So yesterday, my little Nephew, Tomas, was christened in the Igreja do Seixal. It was a traditional Catholic ceremony where the baby was "entered in God's world" and the Parents, Godmother and Godfather promised to guide Tomas in the name of the God throughout their life.
The Priest conducting the ceremony mentioned a couple of times the role of the Parents and the Godparents in instilling the needed values in Tomas life to put him in good stead throughout his life. All of those that know me, know my thoughts on Religion and God, so I will not bother with you that today, but those comments made me think about making this post and tell you about something that happened in my life much earlier on.
When we are born we are pretty much a "blank canvas" and the Values that most of us hold today, do indeed stem from our Parents and close relatives of the family. These most of the time were "forced" on us by those older because of the things that they believed and valued.
These values can be cultural, the country where you born and region of the World, religious, whether your family and close friends were indeed religious or not, and the own family views on the World outside. Ultimately, you as you grow older adopt new values, although traditionally most of these align themselves with the ones given to you by your Elders.
Majority of these values put in good stead towards your future life, unfortunately sometimes these values can be detrimental to you, this is where you as an adult can do something about it and adopt new more powerful values to help you in your life, I shall let you know in a different post how you can change or adopt new values that you deem necessary to "succeed" in life, and to make your life all that you want it to be.
This leads me to my own personal story. To cut the long story short when I was born my parents didn't Baptized me due to turmoil the country was going to at the time (I was born just before the 1974 revolution) and decided to wait a bit longer. Eventually my Sister was born and they thought when she was at a age to decide they ask us both if we wanted to. So when she was about 7 or 8 asked us both if we wanted to.
Because of our age the Church had told my parents that we both had to attend "induction classes" to be able to learn all the Church principles so that we could be baptized. I asked when these classes were and they happened to be on Saturday afternoons. Now Saturday afternoons I used to play football with all my friends pretty much all of the afternoon.
So for me the decision was simple I preferred to spend time with my friends doing something I loved rather than spend the afternoon learning about something that, due to influence of my Maternal Grandfather and my own Father, I wasn't keen on. At the time my values dictated that spending time with my friends was more important and added much higher value to me than going to "Church induction classes". For my sister, she wanted to go and hence one of the reasons that still today she is a Church goer and I am not.
I had never thought before on how much that decision of mine was based on my Values and Beliefs, but as pretty much every decision you, I and everyone makes in their lifes they are based on our Values and Beliefs, apart from when we need to meet our Human Needs, where we can ultimately break our values to meet our Needs (I will talk about Needs another time).
Going back to the Christening, after the ceremony we all went to have a meal with plenty of food and drink and a lot of good camraderie and fun. It was a fantastic time spent with pretty much all of my family which I always love! Again, Values and Needs :-).
That is all for today, catch you all later.
Hope you all have a fantastic day meeting your Values and Needs.
Paulo
4 years ago
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