The human mind can be very reactive. We don’t get what we want and we rage, complain, or attack whatever we can blame for the disappointment. It is astonishing how cruel and irrational we can be even over relatively minor things, when things don’t go our way. Pain and sadness usually separate and isolate us. Sometimes they even sever us from the very hand that stretches out offering to save us by connecting us again to a source of compassion and healing. To another. Even in the midst of loss and confusion and fear, we can learn to choose another way. Rather than the reaction of anger there is the response of acceptance. Simply accepting what is. In that openness to truth—the truth is what is—the option for violence dissolves. We see with a higher reason that violence is a terrible lack of imagination. When we respond to events in this way we leave the past behind and a bright light from behind us illuminates the road ahead.
— from the book Sensing God: Learning to Meditate during Lent by Laurence Freeman, OSB
