The relational presence !

From being buds to become flowers, the desert rose plant needed about three weeks of time.  There is more still to look forward to in the plant!

This is a journey of fullness of presence !

All of us are growing into our fullness ! 

While being with a family yesterday Anna and I  noticed the becoming process of their children. The children receive instruction, clarification and explanation which upbuild their formative and developing process! 

The buds shall become flowers !

This becoming process is endowed in the plant life. A plant shall give forth a bud in due time and a bud shall become a flower, all being well in a protective and enabling environment. 

The becoming process is facilitated by multiple factors in the soil and atmosphere. 

Each of us is becoming a person !

In a conversation with a friend whom I knew as student is now overseeing the affairs of two large organisations. His becoming process from being a student to be in the leading role of two organisations during the last thirty years, has been a journey of transitions and transformation. His becoming process was simultaneous with an enabling process. His enabling skills have turned one organisation into a leadership role in health care in the last fifteen years! Now his initiatives to give a new momentum and purpose to another organisation, is already bringing changes and transitions in a favourable way.  

I feel encouraged by the message of transitional presence he advocates  through his being  and doing !

A plant to bud, flower and seed !

Life is for flowering and bearing fruit! 

That is the effect of purposeful presence !

The transitional presence and purposeful presence when flavoured with contemplative presence, the result is relational presence. 

Our relational presence at home, work place, and net work of engagements can become the  means of  healing presence !

"Make me a channel of Your peace 

Where there's despair in life let me bring hope

Where there is darkness, only light

And where there is sadness, ever joy

Make me a channel of Your peace

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

In giving to all men that we receive

And in dying that we are born to eternal life"

This prayer of St Francis of Assisi comes to my mind as our vocation in a world of distress and turmoil. 

When the 'Board  of peace' is  being formed for Gaza, under the leadership of one country, whose current president self advocates to be the permanent leader of the group, I feel even more disturbed by the conditionalities of peace. The strange thing about the board of peace is the way it is structured. Nations invited to be its member have to buy the right to be a member of that group by donating millions of dollars.as a requirement by force.  Who should have been initiating this peace process according to the existing international conventions? The UNO ! Here is now a sinister move to establish a parallel organisation to gradually reduce the role of the UNO. The country that is leading this parallel initiative has already exited from all the initiatives and subsidiary organisations of the UNO. 

The irony is that that the  Palestinian government has not been invited to be member of this Board of peace! This is the imposing presence rather than a democratic presence that the world was used to after the second world war conciliation process.  There is a shift of ethos to unilateralism from  bilateralism or multilateralism!

It is in this setting that we exist globally, because of which the  fullness of presence to be neighbour friendly, is even more critical to bring healing presence !

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)