From Pema Chodron’s The Places and Scare You: “There’s something beneath the solidity of anger that feels very raw and sore. Underneath the defensiveness is the brokenhearted, unshielded quality of bodhichitta (compassion or loving-kindness). Rather than feel this tenderness, however, we tend to close down and protect against the discomfort. That we close down is not a problem. In fact, to become aware of when we do so is an important part of the training. The first step in cultivating loving-kindness is to see when we are erecting barriers between ourselves and others. This compassionate recognition is essential. Unless we understand—in a nonjudgmental way—that we are hardening our hearts, there is no possibility of dissolving that armor. Without dissolving the armor, the loving-kindness of bodhichitta is always held back. We are always obstructing our innate capacity to love without an agenda.”
Roger
From Howard Thurmon’s Jesus and the Disenfranchised: “The awareness that a person is a child of the God of religion, who is at one and the same time the God of life, creates a profound faith in life that nothing can destroy. Nothing less than a great daring in the face of overwhelming odds can achieve the inner security in which fear cannot possibly survive. It is true that a person cannot be serene unless he or she possesses something about which to be serene. Here we reach the high-water mark of prophetic religion, and it is of the essence of the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. Of course God cares for the grass of the field, which lives a day and is no more, or the sparrow that falls unnoticed by the wayside. God also holds the stars in their appointed places, leaves his mark in every living thing. And he cares for me! To be assured of this becomes the answer to the threat of violence—yea, to violence itself. To the degree to which a person knows this, she or he is unconquerable from within and without.”
From Thich Nhat Hanh’s Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society: We want to call each suffering by its true name. Our sufferings do not exist separately; each is interlinked and interdependent with the others. For instance, the violence in an unhappy family can be linked to the stress of each person. Each parent is too stressed; they have no peace, no calm. Just one word that irritates the other can begin an escalation. So the suffering and the quarreling in a family don’t begin with unkindness, they begin with one person’s pain and stress. That stress is then watered by the stress of the other family members, and irritation and violence grow. So there is an interconnection, an interdependence of things. The suffering of one family is not only inside the family, but it’s linked with many other things.
