The fruit in water
Parables and Illustrations for Values Education |
According to a beautiful story from the island of Zanzibar, a woman approached a spring: a small mirror, trembling and Crystal, among the trees of the forest. When I went to immerse the jug in water he discovered therein an appetising pink fruit that moistened her mouth desires. It lengthened the arm to take it, but the fruit disappeared into slings that formed in water, and only returned when the woman pulled the arm and the water calmed again.
The same thing happened three times that the woman tried to catch him. Then the woman began to take water with the idea of exhausting the spring and grab the fruit that she believed in the background. He worked busily and when he drew almost all the water, the fruit had disappeared.
Disillusioned and frustrated by their futile effort, was about to leave his home, when he heard that I said a bird: 'why you look for below? The fruit is back up.
The woman looked up and saw hanging from a branch on the spring, the beautiful fruit of cravings, which had only seen the reflection.
We confuse happiness with its reflex grouper and seek it busily down, in material things, without the courage to pick you up, at the top, above advertisements, fashions and promises. We urgently need an education that we open to transcendence, that we pick up from the mere illusion of fullness. An education that will make us face the mystery. It makes possible the encounter with that your unknown, which is presence, concrete face on each brother. The world has become a supermarket that offers us to satisfy every whim. For this reason, also abounds religion a la carte, according to the taste of the consumer. In the bazaar of beliefs is alike: horoscopes, tarot, astrology, sects, gurus, Pentecostalism, self-help books. We have thus the proliferation of a religiosity made to our measurement, very comfortable, no neighbor, with the only market God, which every day gives us new idols to catch our poor hearts in the illusion of reality. Has written masterfully Frei Betto, «every human being as a pilgrim of the absolute. Except for God, nothing satisfies us. And as God lives in the depth of the love, we groping in search of illusory consolations, incurring the ambition that makes us confuse things.