Heaven knows terrible things happen to people in this world.  The good die young, and the wicked prosper, and in any one town, anywhere, there is grief enough to freeze the blood.

But from deep within whatever the hidden spring is that life wells up from, there wells up into our lives, even at their darkest and maybe especially then, a power to heal, to breathe new life into us.

And in this regard, I think, every man is a mystic because every man at one time or another experiences in the thick of his joy or his pain the power out of the depths of his life to bless him.

I do not believe that it matters greatly what name you call this power – the spirit of God is only one of its names – but what I think does matter, vastly, is that we open ourselves to receive it; that we address it and let ourselves be addressed by it; that we move in the direction that it seeks to move us, the direction of fuller communion with itself and with one another.

Howard Thurman