An excerpt from Laurence Freeman OSB, The Fear of Death, THE SELFLESS SELF (London: Darton, Longman, Todd, 1989), pp. 131.
[A]nger, and the fear that it springs from, is everything that meditation is not. The deepest anger comes from our deepest fear of death. But it comes from all sorts of secondary causes too, from everything that makes up our psychological history. We need to be aware when we meditate, and as we cleanse ourselves of anger, that it is not our immediate concern to trace where it comes from. All that is really important is that we are shedding it. . . What is important is that the love active in the faith of the mantra casts out anger from the heart. [. . . .]
As we say the mantra we are learning to be rooted in the universal Spirit, the Spirit that Christ has breathed into us, the Spirit by which Christ lives in us. We begin to meditate with a great advantage if we start with a developed faith because we begin by being able to understand that anger is cast out by the power of love . . . Christ in the power of the Spirit can cast out anger because he is the one who has overcome the primal fear of death and who is now empowered to free us from that fear. . . .[In the words of 1 John 4:16], God is love; he who dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him.
After meditation: two poems from LOVE POEMS FROM GOD: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, tr. Daniel Ladinsky (New York: Penguin Compass, 2002), Visiting Holy Shrines by Kabir, p. 220 and Close to God, Thomas Aquinas, p. 125.
VISITING HOLY SHRINES
If you circumambulated every holy shrine in the world
ten times,
it would not get you to heaven
as quick
as controlling your
anger.
CLOSE TO GOD
One may never have heard of the sacred word Christ
but be closer to God
than a priest or
nun.
