Anna knitted the above woollen mat to offer it for Christmas cheer to the department where I work. But when I saw it, it made a significant appeal to me of its larger symbolic significance.
This happened on a day when a teenage girl and her mother came to visit us for her learning related needs. In the conversation, the mother painfully referred to the longing of her daughter to have her 'father return to value her'! This was a moving experience for me as the mother shared the profound disappointment of her daughter in not being able to receive conversation and interactive times with her father. Her refrain is, 'why is not papa not wanting to talk to me'! The mother justified the father's behaviour by referring to him as a socially reticent person. But for a daughter, this would mean that she does not have the acceptance or approval of her father. It is a picture of absent father in her life.
It was with this grieving mood, I returned home to see this mat which Anna had woven.
The moment I saw it, it became a symbol to me of the millions of children of the world represented through each knot in the mat in the central area. Surrounding that is the red circle which represented to me of all those who are called to surround children in a protecting role.
In the case of this teenager, the protecting role of her father was negligible.
I felt equally moved that since the beginning of ASHIRVAD in 1983, Anna and I had an opportunity to be in a protecting role for children who were neuro-developmentally challenged. I remembered almost hundred former colleagues at Chennai, Nagpur, Vellore, Pondicherry and now in Kolenchery who have been partners with us in our journey to belong to the protecting role of children in need.
What kept this consciousness grow even more that evening, was the three photographs of the a flower in our garden.
The bud when it first appeared did not express fully its potential appearance, colour, fragrance or elegance.
Even in the half open stage, the fullness of the flower was left to imagination.
But when the flower was in full bloom, it transcended even our expectation or imagination.
Till the flower bloomed the plant needed to be taken care of!
At the fullness of time, the flower bloomed fully !
This is the mystery of childhood.
All children would need that protective environment to bloom at home, school, society, sports and athletic environments, art, music, dramatics, music, etc.
The woollen mat is now on the bulletin board facing me in the consultation room. The other picture facing me in the opposite wall is a painting gifted to me by a 12 year old child in 1991, who came a few times to ASHIRVAD Child Development Centre at Chennai for his medical needs. His view of Jesus of Nazareth in a protecting role of children is well portrayed in the painting.
All children are in search to find his or father, mother and his or her own child within. In the psycho-development process designed in Transactional Analysis, this personal discovery of father, mother and child within is an essential inward journey through which we become the intimate companions to our true self, the soul within.
For that teenage girl that I referred to earlier, there is a dual journey- discovering her physical father and returning to him and finding the father within her who shall become a companion to her soul!
In both these journeys most of us make sometime or other, as adults, teenagers, or children, there is a need of a protective environment.
In our inward journey, we shall meet with the darkness and shadows in our lives along with the true self and the authentic 'me'! These discoveries are associated with ups and down emotionally and existentially.
It is for this reason, all of us need a protective covering of our soul and existence so that we are always discovering ourselves to grow into our fullness in a safe emotional environment.
This is why we are to be guardians of the 'souls' of others and not just friends or acquaintances!
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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