spirituality cafe.

MEDITATION:

   You do not have to be good.
   You do not have to walk on your knees
   for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
   You only have to let the soft animal of your body
   love what it loves.
   Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
   Meanwhile the world goes on.
   Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
   are moving across the landscapes,
   over the prairies and the deep trees,
   the mountains and the rivers.
   Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
   are heading home again.
   Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
   the world offers itself to your imagination,
   calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
   over and over announcing your place
   in the family of things.

("Wild Geese" from Dream Work by Mary Oliver, published by Atlantic Monthly Press, [C] Mary Oliver)

QUOTE: "My joy lies in the certainty that life will prevail over death: new buds will burst, new leaves, new fruit." (Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, 1909-1999)

CRASH TEST: "On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews." (Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk; Harper & Row)

"BEAUTY is that which opens our eyes to the majesty of God and moves us to desire him. Worship is not just an intellectual grasping of truths but a process of falling in love. Beauty opens us to adoration, and a craving for God begins to take root. Without this, our love for him may be polite, respectful, and theologically accurate, but it lacks the headlong abandonment that should characterize a relationship between love and beloved." (Frederica Mathewes-Green in At the Corner of East and Now; Tarcher-Putnam)

IN THIS SEASON

For the Easter Triduum comes this classic quote from German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by Nazis in the Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945: "Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the Cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." (The Cost of Discipleship)

IN PRACTICE "Too much noise and too little silence combine to desensitize us in many ways. But when we practice becoming more aware of the spiritual, we engage with the world around us even in simple, seemingly inconsequential ways. The Buddhist tradition teaches us that it is important to cultivate loving-kindness. To do this, we change how we treat people, animals, and all things. We direct love and compassion their way. This means handling objects gently, avoiding loud speech, and refraining from roughness of all kinds." When Catholic monk Thomas Merton asked Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh "what he had learned in his first year at the monastery, Nhat Hanh replied: `How to open and close doors quietly.'" (From Praying with Our Hands: 21 Practices of Embodied Prayer from the World's Spiritual Traditions, by Jon M. Sweeney with photography by Jennifer J. Wilson; Skylight Paths Publishing, 2000)