1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6414
6415
6416
6417
6418
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b3462f8 | The loud, boisterous noises of the world make us deaf to the soft, gentle, and loving voice of God. A Christian leader is called to help people hear that voice and so be comforted and consoled. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| cf423bd | Acknowledge your anguish, but do not let it pull you out of yourself. Hold on to your chosen direction, your discipline, your prayer, your work, your guides, and trust that one day love will have conquered enough of you that even the most fearful part will allow love to cast out all fear. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a0e22af | The immense difference that exists between hope and wishfulness is revealed in the remarks of a student who wrote: "I see hope as an attitude where everything stays open before me. Not that I don't think of my future in those moments, but I think of it in an entirely different way. Daring to stay open to whatever will come to me today, tomorrow, two months from now, or a year from now--that is hope. To go fearlessly into things without know.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| b91f2ce | When we live with hope we do not get tangled up with concerns for how our wishes will be fulfilled. So, too, our prayers are not directed toward the gift, but toward the one who gives it. Our prayers might still contain just as many desires, but ultimately it is not a question of having a wish come true but of expressing an unlimited faith in the giver of all good things. You wish that...but you hope in.... | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 71cbd63 | I also learned afresh that friendship requires a constant willingness to forgive each other for not being Christ, and a willingness to ask Christ himself to be the true center of the relationship. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| f97680e | For as long as you can remember, you have been a pleaser, depending on others to give you an identity. You need not look at that only in a negative way. You wanted to give your heart to others, and you did so quickly and easily. But now you are being asked to let go of all these self-made props and trust that God is enough for you. You must stop being a pleaser and reclaim your identity as a free self. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 8209080 | To live a disciplined life is to live in such a way that you want only to be where God is with you. The more deeply you live your spiritual life, the easier it will be to discern the difference between living with God and living without God, and the easier it will be to move away from the places where God is no longer with you. The great challenge here is faithfulness, which must be lived in the choices of every moment. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 200745a | Your main question should always be whether something is lived with or without God. You have your own inner knowledge to answer that question. Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them. But every time you do.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 2b8b5bd | Boredom is a sentiment of disconnectedness. While we are busy with many things, we wonder if what we do makes any real difference. Life presents itself as a random and unconnected series of activities and events over which we have little or no control. To be bored, therefore, does not mean that we have nothing to do, but that we question the value of the things we are so busy doing. The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy .. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 9365438 | Community as discipline is the effort to create a free and empty space among people where together we can practice true obedience. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a3e13f5 | This is the real Pentecost experience. When the Spirit descended on the disciples huddling together in fear, they were set free to move out of their closed room into the world. As long as they were assembled in fear they did not yet form community. But when they had received the Spirit, they became a body of free people who could stay in communion with each other even when they were as far from each other as Rome is from Jerusalem. Thus, wh.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| b0b05d1 | Whether in solitude or community, whether alone or with others, we are called to live obedient lives, that is, lives of unceasing prayer -- "unceasing" not because of the many prayers we say but because of our alertness to the unceasing prayer of God's Spirit within and among us." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 639d1d6 | detach ourselves from making our individual experience the criterion for our approach to others, | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| b138bed | We seem to have a fear of empty spaces. The philosopher Spinoza called this a horror vacui. We want to fill up what is empty. Our lives stay very full. And when we are not blinded by busyness, we fill our inner space with guilt about things of the past or worries about things to come. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 4118545 | One student prays: When I speak to you I strongly suspect that You aren't "out there" now and never were. I have lost You and I feel better for it because You diminished me and wouldn't let me be myself. I always felt I had to consider what You wanted me to do, what image or state of perfection You demanded. Since the time of our separation I've grown more selfish. I'm concerned a lot with myself, with my own development as a human being. I.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 7106681 | To serve means to minister, to love and care for others, and to recognize in them the heart of God. A true disciple of Jesus will always go to where people are feeling weak, broken, sick, in pain, poor, lonely, forgotten, anxious, and lost. It is often hard to go to places of weakness and rejection to offer consolation and comfort. It is possible only when we discover the presence of Jesus among the poor and weak and realize the many gifts .. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a2f44f4 | The core of all prayer is indeed listening, obediently standing in the presence of God. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 3ff3208 | Here is the God I want to believe in: a Father who, from the beginning of creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing, never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting; never letting his arms drop down in despair, but always hoping that his children will return so that he can speak words of love to them and let his tired arms rest on their shoulders. His only desire is to bless. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 129c92c | Prayer opens our eyes for ourselves and through clarification enables us to step forward in the direction of hope. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| ec48b39 | Boredom, resentment, and depression are all sentiments of disconnectedness. They present life to us as a broken connection. They give us a sense of not-belonging. In interpersonal relations, this disconnectedness is experienced as loneliness. When we are lonely we perceive ourselves as isolated individuals surrounded, perhaps, by many people, but not really part of any supporting or nurturing community. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| ccadc74 | Worrying causes us to be "all over the place," but seldom at home. One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there. We know where we belong, but we keep being pulled away in many directions, as if we were still homeless. "All these other things" keep demanding our attention. They lead us so far from home that we eventually forget our true address, that is, the place whe.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 379bfe1 | Being in the world without being of the world." These words summarize well the way Jesus speaks of the spiritual life. It is a life in which we are totally transformed by the Spirit of love. Yet it is a life in which everything seems to remain the same. To live a spiritual life does not mean that we must leave our families, give up our jobs, or change our ways of working; it does not mean that we have to withdraw from social or political ac.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 331d3bb | All these other things," which so occupied and preoccupied us, now come as gifts or challenges that strengthen and deepen the new life which we have discovered. This does not mean that the spiritual life makes things easier or takes our struggles and pains away. The lives of Jesus' disciples clearly show that suffering does not diminish because of conversion. Sometimes it even becomes more intense. But our attention is no longer directed to.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 82e3e75 | Healthy development means a gradual movement out of the magical world. Even when the development takes place in other areas, our religion easily remains on this immature level. In that case, God remains the magical pacifier whose existence depends on ours. Prayers remain tools to manipulate him in our direction and religion is nothing more than a big, soft bed on which we doze away and deny the hardships of life. Our religious sentiment wil.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 1cec89a | As Father, the authority he claims for himself is the authority of compassion. That authority comes from letting the sins of his children pierce his heart. There is no lust, greed, anger, resentment, jealousy, or vengeance in his lost children that has not cause immense grief to his heart. The grief is so deep because the heart is so pure. From the deep inner place where love embraces all human grief, the Father reaches out to his children... | father god love rembrandt sin | Henri J.M. Nouwen | |
| ab499b8 | Advent . . . leads to a growing inner stillness and joy allowing me to realize that the One for whom I am waiting has already arrived and speaks to me in the silence of my heart. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 9cf00f7 | Love is not based on the willingness to listen, to understand problems of others, or to tolerate their otherness. Love is based on the mutuality of the confession of our total self to each other. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 1566a1f | When our friend says, "If my friends found out how I really feel, if I would show my real self, then they would no longer love me but hate me" -- he speaks about a real possibility. It is very risky to be honest, because someone just might not respond with love, but take us by our weak spot and turn it against ourselves. Our confession might destroy us." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a38168f | Around the table, we know whether there is friendship and community or hatred and division. Precisely because the table is the place of intimacy for all the members of the household, it is also the place where the absence of that intimacy is most painfully revealed. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 38d0c59 | When we wonder why the language of tradition Christianity has lost its liberation power for nuclear man, we have to realize that most Christian preaching is still based on the presupposition that man sees himself as meaningfully integrated with a history in which God came to us in the past, is living under us in the present, and will come to liberate us in the future. But when man's historical consciousness is broken, the whole Christian me.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 6172ac5 | Mysticism and revolution are two aspects of the same attempt to bring about radical change. Mystics cannot prevent themselves from becoming social critics, since in self-reflection they will discover the roots of a sick society. Similarly, revolutionaries cannot avoid facing their own human condition, since in the midst of their struggle for a new world they will find that they are also fighting their own reactionary fears and false ambitio.. | revolution | Henri J.M. Nouwen | |
| 4d0c34b | I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves. . . . Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. . . . Take whatever comes with great trust.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 45acd0a | crisis of our prayer life is that our minds may be filled with ideas of God while our hearts remain far from him. Real prayer comes from the heart. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 29eaee0 | Jesus is the obedient one. The center of his life is this obedient relationship with the Father. This may be hard for us to understand because the word obedience has so many negative connotations in our society. It makes us think of authority figures who impose their wills against our desires. It makes us remember unhappy childhood events or hard tasks performed under threats of punishment. But none of this applies to Jesus' obedience. His .. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 7dd9684 | Often I have the impression that priests and ministers are the least confessing people in the Christian community | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 250d25b | From beginning to end, fundraising as ministry is grounded in prayer and undertaken in gratitude. Prayer is the radical starting point of fundraising because in prayer we slowly experience a reorientation of all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and others. To pray is to desire to know more fully the truth that sets us free (see John 8:32). Prayer uncovers the hidden motives and unacknowledged wounds that shape our relationships. Pr.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| f9abb11 | As ministers our greatest temptation is toward too many words. They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 456dcb9 | Worrying causes us to be "all over the place," but seldom at home." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 9be450f | Dying is always suffering, because dying always puts us in the place where others do to us whatever they decide to do, good or bad. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 5e28d19 | in and through solitude we do not move away from people. On the contrary, we move closer to them through compassionate ministry. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| f9ece4d | when prayer is no longer its primary concern, and when its many activities are no longer seen and experienced as part of prayer itself, the community quickly degenerates into a club with a common cause but no common vocation. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 2578f64 | Why do we children of the light so easily become conspirators with the darkness? The answer is quite simple. Our identity, our sense of self, is at stake. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| f5a806d | If prayer, understood as an intimate relationship with God, is indeed the basis of all relationships--to ourselves as well as to others. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 39a516a | Poverty, pain, struggle, anguish, agony, and even inner darkness may continue to be part of our experience. They may even be God's way of purifying us. But life is no longer boring, resentful, depressing, or lonely because we have come to know that everything that happens is part of our way to the Father. | Henri J.M. Nouwen |