in which newly married women stand before a baobab to pray for fertility and a successful marriage - a marriage which, like the growth of the baobab, which when fully grown conceals within it fruits of many kinds, requires patience, perseverance and gentleness.
We bring you a text by Fr Šimun Doljanin on the harm that haste does to the growth of love, together with two stories about the baobab that confirm this.
We bring the story of Telemachus and Odysseus, of a father and a son, of two people who learned from their mistakes. We also bring the testimony of Massimo Recalcati, the Italian psychiatrist who has written more than most about Telemachus and Odysseus, about a son's need for his father and a father's need for his son. He shares with us his own experience of his father, of his father's absence, and of what he inherited from him.
All of us have been Telemachus at least once, have gazed at least once at the horizon of the sea, waiting for someone or something to return to us from there, to come to us and restore our strength for living. Today's Telemachus is the young person in a state of alienation: without a clear future, wrecked from within, without perspective, without authentic experience, without desire, enslaved to pleasure, unemployed, insecure. Our children do not inherit a Kingdom, but a dead body, an exhausted land, a ruined economy, unlimited debt, a lack of work, and no horizon for life. Our children are exhausted.
The old Latin saying Vita hominis militia superterram est, meaning Human life on earth is a battle, most vividly reflects the life of the hero of this story. His way of living could be summed up, in short, as a fierce struggle, a ceaseless race and a longing for self-fulfilment. Such was the life lived by the athlete Jesse Owens, an African-American who won four gold medals and was the star of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
"In my youth's days I longed ardently to pierce the hearts of others with my own heart, to shine before the nations, to rise, I myself knew not where…." Byron, Manfred
"I do not forget her (Greta); Schiller's line always comes to my mind: "Oh, dass sie ewig grünen bliebe, die schöne Zeit der ersten Liebe." (Oh, that it might remain forever green, the beautiful time of first love). The first love is the deepest, and that is why the memory of it is sacred to me. All this is fleeting. I doubt I ever loved anyone as deeply as I loved Greta; and yet it passed – I remember it, it ennobled me, but one can live without it too." Ivan Mertz
Ivan Merz was born in 1896 in Banja Luka, the only son of his parents, raised in a liberal, bourgeois spirit. He, too, grew up in Banja Luka, in a family and social environment in which greater care was given to civic and worldly values, while Christian ones were more a matter of formality and tradition. He was a soldier in the First World War. He studied in Vienna, Paris and Zagreb. He earned a doctorate. He was a professor of French language and literature. He had a broad culture. He was one of the leaders of the Catholic movement, worked extensively with young people, and wrote many valuable texts. He died in 1928 at the age of 32, with a reputation for holiness. His grave is in Zagreb, in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Palmotićeva Street. Pope John Paul II declared him blessed.
At the age of sixteen he fell in love with his peer, Greta Teschner. He experienced this falling in love very intensely. But soon Greta, during a brief stay with her parents in Travnik, became involved with a young Muslim man who exploited and then abandoned her. She experienced this very traumatically and tragically, and in that disappointment took her own life: „When I learned of her death, a fracture occurred in my soul, not all at once but over time… My youth, it seems to me, has lain down in the grave with her; everyone else can laugh from the bottom of their heart, I cannot. I look at girls, I like them, but if I think of her, everything else vanishes. The only comfort I find is in art, which I love intensely, and in nature. Her soul has shaken off transience and departed. Where to? Into eternity. But God, horror seizes me when I think that she took her own life.“
What a story of love! Love as a virtue struggles against folly and corruption, betrayal and hypocrisy, against cowardice and vicious brutality, against rebellion and disease — and wins.
Each of us carries both Cain and Abel within, and every day we struggle against straying onto Cain's path. History is full of people who took that path, leaving nothing behind but blood and death. What does it mean to offer a right sacrifice? It means falling to your knees and asking the Lord to kindle the sacrificial fire. It means giving the Lord the best of what we have.
The Dutch psychologist Namkje Koudenburg says that it takes only four seconds for the discomfort to set in. The time of silence has arrived, or at least a time in which we have more opportunity to be in silence, to be with ourselves. This has, in part, been forced upon us by the coronavirus, which has reduced our social contacts and compelled us to stay at home for long stretches of time. As recently as last month, something seemingly quite impossible, and therefore shocking – "the prospect of an unreal silence", as Giuseppe Marino puts it.
You will not fear the terror of the night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.
Ps 91:5-6
As the psychiatrist Karl Menninger observed, sin can simply be a failure to act, to know, or to see what must be done – in short, a failure to care; that, quite literally, is what the word acedia has always meant, a problem recognised for centuries, and one that still afflicts us today.
Karl Menninger
Bertrand Russell once observed that a generation unable to bear boredom becomes a generation of small people, cut off from nature's slower rhythms, in whom every living impulse gradually fades, like flowers cut and placed in a vase.
Bertrand Russell
There is a spiritual state that is both a reaction to our wounds and a cause and consequence of our sins and weaknesses. We call it acedia. It can creep, like a spiritual worm, into our homes and family relationships, into our churches and sacristies. There are three kinds of acedia.
