"Malice will disappear like a cloud that evaporates when you eliminate the power of the wicked."

--Catherine of Sena

This was sent to the Uplift list today. Why not join us?

I read this quote today, and it describes so well my reaction to September 11. From the Babylonian Talmud:

"The deeper the sadness, less [speaks] the tongue."

and I'm translating from the Portuguese, "If you stay calm, you'll have the advantage over your enemy."

If you have an enemy. ;-)

"It matters crucially how, how much, and what we eat, how we work and play and sleep and spend money, even how we defecate or vomit -- not that these details are matters for accusation or breast-beating guilt, but that they are precious indications of the inner work we have yet to do. From them we learn what is necessary in terms of relaxing into life and trusting it, of surrending our fears and our obsessions. They are the pigment with which the canvas of our life is painted, and what matters is how we make them into a whole, recognize the essential relation of one to another. Contemplation now seems to me to be about that whole picture, and our labours at prayer, or meditation, or rhythm, or release from tensions [are] only of value in so far as they lead us towards making our life a working whole." --Monica Furlong, Contemplating Now, "Authors preface" (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 1983).

This culled from a quotes list, citing George Macdonald (1824-1905).

"When I trouble myself over a trifle, even a trifle confessed -- the loss of some little article, say -- spurring my memory, and hunting the house, not from immediate need, but from dislike of loss; when a book has been borrowed of me and is not returned, and I have forgotten the borrower; and fret over the missing volume, . . . is it not time that I lost a few things, when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is the mercy of God: it comes to teach us to let them go. Or have I forgotten a thought that came to me, which seemed of the truth? I keep trying and trying to call it back, feeling a poor man until that thought be recovered -- to be far more lost, perhaps, in a notebook into which I shall never look again to find it! I forget that it is live things that God cares about."