spirituality cafe.

QUOTE: "Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart." (Desert Father Abba Poeman the Shepherd, fourth century)

IN THIS SEASON In honor of Black History Month, words of wisdom from George Washington Carver: "How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these." (http:// www.dailycelebrations.com)

LIVING. "Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. We leave our homes for work, acting and even believing that we will reach our destinations with no unusual event startling us out of our set expectations. The truth is we know nothing, not where our cars will fail or when buses will stall, whether our places of employment will be there when we arrive, or whether, in fact, we ourselves will arrive whole and alive at the end of our journeys.

"Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed. Life seems to love the liver of it." (Maya Angelou in Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Random House)

WITH LOVE. "I turn my little omelet in the frying pan for the love of God. When it is done, if I have nothing to do, I bow down to the ground and adore God from whom has come the grace to make it. Then I straighten up, more contented than a king. When there is nothing more that I can do, it is enough to pick up a straw from the floor for the love of God.

"People look for methods for learning to love God. They desire to arrive by I don't know how many different practices.

"Is it not much shorter and more direct to do everything for the love of God, to use all the tasks of one's situation, to give testimony of it, and to maintain His presence within us by this communication of the heart with Him? He has no fancy ways for this. One has only to go plainly and simply to Him." (Brother Lawrence, Carmelite lay brother, 1614-1691. From Ordinary Graces: Christian Teachings on the Interior Life; Bell Tower, 2000)

IN PRACTICE. "A kind and ethical attorney swears he's not spiritual because he doesn't pray. Then he told me he loves country music. Immediately, he lit up and I got it: For him, country music is like a taproot. It gets him out of his head and into his body and emotions. To [him], listening to country music is a vital practice, the effects of which run deep. When you're in tune with your spiritual taproot, you can draw on reserve strength." (Pat McHenry Sullivan, "Practical Spirituality" at http://www.myprimetime.com)

STEADFASTNESS. "When I was a child my mother cut cedar boughs in the deep of winter and brought them into the house. She did it, she said, because they stayed green when everything else withered. How they manage this, she told me, is a secret we spend our whole lives learning.... Moses, Teresa, Clare, Mechthild, Catherine, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Sojourner Truth, Archbishop Desmond Tutu--they seem to possess the secret of winter foliage, the secret that keeps leaves steadfast in the bitterest season. They were, I suspect, distilled down again and again to the undying ground of God that underlies all being, the place `where all the ladders start,' as Yeats put it. Perhaps the knowing they tapped there burst upward like a fountain of resolve in their chests, a source they drank from when the world went dry." (Sue Monk Kidd, "The Secret of Winter Foliage," in the November/December 2000 issue of Weavings)