The offensive word, the aggressive gesture, the hand that hurts; the denied right, the forbidden expression, the hindered step; the school without doors, the book with a price that can not be paid, the empty dish; the color, race, sexuality, religious and social status prejudices; the murdered son, the demolished house, the stolen future. The faces of terror are as many as the faces of Man. It can be the one of hate that destroys and kills in a moment but it can also be the one of indifference and contempt that reaches the same goals in a little longer.
Hypocrisy knows no limits, if trying to prevail. Thus, if it brings itself benefits, it turns the victim into the offender and the offender into the victim. Shameless, it manipulates words as if weaving Good, when its speech results in the foresighted Evil. The hypocrite surpasses himself when using the fear of terror as a weapon to terrorize, thus getting support to his ominous purposes. Pay attention, whoever listens to him: his words may sound just but his aims are not!
We live in a difficult time, even if no time before had been easy, if we remember well. The number of problems that we face has never been so big, certainly because we have never been so many humans on the planet. We become aware of miseries and tragedies in a scale never imagined before, because we have never had, as we do now, immediate and global access over whatever happens here, there and beyond. And we suffer or not, knowing what is going on.
How to react? What should "I" do to avoid such an immense misfortune, to change what seems to be the terrible calling of Man to flagellum, to suffering? Have I, one person only, only one voice, power to change whatever is needed to make the world better, to fight terror?
As the desert is the sum of all its tiny grains of sand, the "great terror" is the sum of all the small ones living in hearts and minds. Therefore, if we really wish to change the destiny of Man, we can do it, each one of us, insignificant as we may be. All we have to do is to make sure that we offer to the others what we expect to find in the others: Peace, Respect and Solidarity.
Barcelona, 9 October 2004.
If God exists and is the Creator of all things, all things "are" because they were created, and God "is" not, since He was not. "To be" would express quality or attribute of His creatures, only.
Not being, He would escape the laws of Physics, rulers only of the "is" thing. Any attempt to define Him, measure Him, weight Him or even only to imagine Him would be, consequently, useless. Trying to understand Him would result, also, futile and only less foolish than trying to explain Him, using the rationale of Man, philosophical resources at his disposal.
One deduces that it would not be necessary to "be" to "exist" and that the idea that Existence would transcend Life - as we know it - would be beyond all parameters established by Knowledge.
It also results, from the same idea, the need of revaluating our relationship, as creatures, to the Creator, placing - under the light of this understanding - the mechanisms used by Man to explain "God" to himself: the religions.
Religious institutions are, by calling and expectations, gatherers of individuals but none of them will be able to offer equal solution to the problems of more than one follower. Simply because no disciple is equal to another and, therefore, each one of them has different spiritual needs. Thus, Man's true meeting with God would be always a self experience, never a collective one.
Everything seems to indicate that the Greatest Temple is not made of stones, wood, cement, marble and gold. It would stand inside each Being and for us to find it, it would be necessary a trip to our inner selves up to the point where a little flame of Understanding illuminates, gently, a Doorway. Beyond that, in silence and absolute peace, the Old Man, Keeper of the Memory and Master of the Lighthouse, waits. Wise, he teaches only what the disciple is ready to learn. Nothing more, nothing less.
After one of these visits, I brought with me the words "my" Old Man - each one has his own - chose to talk about "The One Who Exists": "When God thinks, He uses Mathematics; when He speaks, Music; when He feels, Love; when He dreams, Hope; when He awakes, the Light of the Stars; when He breathes, Life! Sometimes I think that, if He could forget He is God, He would remind Man. Fortunately, He never forgets." He said nothing else, nor did I ask, that time.
Barcelona 2 October 2004.