Mei Kaun hun?

~ Fr. Thomas Kunnunkal, Chairman, Jesus & Mary College, Founding Chairman, NIOS – the largest open school in the world, Ex Chairman, CBSE.

         Meaninglessness is affecting the lives of many. Fortunately, we have Reverend Father Thomas Kunnunkal to share some words of wisdom to make our journey of self discovery a bit easier. India’s quest for thousands of years was to seek answers to the life question: Mei Kaun hun? Let us now try to learn a little from our beloved Rev. Father and make our life better and more meaningful.

INVITATIONS FROM LIFE TO LIVE IT FULLY

Choose better Patterns of Response to life

• To live fully your human life, you need to be bipolar, by discovering and connecting with both your outer and your inner world. Then only you will experience the magic of life.
• Love, the bedrock of life, needs your nurture. Without it, it will cool down to a chill. This is true of human love and is equally true of divine love. Write a loving personal letter to another from time to time to keep love warm in your heart and don’t wait for the chill to set in and freeze it. You can also write to God and to your parents or spouse, whether they are still alive or have died. You will experience much joy.
• Life comes to you one day at a time. So, today is the whole of your life. Live in the Now of life – neither in the past that is no more present now nor in the future that is yet to be.
• The industrial mindset, with its focus on things, is enslaving every sector of our life. We tend to deal with even persons as things, causing much pain to them.
• Joy is an attitude that you can bring to every aspect of your life.
• You have not begun to live until you have really become a gift.
• Appreciation is the miracle balm and a valued gift. Give it freely, generously and often.
• See your life as God’s unconditional gift to you. But sin-centredness and fear of punishment often characterize the spirituality of many, which is deeply at odds with the spirituality that Jesus brought.
• To see myself and others as real miracles of God’s creation and as partners in a joint venture with God to build His new world is a sure sign that the Kingdom of God has taken root in you.
• Merely to follow the footsteps of the past and become a slave to tradition may indeed be comforting but the call from life is to respond to it in the current conditions of life. Authentic spirituality always responds to current contexts.
• We all pick up several outer scars on our body from illnesses and accidents. We pick up several more inner scars from the many wounds that life has inflicted in the past, whose memory continues to burn into our hearts. But an effective balm to remove this pain is to act on the insight that no one can hurt me for what has happened in the past unless I give myself permission today.
• You will know no peace until you exercise gentleness.
• Faith is always more than certainty. Believe and discover the wonder of a faith-filled life.
• If you do not pray and connect with God, the tree of life within you will slowly wither and die. The tragedy of life is that so many ‘die’ so many times before they finally die.
• Faith, a gift from God, is a new way of seeing God, you, others and all reality and choosing to undertake a faith-based life journey, which often will invite you to walk on the less travelled pathways. On the other hand, Religion, which is man-made, prefers to remain on the well-travelled and safer broad roads of life and relies heavily on institutional and ritual supports. The result? You miss the many wonders and mysteries of life.
• Accept gratefully the many gifts that God has given you and share them with others in the same generous way. You received much without charge from life and so give at least some of it without charge.
• The spiritual way of living calls you to forgive yourself, forgive others and forgive the world, as God does.
• Everything that happens in your life and in the world around (yes, absolutely everything) is part of the mystery of God’s design and purpose for you and for the world. When you deeply believe this, it will make a dramatic difference to your life and will also become a very effective way to deal with the small and the bigger pains of your life. This pill really works!
• The only purpose of power is empowerment. Rollo May says that every act of power is either a) Exploitative or  b) Competitive or c) Manipulative or d) Integrative and Nurturing. The first three are used to destroy, using power to control, to defeat others and thus to hurt or destroy them. In so doing, you also destroy yourself. Instead, use power to construct, to connect, to nurture, to unite, to foster growth and communion.
• The humanization of the human race and its divinization, is the single point agenda of Jesus, namely to build a kingdom world on earth. This is also our one common and fundamental mission and God invites all of us to partner in it. Contribute to build that wonder world in place of the present brutalizing, vulgarizing, violent and corrupting world.
• Connecting is the healing action for our broken world. Imitate the loving, caring, sharing, giving, accepting, appreciating, forgiving and parenting God.
• Quantum Physics now corroborates the spiritual vision that we and the whole world are inextricably connected! So, discover and connect and then experience life’s many miracles.
• As your Map of life goes out of date, you need to make a paradigm shift to discover the More of life.