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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f170cac | The younger son's return takes place in the very moment that he reclaims his sonship, even though he has lost all the dignity that belongs to it. In fact, it was the loss of everything that brought him to the bottom line of his identity. He hit the bedrock of his sonship. In retrospect, it seems that the prodigal had to lose everything to come into touch with the ground of his being. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 7cad537 | God has created you and me with a heart that only God's love can satisfy. And every other love will be partial, will be real, but limited, will be painful. And if we are willing to let the pain prune us, to give us a deeper sense of our belovedness, then we can be as free as Jesus and walk on this world and proclaim God's first love, wherever we go.2 | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 9c70200 | The parable that Rembrandt painted might well be called "The Parable of the Lost Sons." Not only did the younger son, who left home to look for freedom and happiness in a distant country, get lost, but the one who stayed home also became a lost man. Exteriorly he did all the things a good son is supposed to do, but, interiorly, he wandered away from his father. He did his duty, worked hard every day, and fulfilled all his obligations but be.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| fa0a4a4 | Since my visit to the Hermitage, I had become more aware of the four figures, two women and two men, who stood around the luminous space where the father welcomed his returning son. Their way of looking leaves you wondering how they think or feel about what they are watching. These bystanders, or observers, allow for all sorts of interpretations. As I reflect on my own journey, I become more and more aware of how long I have played the role.. | observer outsider prodigal-son rembrandt | Henri J.M. Nouwen | |
| b3e1cce | You feel overwhelmed by distractions, fantasies, the disturbing desire to throw yourself into the world of pleasure. But you know already that you will not find there an answer to your deepest question. Nor does the answer lie in rehashing old events, or in guilt or shame. All of that makes you dissipate yourself and leave the rock on which your house is built. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 60125da | Becoming a child is living toward a second innocence: not the innocence of the newborn infant, but the innocence that is reached through conscious choices. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 6f4802e | Many consumerist economies stay afloat by manipulating the low self-esteem of their consumers and by creating spiritual expectations through material means. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 8d6e4ee | now I realize that the real sin is to deny God's first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 452ca49 | God rejoices when one repentant sinner returns. Statistically that is not very interesting. But for God, numbers never seem to matter. Who knows whether the world is kept from destruction because of one, two, or three people who have continued to pray when the rest of humanity has lost hope and dissipated itself? From God's perspective, one hidden act of repentance, one little gesture of selfless love, one moment of true forgiveness is all .. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 299c491 | Ignorance makes us look for acceptance where it cannot be expected, and makes us hope for changes where they cannot be found. Illusion makes us fight for a new world as if we could create and control it ourselves; it makes us judge our neighbors as if we had the final word. Ignorance and illusion keep us entangled in the world and cause suffering and sorrow. But the way of the heart leads to freedom. The spiritual life is a life in which we.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 370e135 | she said, "Whether you are the younger son or the elder son, you have to realize that you are called to become the father." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 9484f1e | God does not love the younger son more than the elder. In the story the father goes out to the elder son just as he did to the younger, urges him to come in, and says, "My son, you are with me always, and all I have is yours." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a22f81c | Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 9c8cdc8 | Without trust, I cannot let myself be found. Trust is that deep inner conviction that the Father wants me home. As long as I doubt that I am worth finding and put myself down as less loved than my younger brothers and sisters, I cannot be found. I have to keep saying to myself, "God is looking for you. He will go anywhere to find you. He loves you, he wants you home, he cannot rest unless he has you with him." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| f73f83e | Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Way of the Heart: Connecting with God through Prayer, Wisdom, and Silence. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. | Robert Sarah | ||
| 458d308 | Rembrandt portrays the father as the man who has transcended the ways of his children. His own loneliness and anger may have been there, but they have been transformed by suffering and tears. His loneliness has become endless solitude, his anger boundless gratitude. This is who I have to become. I see it as clearly as I see the immense beauty of the father's emptiness and compassion. Can I let the younger and the elder son grow in me to the.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| e8d4fce | Do you really want to be converted? Are you willing to be transformed? Or do you keep clutching your old ways of life with one hand while with the other you beg people to for help you change? | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a95d6ec | The young man being embraced by the Father is no longer just one repentant sinner, but the whole of humanity returning to God. The broken body of the prodigal becomes the broken body of humanity, and the baby-like face of the returning child becomes the face of all suffering people longing to reenter the lost paradise. Thus Rembrandt's painting becomes more than the mere portrayal of a moving parable. It becomes the summary of the history o.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 49e8930 | Both trust and gratitude require the courage to take risks because distrust and resentment, in their need to keep their claim on me, keep warning me how dangerous it is to let go of my careful calculations and guarded predictions. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| ce01201 | Confronted here with the impossibility of self-redemption, I now understand Jesus' words to Nicodemus: "Do not be surprised when I say: 'You must be born from above.' " Indeed, something has to happen that I myself cannot cause to happen. I cannot be reborn from below; that is, with my own strength, with my own mind, with my own psychological insights. There is no doubt in my mind about this because I have tried so hard in the past to heal .. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 89005ea | Anger, resentment, jealousy, desire for revenge, lust, greed, antagonisms, and rivalries are the obvious signs that I have left home. And that happens quite easily. When I pay careful attention to what goes on in my mind from moment to moment, I come to the disconcerting discovery that there are very few moments during the day when I am really free from these dark emotions, passions and feelings. Constantly falling back into an old trap, b.. | father hurt jealousy love lust resentment revenge rivalry | Henri J.M. Nouwen | |
| f7076bd | When the younger son was no longer considered a human being by the people around him, he felt the profundity of his isolation, the deepest loneliness one can experience. He was truly lost, and it was this complete lostness that brought him to his senses. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 1174ba8 | Becoming like the heavenly Father is not just one important aspect of Jesus' teaching, it is the very heart of his message. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| f39961a | The loud, boisterous noises of the world make us deaf to the soft, gentle, and loving voice of God. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| d2d1b9d | The first and most basic task of the minister of tomorrow is to clarify the immense confusion which can arise when people enter this new internal world. It is a painful fact indeed to realize how poorly prepared most Christian leaders prove to be when they are invited to be spiritual leaders in the true sense. Most of them are used to thinking in terms of large-scale organization, getting people together in churches ... running the show as .. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 2f458d1 | It is as if we have been wandering in a foreign land looking for peace and purpose in our lives and a true sense of who we are. Jesus stands in our midst and beckons us home so that we can be restored to our true selves. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 7e3bbcc | It is in this solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the result of our efforts. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 1249110 | We might be competent in many subjects, but we cannot become an expert in the things of God. God is greater than our minds and cannot be caught within the boundaries of our finite concepts. Thus, spiritual formation leads not to a proud understanding of divinity, but to docta ignorantia, an "articulate not-knowing." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 2f2904e | Doctors, lawyers, and psychologists study to become qualified professionals who are paid to know what to do. A well-trained theologian or minister is only able to point out the universal tendency to narrow God down to our own little conceptions and expectations, and to call for an open mind and heart for God to be revealed. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 474a53b | I asked him how he had been able to take such a splendid picture. With a smile he said, "Well, I had only to be very patient and very attentive. It was only after a few hours of compliments that the lily was willing to let me take her picture." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 0a3bc75 | Building a vocation on the expectations of concrete results, however conceived, is like building a house on sand instead of on solid rock, and even takes away the ability to accept successes as free gifts. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 035889f | The Bible is primarily a book not of information but of formation, not merely a book to be analyzed, scrutinized, and discussed but a sacred book to nurture us, to unify our hearts and minds, and to serve as a constant source of contemplation | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 305ffb7 | The more we come to depend on the images offered to us by those who try to distract us, entertain us, use us for their purposes, and make us conform to the demands of a consumer society, the easier it is for us to lose our identity. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| f3a96d1 | I reached a healthy place in which I was able to stop projecting my needs on another human being. We both came to understand that each of us is limited in our capacity to be for another what is needed, and learned to forgive each other for not being God. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| e184408 | To care for others requires an ever-increasing acceptance. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 801cb5d | We probably will never be free from all our hostilities, and there even may be days and weeks in which our hostile feelings dominate our emotional life to such a degree that the best thing we can do is to keep distance, speak little to others and not write letters, except to ourselves. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 03d3c5e | We all are children and parents, students and teachers, healers and in need of care. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 0a89c17 | The first task of seeking guidance then is to touch your own struggles, doubts, and insecurities--in short, to affirm your life as a quest.8 Your life, my life, is given graciously by God. Our lives are not problems to be solved but journeys to be taken with Jesus as our friend and finest guide. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 131b669 | Durante mucho tiempo considere la imagen negativa que tenia de mi como una virtud. Me habian prevenido tantas veces contra el orgullo y la vanidad que llegue a pensar que era bueno despreciarme a mi mismo. Ahora me doy cuenta de que el verdadero pecado consiste en negar el amor primero de Dios por mi, en ignorar mi bondad original. Porque, si no me apoyo en ese amor primero y en esa bondad original, pierdo el contacto con mi autentico yo y .. | autoestima bondad católico dios orgullo pecado psicología vanidad virtud | Henri J.M. Nouwen | |
| 45ec698 | Spiritual formation prepares us for a life in which we move away from our fears, compulsions, resentments, and sorrows, to serve with joy and courage in the world, even when this leads us to places we would rather not go. Spiritual formation helps us to see the face of God in the midst of a hardened world and in our own heart. This freedom helps us to use our skills and our very lives to make that face visible to all who live in bondage and.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| c011d4c | everyone shares the handicap of mortality. Our individual physical, emotional, and spiritual failures are but symptoms of this disease. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 0b357f2 | You read yourself full, you pray yourself hot, and then you turn yourself loose. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| f4f1187 | The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain... | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| cfd68c9 | What others might dismiss as the vagaries of fate, my father interpreted as dancing lessons from the Divine. | Timothy B. Tyson |