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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 756ae34 | A young student reflecting on his own experience wrote recently: When loneliness is haunting me with its possibility of being a threshold instead of a dead end, a new creation instead of a grave, a meeting place instead of an abyss, then time loses its desperate clutch on me. Then I no longer have to live in a frenzy of activity, overwhelmed and afraid for the missed opportunity. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| e2c8280 | Prayer is often considered a weakness, a support system, which is used when we can no longer help ourselves. But this is only true when the God of our prayers is created in our own image and adapted to our own needs and concerns. When, however, prayer makes us reach out to God, not on our own but on his terms, then prayer pulls us away from self-preoccupations, encourages us to leave familiar ground, and challenges us to enter into a new wo.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| a5c0afb | The paradox of prayer is that it asks for a serious effort while it can only be received as a gift. We cannot plan, organize or manipulate God; but without a careful discipline, we cannot receive him either. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 64ea99b | Certainly in a period of history in which we have become so acutely aware of our alienation in its different manifestations, it has become difficult to unmask the illusion that the final solution for our experience of loneliness is to be found in human togetherness. It is easy to see how many marriages are suffering from this illusion. Often they are started with the hope of a union that can dispel all painful feelings of "not belonging" an.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 1e8e0a5 | Together, Yet Not Too Near When we try to shake off our loneliness by creating a milieu without limiting boundaries, we may become entangled in a stagnating closeness. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| ee4ea93 | But real openness to each other also means a real closedness, because only he who can hold a secret can safely share his knowledge. When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendship and develop lasting relationships of love. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 2f85db6 | Violence in human relationship is so utterly destructive because it not only harms the other but also drives the self into a vicious circle asking for more and more when less and less is received. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 6cbbb23 | It is sad to see how sometimes people suffering from loneliness, often deepened by the lack of affection in their intimate family circle, search for a final solution for their pains and look at a new friend, a new lover or a new community with Messianic expectations. Although their mind knows about their self-deceit, their hearts keep saying, "Maybe this time I have found what I have knowingly or unknowingly been searching for." It is indee.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| c85153b | As long as our loneliness brings us together with the hope that together we no longer will be alone, we castigate each other with our unfulfilled and unrealistic desires for oneness, inner tranquility and the uninterrupted experience of communion. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| c944086 | Friendship and love cannot develop in the form of an anxious clinging to each other. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| b626dd7 | The problem, however, is that we not only want our freedom but also fear it. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| d32ac1c | Is this not in large part due to our inability to face the pain of our loneliness? By running away from our loneliness and by trying to distract ourselves with people and special experiences, we do not realistically deal with our human predicament | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 43a55d3 | We have become so used to this state of anesthesia, that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us. When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anythi.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 66dd811 | September 4, 2019 0 Minutes Children, adolescents, adults and old people are in growing degree exposed to the contagious disease of loneliness in a world in which a competitive individualism tries to reconcile itself with a culture that speaks about togetherness, unity and community as the ideals to strive for. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 35eecfb | Loneliness is one of the most universal human experiences, but our contemporary Western society has heightened the awareness of our loneliness to an unusual degree. During a recent visit to New York City, I wrote the following note to myself: Sitting in the subway, I am surrounded by silent people hidden behind their newspapers or staring away in the world of their own fantasies. Nobody speaks with a stranger, and a patroling policeman keep.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 0e54648 | Although after many years of living we often feel more lonely, hostile and filled with illusions than when we had hardly a past to reflect upon, we also know better than before that all these pains have deepened and sharpened our urge to reach out to a solitary, hospitable and prayerful mode of existence. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 65c92eb | The more we come to the painful confession of our loneliness, hostilities and illusions, the more we are able to see solitude, hospitality and prayer as part of the vision of our life. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 1220cb1 | Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 28f9f7a | Small, seemingly innocent events keep telling us how easily we eternalize ourselves and our world. It takes only a hostile word to make us feel sad and lonely. It takes only a rejecting gesture to plunge us into self-complaint. It takes only a substantial failure in our work to lead us into a self-destructive depression. Although we have learned from parents, teachers, friends and many books, sacred as well as profane, that we are worth mor.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| d03da4a | The main problem of service is to be the way without being "in the way." And if there are any tools, techniques and skills to be learned they are primarily to plow the field, to cut the weeds and to clip the branches, that is, to take away the obstacles for real growth and development." | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 6233f28 | But Karl Menninger did not accept any of these answers as the right one. His answer was "diagnosis." The first and most important task of any healer is making the right diagnosis. Without an accurate diagnosis, subsequent treatment has little effect. Or, to say it better, diagnosis is the beginning of treatment. For Karl Menninger, speaking to a group of future psychiatrists, this obviously meant that the most attention should be paid to le.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 78e01a4 | Many students have been for so many years on the receiving side and have become so deeply impregnated with the idea that there is still a lot more to learn, that they have lost confidence in themselves and can hardly imagine that they themselves have something to give, not only to the ones who are less educated but to their fellow students and teachers as well. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 630a4bb | I remember a student presenting with great enthusiasm a summary of a book on Zen meditation while his own life experiences of restlessness, loneliness and desire for solitude and quietude remained an unknown book of knowledge to him. Just as words can become obstacles for communication, books can prevent self-knowledge. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 97e432f | One of the greatest tragedies of our culture is that millions of young people spend many hours, days, weeks and years listening to lectures, reading books and writing papers with a constantly increasing resistance. This has become such a widespread phenomenon that teachers on all levels, from grade school to graduate school, are complimented and praised when they can get the attention of their students and motivate them to do their work. Pr.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| 28329fe | The awareness that children are guests can be a liberating awareness because many parents suffer from deep guilt feelings toward their children, thinking that they are responsible for everything their sons or daughters do. When they see their child living in ways they disapprove of, the parents may castigate themselves with the questions: "What did we do wrong? What should we have done to prevent this behavior?" and they may wonder where th.. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| b1652ec | Our children are our most important guests, who enter into our home, ask for careful attention, stay for a while and then leave to follow their own way. Children are strangers whom we have to get to know. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| d87f20b | the spiritual life can only be real when it is lived in the midst of the pains and joys of the here and now. | Henri J.M. Nouwen | ||
| c289077 | So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building - 'Equal Justice Under Law' - can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| edbeee7 | I knew that I could talk for the rest of my life about what happened to my baby, I could explain it in great detail, I could describe what I saw laid out there on that slab at A. A. Rayner's place, one piece, one inch, one body part at a time. I could do all of that and people would still not get the full impact. . . . They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 9c41560 | In the South's calculation it took only "one drop" of black blood to make a person black." | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 4d678e8 | Mamie now envisioned God's purpose for her life--and for her son's life: "I took the privacy of my own grief and turned it into a public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic force that ultimately led to a generation of social and legal progress for this country."32" -- | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 5ebc83d | Not everything that is faced can be changed," Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced." | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 2feef83 | We must look at the facts squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 8d0847e | What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened? | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 19aeb36 | Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as "the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white." | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 5935aba | Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, "If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps."68" | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| bcbf39a | If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't."13" | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 1ca141c | The ruthless attack inflicted injuries almost certain to be fatal. They reveal a breathtaking level of savagery, a brutality that cannot be explained without considering rabid homicidal intent or a rage utterly beyond control. Affronted white supremacy drove every blow. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| dac04d0 | the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 86a4964 | The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: "The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would." | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| a3b6356 | The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| d2b49d1 | There was at least one way that Chicago was actually more segregated than Mississippi. A demographic map of the city in 1950 shows twenty-one distinct ethnic neighborhoods: German, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech and Slovak, Scottish, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican, French, and Hungarian, among others.5 These ethnic groups divided Chicago according to an unwritten treaty, which clearly stated that Germans, for.. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 40200ff | Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs. | Timothy B. Tyson | ||
| 5aa3675 | We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.15 | Timothy B. Tyson |