spirituality cafe.

ON WILD FREEDOM: "The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn't, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl--but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz." (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; HarperPerennial Library, 1998)

SCRIPTURE NOTE

An article in National Geographic several years ago provided a penetrating picture of Psalm 91:4, "He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge ..." After a forest fire in Yellow-stone National Park, "forest rangers began their trek up a mountain to assess the inferno's damage. One ranger found a bird literally petrified in ashes, perched statuesquely on the ground at the base of a tree. Somewhat sickened by the eerie sight, he knocked over the bird with a stick. When he struck it, three tiny chicks scurried from under their dead mother's wings. The loving mother, keenly aware of impending disaster, had carried her offspring to the base of the tree and had gathered them under her wings, instinctively knowing that the toxic smoke would rise. She could have flown to safety but refused." (Jim Forest, via correspondence)

IN THIS SEASON

"The more holy someone is, the more cordial should they be with others. Although you may be pained because their conversation is not what you would wish, never keep aloof" (The Way of Perfection). So says Saint Teresa of Avila, whose feast day is October 15. Visit the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at www.ccel.org/t/ teresa, where her complete writings can be printed from your own computer.

QUOTE: "Quaker teacher Douglass Steere was fond of saying that the ancient human question `Who am I?' leads inevitably to the equally important question `Whose am I?'" (Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak; Jossey-Bass, 2000)

RECOMMENDED:

"Marrow of Flame: Poems of the Spiritual ]ourney, by Dorothy Walters (Hohm Press, 2000). I know I am reading the work of a mystic. The beauty of her soul illuminates her work. I return again and again to verses and never fail to be inspired." (Joyce Rupp, author of Out of the Ordinary and Praying Our Goodbyes)

IN PRACTICE "There's a spiritual practice of `seeing Jesus' in the smelliest, most obscene homeless person you see on the bus, in the most frustrating ideological enemy you encounter in your work. But it's never really `clicked' for me. Then it hit me. The trick is to imagine everyone, even the most difficult, as the small child they once were. It's disarming to be where mercy meets innocence--to realize in your bones that people can become bent and broken over the years through no particular fault of their own, to recognize that all children desperately deserve to be loved even when they are not. I have to think that God must look upon us all in the same way." (Mary Lynn Hendrickson)