I've walked the battlefield of Gettysburg. It was a transforming moment when, in an awesomely vivid way, I realized the enormous cost of violence. It took little imagination to envision the thousands of men dropping one after another into those beautiful Pennsylvania fields. Bodies mounted atop bodies, blood running like rivers and for what? Emancipation of black women and men? States' rights? Those battles are still being fought and the victories seem to come more often in acts of non-violence than violent confrontation.

I wonder how many of us live under the control of vengeance and violence. How many of us think we are the manager of our destiny but too often give in to base feelings of anger and revenge?

Think of the many times a day that temptation arises. You are cut off in traffic and a little light goes off in the back of your brain. You seethe and seek to retaliate. Your blood pressure rises. Your heart beats faster. This is not what the doctor recommends when he says give your heart some exercise! Wouldn't it be wonderful if such disruptions never occurred? It can happen, of course. It is entirely up to us. We decide if violence and anger will control us or peace and love. No one has to describe the benefits of living a life of peace over one of war. It's the same on the battlefields of the world and in the battlefield of our own soul. Jesus said the Kingdom of God is all around us. It's just that we can't get in if we're caught in that vicious cycle of violence.

Thomas Merton wrote once of a time when he was standing on a corner in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, when suddenly he was overwhelmed by a sense of loving everyone he saw. Every man and woman, boy and girl in his sight was seen as brother or sister, parent or child. For a moment he entered into the kingdom and it transformed him.

Such an experience is available to all of us. There is a wonderful Buddhist exercise that has us simply viewing every person we see as an object of love. That little boy who is making all the racket in the theater is someone's precious child or the woman who so irritates you at the church meetings is loved and esteemed by her husband and friends. The pastor who drives you crazy with his wild ideas is treasured by his family and maybe a few others...and so it goes.

Try this exercise sometime this week. Sit somewhere and just enter into this little holy experience and see where it leads you. I think it will lead you into the Kingdom of God.