Alone?

Monday of the First Week in Lent

It remains true that loneliness often leads to hostile behavior and that solitude is the climate of hospitality. When we feel lonely we have such a need to be liked and loved that we are hypersensitive to the many signals in our environment and easily become hostile toward anyone whom we perceive as rejecting us. But once we have found the center of our life in our own heart and have accepted our aloneness, not as a fate but as a vocation, we are able to offer freedom to others…We can only perceive the stranger as an enemy as long as we have something to defend. But when we say, “please enter- my house is your house, my joy is your joy, my sadness is your sadness, and my life is your life,” we have nothing to defend, since we have nothing to lose but all to give….Who will be our robber when everything he wants to steal from us becomes our gift to him?...Who wants to sneak into our back door, when our front door is wide open?”

Show Me the Way, Henri Nouwen

God vs. Neighbor

First Sunday in Lent

“Perhaps we must continually remind ourselves that the first commandment requiring us to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind is indeed the first. I wonder if we really believe this. It seems that in fact we live as if we should give as much of our heart, soul, and mind as possible to our fellow human beings, while trying hard not to forget God. At least we feel that our attention should be divided evenly between God and our neighbor…It is this unconditional and unreserved love for God that leads to the care for our neighbor, not as an activity which distracts us from God or competes with our attention to God, but as an expression of our love for God who reveals himself to us as the God of all people. It is in God that we find our neighbors and discover our responsibility to them. We might even say that only in God does our neighbor become a neighbor rather than an infringement upon our autonomy, and that only in and through God does service become possible.”

-Show Me the Way Henri Nouwen

Lent Readings...

I'm reading through Show Me the Way, an anthology of Henri Nouwen for Lent. There have been quite a few things that I've wanted to think about harder, and that I believe are worthwhile to share with others. So here is the first installment.

Saturday after Ash Wednesday
“[When our lives are transformed]…What is new is that we no longer experience the many things, people, and events as endless causes for worry, but begin to experience them as the rich variety of ways in which God makes his presence known to us.”

Death with Interruptions...

a couple gems from Jose Saramago's Nobel Prize for Literature winning book...

“Context gives not only the background, but all the innumerable other grounds that exist between the subject observed and the line of the horizon.” -69

“It is still too early...so it can sleep a little more. This is what insomniacs say when they have not slept a wink all night, thinking, poor things, that they can fool sleep by asking for a little more, just a little more, when they have not yet been granted one minute of repose.” -204