Comforting words

If you are not able to save yourself, abandon yourself, only taking care that you do not lose God – Jan Amos Komenský

Comforting words

At times of experiencing difficulties in life, one usually stops and asks questions. Many questions arise. One is often unable to explain his situation at all. The mind stops, as if standing in front of a high wall which it is not possible to cross or over which it is not possible to jump.

Only after a certain period of stagnant misunderstanding and emptiness a certain insight and knowledge appears. Looking back one finds that everything that happened to him, was no accident, but the result of previous situations he had not been able to see. Now, looking back, he can see them.

And maybe he also experiences and feels that there is nothing random in life, but everything is somehow controlled by a higher intelligence, a higher plan.

Just like in olden clockwork, there are small and large wheels and a watchmaker who assembles and repairs the clock, for example, when a spring breaks.

Such an inner experience of the existence of a higher plan, in which our lives are embedded, broadens the horizons. We can internally step back and step out of the insignificance of our lives and we can experience being part of the Great.

We can experience that everything makes sense and the plan provides security, even though we ourselves have lost all fixed points.

It feels as if large warm palms of hands have just taken from the ground a small frightened bird, which has just fallen out of its nest, trembling from the fall and the loss of safety, frightened and confused. And those palms radiate warmth and a safe embrace.

The words of Jan Amos Comenius from his work Unum necessarium are also comforting:

The most important thing about this prudence is spiritual.

  1. Do not burden yourself with anything beyond that which is necessary for life; be satisfied with a few things that benefit you; praise God.
  2. If conveniences are lacking, be satisfied with only necessities.
  3. And if they are taken away, strive to save yourself.
  4. If you are not able to save yourself, abandon yourself, only taking care that you do not lose God. For he who has God is able to lack all other things, since he will forever possess his highest good and eternal life with God, and in God. And this, of all desires, is THE END.[1]

One gradually learns that he can eventually abandon what he has clung to so much.

He experiences that what he is leaving is no longer him.

And he sees that it was never really him.

He sees his social role mask crumbling and falling off.

He looks at the cracks in his own ideas about relationships with the closest ones.

And he also sees old withered illusions about himself, which roll off like yesterday’s lipstick on the lips, which want to tell the truth.

He stands just with himself alone for a moment, naked without anything.

He finds himself in a quiet moment and the well-known words “To be or not to be” are pulsating in his blood and they´re sighing in the marrow of the bones.

But just at the same moment, when the desire for truth, for pure life, breaks up in his chest, the wings of a reborn phoenix tremble inside the soul.

And the man stands still, with his empty hands,… and the phoenix soars up into the clouds, flapping its wings.

He is part of a higher plan.

He has a part in the divine fulness.

He is guided by divine wisdom.

He experiences the consolation of divine love.

And we wait in peace for him to arrive again, because something of his splendor and majesty shakes us inaudibly and joyfully.


[1] John Amos Comenius, Unum necessarium, The One Thing Necessary, Moravian Archives 2008, p. 88, https://moravianarchives.org/images/pdfs/Unum%20Necessarium.pdf

 

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Date: September 1, 2020
Author: Olga Rosenkranzová (Czech Republic)
Photo: Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

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