54. Who Are the Loving Parents?

I must explain to you the concept of “the loving parents,“ so that you would understand a very precise meaning of these words. You already know well that the Source of love is the Father. Therefore, it is possible to feel love and experience it with all its sweetness and tranquility, flight and freedom, provided that the Father is discovered within oneself. Only then do the parents stand firmly in all their life circumstances, loving each other in the strict sense of the word. In all other cases they are not the loving parents. They merely have their own interests and strive for satisfying them: some by coddling their children, others, by teaching them very strictly, and still others by intimidating them. And they always believe that they love their children. The same might also be said about the parents themselves in relation to each other. They keep asking each other: “Do you love me?“ Why would one ask about the very thing that one must be feeling every single moment? If this question comes up, it means there is no feeling of this sort. In this case there is only a distorted concept, an illusion, of loving.

Therefore, when I say, “the loving parents,” I speak about the truly loving parents, rather than about the self-deceiving parents who believe they are the loving parents. Simply there cannot be any father or mother who would be loving if the father or the mother does not reveal himself or herself in all his or her soul and heart to the Father, if he or she does not commune with Him with all his or her soul and heart. Only this type of communion with the Father truly enables the parents to become the loving parents.

Meanwhile, an otherwise instinctive love for their children, characteristic of parents, is the very same love from the Father, only on a level of instinct, that all the fairly large mammal families live on. But man is the only one to possess the gift of the personality provided by the Father. Therefore, he must raise the Father‘s love that he is receiving from the Source of personality, from an instinctive, and at the same time animal level, to a higher level - to the human level of personality. But it is actually impossible to do it without having found the Father within oneself. Moral principles, the norms of ethics, the postulates of a religion can help only partly; and only to those who still seek God, who are not satisfied with merely performing the church rituals.