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Healthy Growth is Imperceptible The growth of our society is like the growth of our person. Growth, natural growth, is something that is subtle; the growth of a cancer is different. Natural growth is day by day, difficult to perceive, difficult to see because it happens a little bit at a time, but over a long time it becomes big. This is true for everything, natural and supernatural. You see a child. Everyday it looks like he is the same but when you compare a picture of the child from a year ago with the child as he looks now, you see a tremendous change. You see the picture of the child from when he is born and then 10 years later, there is an enormous difference. You can see the picture of a person when he is 20 years old and when he is 65 – the difference is unbelievable. Many times, it doesn’t even look like the same person. In my parents’ house, they had an album of pictures of the family, and i used to like to look at the pictures of my grandfather when he was a young man. I want to brag a little bit about my family. He was a very good looking young man, with a beard like many men have a beard today. When he was young it was the style. I think practically every man had a beard in his wedding picture. Then see this picture 50 years later. Is this the same person? It is. It doesn’t look like it. You can put both pictures together and they look like a young man and an old man. Unbelievable. We have such a tendency in our subconscious to believe that certain people were always old, don’t we? The same thing happens in the spiritual life in you. When you follow a normal spiritual life, you just grow a little bit at a time. It is the same thing emotionally, psychologically. It is imperceptible. You don’t see it. Well, the same thing happens to our society. We see everything continuing everyday. It looks the same. Sometimes we can indulge in negative thinking: things are not progressing. But they are progressing. You know what really called my attention to this? I read a front-page article of an issue of the newsletter, in which Fr. Vota gives a report of his trip abroad. And reading about the things they had done, i thought, “It’s really different, you know. Two years ago, a year ago, i was doing all those things by myself and i couldn’t do as much because i was only one person. And now, they are going to so many places and strengthening religious groups and creating new ones.” Marvelous, right? Well they just came back from another trip. It’s growing. The site is growing. It’s immense. There’s no human growth without spiritual growth. And when there is, it is destructive. It is not truly human growth without divine growth. Growth might occur in one area or another but it’s almost like a monster. It’s like a person who has long legs and a small body. They don’t look good. They look strange. We must grow. That is the emphasis we place and it is true. We must grow. We must progress. That’s life. |