Celebrating the Wisdom of Women

I have come to see over the years that the greatest obstacle to prayer is fear. We still seem to think that God is watching us. But this is the God who calls to us in utter love, "Come...come into greater life, come into fuller wholeness." It is hard for us to hear the good news.... God is happy with us, God is pleased with us, God is delighted with us. If we could really believe this, would we not do anything for God, not out of submission or fear but in love? If we could really believe that ours is a God who says "I call you not servants but friends"--how free we would be!

MARGARET FARLEY

Sin strikes me as...not the rather fiddling obsession with envy and anger and small untruths that we often make of it, but something much more terrible--a determined, obstinate choice of unreality and obsession which has become a whole life style.

MONICA FURLONG

All our travail and all our woe are naught but the failing of love on our part.

JULIAN OF NORWICH

One might lay it down as a postulate that all conceptions of God which are incompatible with a movement of pure charity are false. All other conceptions of God, in varying degree, are true.

SIMONE WEIL

If stock exchanges buy and sell around the world, surely that same technology can be used to shift food around as needed.

ANTONIA FRASER

If you ask me what is this pattern which I recognize as the true law of my nature, I can only suggest it is the pattern of the creative mind--an eternal Idea, manifested in material form by an unresting Energy, with an outpouring of Power that at once inspires, judges and communicates the work; all three being one and the same in the work. And this, I observe, is the pattern laid down by theologians as the pattern of the being of God.

If all this is true, then the mind of the maker and the Mind of the Maker are formed on the same pattern and all their works are made in their own image.

DOROTHY L. SAYERS

Upon hearing a fellow worshiper praying that Allah might open wide the door of the spirit and allow him to enter, Rabi'a exclaimed, `O foolish one--who said the door was shut?"

RABI 'A (8th century; sometimes called `the Muslim St. Teresa')

All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet.

EDITH HAMILTON

History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

MAYA ANGELOU

I would like to be a fool. I would like to say hello when I am leaving, good-bye when I am coming. In this manner, I would remember, from the beginning, the potential of loss, and so might learn to treasure before losing: as I bid farewell, I would remember the potential for return, all things circling as they do, into something like fullness, small moments of completion...
I would like to be a fool, to keep the unnameable word in my heart, to speak in silence, in silence to speak, to move in stillness, to be still in movement, to end at the beginning, to begin at the end.
I would like to be a fool. I would like to be a fool. I would like to be a fool.

BK LOREN

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict.

DOROTHY THOMPSON

To understand the world beyond the narrow self...it is necessary to expose that self to the unmapped and uncontrolled, to be touched by it and transfigured.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

When we see God in each other, we will be able to live together in peace.

MOTHER TERESA

I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears, my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light...has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret to seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

ANNIE DILLARD

Of all that God has shown me, I can speak just the smallest word, no more than a honeybee takes on her foot from an overflowing jar.

MECTHILDE OF MAGDEBURG

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all these things, I have found them to be reason enough and--I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations

LORRAINE HANSBERRY

A good soldier does not fear battle. And haven't I said I would die fighting?

THERESE OF LISIEUX

The words I first used, perfection, purity and the like, seem to me now mere lies in the presence of truth. Nor can I any longer say, `my God, my all.' Everything is mine for all that is God's seems to be wholly mine. I am mute and lost in God.

CATHERINE OF GENOA

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead....We are in it now.

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

Do not come to me when something terrible has happened saying `It's God's will.' No! Death, disease, murder may be man's error but never God's will. In the face of suffering and tragedy, we have faith that somehow, ultimately, in God's time all wounds will be healed

MADELEINE L'ENGLE

I don't just get up in the morning and start making potteries. First I go and talk to Grandma clay...to make good potteries you have to do it the right way, the old way, and you have to have a special happy feeling inside.

HELEN CORDERO
Native American potter

To the crowd gathered around the tomb, Jesus says, "Unbind him. Let him go free"...the command of Jesus comes to us... Unbind them. Unbind all your brothers and sisters. Let them go free. This your brother is bound, this your sister is unfree. Come and unwind the wrappings which keep them from wholeness and freedom and new life.... Do be there when resurrection happens. God needs you to unbind the strips that keep another from walking and dancing free.

ANN ABERNATHY