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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 13dbd0c | Our primary task in solitude, therefore, is not to pay undue attention to the many faces which assail us, but to keep the eyes of our mind and heart on him who is our divine savior. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 9e27d1b | Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature. As we come to realize that it is not we who live, but Christ who lives in us, that he is our true self, we can slowly let our compulsions melt away and begin to experience the freedom of the children of God. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 0c83c67 | ministry can be fruitful only if it grows out of a direct and intimate encounter with our Lord. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 67c31a8 | Solitude is not simply a means to an end. Solitude is its own end. It is the place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimizing compulsions of the world. Solitude is the place of our salvation. Hence, it is the place where we want to lead all who are seeking the light in this dark world. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| f6bb308 | We walk through life as if we had swallowed an Easter candle, rigid and tense, always afraid that things will get out of hand. This reaction is just as harmful as open rebellion, or even more so, because it blocks our way to religious maturation. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a6c58f7 | When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 4cd9e21 | The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there. Our lives are filled with examples which tell us that leadership asks for understanding and that understanding requires sharing. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 25098a1 | Compassion is the fruit of solitude and the basis of all ministry. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 039e446 | a much deeper human darkness: the darkness of not feeling truly welcome in human existence. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| e7cc6e8 | Henri found a new capacity for joy. By claiming his belovedness, he had more compassion for people who hurt him, more courage to live his struggles as gateways to inner freedom. He became more loving, and felt more at peace with himself and the world. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| f606c72 | It seems indeed that the Church today is one of the few institutions in the world willing to defend human rights regardless of who the oppressor is. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| cb8b86e | Temptations and struggles will remain to the end of our lives, but with a pure heart we will be restful even in the midst of a restless existence. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 610c535 | Setting our hearts on something involves not only serious aspiration but also strong determination. A spiritual life requires human effort. The forces that keep pulling us back into a worry-filled life are far from easy to overcome. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| b04ab65 | silence remains indispensable today as it was in the past. The Word of God is born out of the eternal silence of God, and it is to this Word out of silence that we want to be witnesses. | the-bible word-of-god | Henri J.M. Nouwen | |
| 981d462 | To love and work for the glory of God cannot remain an idea about which we think once in a while. It must become an interior, unceasing doxology. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| b703d20 | It is the mystery that the heart, which is the center of our being, is transformed by God into his own heart, a heart large enough to embrace the entire universe. Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness, and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God's heart has become one with ours. Here we catch si.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 537e4f8 | Then occupation is called a blessing and emptiness a curse. Many telephone conversations start with the words: "I know you are busy, but ..." and we would confuse the speaker and even harm our reputation were we to say, "Oh no, I am completely free, today, tomorrow and the whole week." Our client might well lose interest in a man who has so little to do." -- | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| cc33e3e | When we think about the people who have given us hope and have increased the strength of our soul, we might discover that they were not the advice givers, warners or moralists, but the few who were able to articulate in words and actions the human condition in which we participate and who encouraged us to face the realities of life. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 2bb2519 | Maybe my own deep-rooted fear to be on my own and alone kept me going from person to person, book to book and school to school, anxiously avoiding the pain of accepting the responsibility for my own life. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| aaad171 | Don't we often look at the many events of our lives as big or small interruptions, interrupting many of our plans, projects and life schemes? Don't we feel an inner protest when a student interrupts our reading, bad weather our summer, illness our well-scheduled plans, the death of a dear friend our peaceful state of mind, a cruel war our ideas about the goodness of man, and the many harsh realities of life our good dreams about it? And doe.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 10d31c6 | While visiting the University of Notre Dame, where I had been a teacher for a few years, I met an older experienced professor who had spent most of his life there. And while we strolled over the beautiful campus, he said with a certain melancholy in his voice, "You know,... my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 7939945 | We often are very, very busy, and usually very tired as a result, but we should ask ourselves how much of our reading and talking, visiting and lobbying, lecturing and writing, is more part of an impulsive reaction to the changing demands of our surroundings than an action that was born out of our own center. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 8fca97e | There are days, weeks and maybe months and years during which we are so overwhelmed by our sense of loneliness that we can hardly believe that the solitude of heart is within our horizon. But when we have once sensed what this solitude can mean, we will never stop searching for it. Once we have tasted this solitude a new life becomes possible, in which we can become detached from false ties and attached to God and each other in a surprising.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| e46cb5e | Letters of friends are good to receive, but we should be able to live happily without them. Visits are gifts to be valued, but without them we should not fall into the temptation of a brooding mood. Phone calls, "just to say hello," can fill us with gratitude, but when we expect them as a necessary way to sedate our fear of being left alone, we are becoming the easy victims of our self-complaints. We are always in search of a community that.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 1044313 | I have found it very important in my own life to let go of my wishes and instead to live in hope. I am finding that when I choose to let go of my sometimes petty and superficial wishes and trust that my life is precious and meaningful in the eyes of God something really new, something beyond my own expectations begins to happen for me. To wait with openess and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that .. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| e310909 | Dare to lose your life and you will find it. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 34dadce | Your pain is deep, and it won't just go away. It is also uniquely yours, because it is linked to some of your earliest life experiences. Your call is to bring that pain home. As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others. Yes, you have to incorporate your pain into your self and let it bear fruit in your heart and the hearts of others. This is what Jesus means when he asks you t.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 54e4680 | You have to live through your pain gradually and thus deprive it of its power over you. Yes, you must go into the place of your pain, but only when you have gained some new ground. When you enter your pain simply to experience it in its rawness, it can pull you away from where you want to go. What is your pain? It is the experience of not receiving what you most need. It is a place of emptiness where you feel sharply the absence of the love.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| dac4d41 | There is a real pain in your heart, a pain that truly belongs to you. You know now that you cannot avoid, ignore, or repress it. It is this pain that reveals to you how you are called to live in solidarity with the broken human race. You must distinguish carefully, however, between your pain and the pains that have attached themselves to it but are not truly yours. When you feel rejected, when you think of yourself as a failure and a misfit.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 8eb3ae5 | You are confronted again and again with the choice of letting God speak or letting your wounded self cry out. Although there has to be a place where you can allow your wounded part to get the attention it needs, your vocation is to speak from the place in you where God dwells. When you let your wounded self express itself in the form of apologies, arguments, or complaints--through which it cannot be truly heard--you will only grow frustrate.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| b14264f | But God has called you to speak the Word to the world and to speak it fearlessly. While acknowledging your woundedness, do not let go of the truth that lives in you and demands to be spoken. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 9b756b0 | the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23): love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 1e3e85b | Frequently prison makes us think about freedom, hunger helps us to appreciate food, and war gives us words for peace. Not seldom are our visions of the future born out of the sufferings of the present and our hope for others out of our own despair. Only few "happy endings" make us happy, but often someone's careful and honest articulation of the ambiguities, uncertainties and painful conditions of life gives us new hope. The paradox is inde.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a89de50 | Life is just a little opportunity for you during a few years to say, "I love you, too." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 172eda8 | Your whole life is filled with losses, endless losses. And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 8646e82 | Nouwen's wisdom is a fusion of the psychological and the spiritual. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 6e2717a | Why is it, that many parties and friendly get-togethers leave us so empty and sad? | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 6f6f60f | Our preoccupations prevent our having new experiences and keep us hanging on to the familiar ways. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 17c36b1 | By slowly converting our loneliness into a deep solitude, we create that precious space where we can discover the voice telling us about our inner necessity--that is, our vocation. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 9972d5b | When we live with a solitude of heart, we can listen with attention to the words and the worlds of others, but when we are driven by loneliness, we tend to select just those remarks and events that bring immediate satisfaction to our own craving needs. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 5d10978 | Does not all creativity ask for a certain encounter with our loneliness, and does not the fear of this encounter severely limit our possible self expression? | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a692352 | The few times, however, that we do obey our severe masters and listen carefully to our restless hearts, we may start to sense that in the midst of our sadness there is joy, that in the midst of our fears there is peace, that in the midst of our greediness there is the possibility of compassion and that indeed in the midst of our irking loneliness we can find the beginnings of a quiet solitude. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| c94b6a4 | A friend once wrote: "Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 167b937 | It is far from easy to believe that this is true. Often we go to good men and women with our problems in the secret hope that they will take our burden away from us and free us from our loneliness. Frequently the temporary relief they offer only leads to a stronger recurrence of the same pains when we are again by ourselves. | Henri J.M. Nouwen |