When anyone arouses my anger, I will immediately pray for them and regain my peace of soul.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining inner peace and responding to anger with compassion and prayer.
Mother Angelica highlights a powerful strategy for managing anger: instead of reacting negatively, she suggests choosing to pray for those who provoke this emotion. By doing so, one can restore their own tranquility and foster a more compassionate response, ultimately leading to personal peace and emotional resilience amidst conflict.
In practice
During a team meeting after a heated discussion, I reminded everyone that when we feel angry, we should take a moment to pray for each other, as Mother Angelica suggested.
I am not like a pebble on the beach - a grain of sand on the seashore or just one of millions of human beings past, present and future. No, I am a unique human being loved by God as if I were an only child - the only fruit of his creative powers.
I must not permit the evil capabilities of human nature to sour my faith in the tremendous good that is possible despite the frailty of that nature.
The sinner who suddenly realizes God's love for him and then looks at his rejection of that love feels a loss similar to the death of a loved one. A deep void is created in the soul and a loneliness akin to the agony of death.
Our memories are our own, and we cannot blame anything or anyone in the past for any pain dwelling there. If we open the door to them or keep hashing over past incidents in our minds, we have only ourselves to blame.
Man can and does rationalize his sins. He finds reasons for all his weakness, invents excuses that first calm and then deaden his conscience. He blames God, society, education, and environment for his wrong doing.
Love has been defined, analyzed, explained and excused. It has been the cause of wars, feuds, heroism, martyrdom, inordinate passion, and beautiful friendships. It pulls two people of opposite temperaments together into a married state and permits them to live happily. It makes friends understand each other without the necessity of words.
One must know not just how to accept a gift, but with what grace to share it.
The passions are the only orators which always persuade.
What you call flaws are really just scars and wounds accumulated over a lifetime.
Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
For young women, I would say don't worry so much about your weight. Girls spend way too much time thinking about that, and there are better things. For young men, and women, too, what makes you different or weird-that's your strength. Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up. I used to hate my nose. Now I don't. It's OK.
The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive.
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