Something unexpected

(…) giving up drinking or taking up meditation. Both are difficult; both require strength, more strength than we have just in our own ego resources. So we have to open to a Higher Power and we have to open to community; we have to open to others. You call it ‘fellowship’; in the meditation world I would call it ‘community’. Meditation seems to me to be in that sense a grace. Something that is a gift, something that is genuinely free, it doesn’t cost anything and there is no bargaining about meditation. To find meditation in one’s life is a grace. It’s something unexpected, and finding in an unexpected moment, in an unexpected way, something that changes the world for you. It changes patterns that we – for some reason or another, because of our own mistakes or because of bad luck or a combination of the two – have gotten into; it breaks those patterns.

Grace at Work by Laurence Freeman OSB