Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Radical acceptance

The following passage from After the Fall is truly profound. If each of us would do this there would be so much greater happiness and alleviation of suffering in the world:

I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible . . . but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms.

-- Arthur Miller, from After the Fall

Utter acceptance of who and what we are and what we have experienced is the only way forward on the path to enlightenment - of that I'm very certain.

(I am indebted to Fr. Clyde Glandon for calling the above quotation to my attention.)

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous3:29 PM

    Thanks for your blog, which I just stumbled across recently somehow. I loved this quote. It made me look up Arthur Miller on Wikipedia, and from there I found a link to an article from Vanity Fair magazine about Arthur Miller and his son who has Down's Syndrome. The article also contains this quote. It seems that this tragic story is about a part of Arthur Miller's own life that he was unable to take into his own arms, although he wrote "After the Fall" before this son was born. Just thought you might be interested.

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