"The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees."  -- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

"Learn to look behind your judgments to the need at the root of them. Learn from your limitations without losing self-respect. Learn to mourn your actions without blame, without guilt."  —Marshall B. Rosenberg

A Prayer

Dear Lord,

Today I thought of the words of Vincent van Gogh: “It is true there is an ebb and flow, but the sea remains the sea.” You are the sea. Although I experience many ups and downs in my emotions and often feel great shifts and changes in my inner life, you remain the same. Your sameness is not the sameness of a rock, but the sameness of a faithful lover. Out of your love I came to life, by your love I am sustained, and to your love I am always called back. There are days of sadness and days of joy; there are feelings of guilt and feelings of gratitude; there are moments of failure and moments of success; but all of them are embraced by your unwavering love. . . . O Lord, sea of love and goodness, let me not fear too much the storms and winds of my daily life, and let me know there is ebb and flow but the sea remains the sea.

Amen.

--Henri Nouwen

"The soul of our country needs to be awakened. . . . When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders."  —Veterans Fast for Life

"Why do we keep hiding our deepest feelings from each other? We suffer much, but we also have great gifts of healing for each other. The mystery is that by hiding our pain we also hide our ability to heal. . . . We are called to confess to each other and forgive each other, and thus to discover the abundant mercy of God. But at the same time, we are so terribly afraid of being hurt more than we already are. This fear keeps us prisoners, even when the prison has no walls! I see better every day how radical Jesus’ message of love really is."  --Henri Nouwen

"'I tell my students, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'"  -- Toni Morrison

"Hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises . . . to expect miracles—not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don't know. And this is grounds to act."  —Rebecca Solnit

Knowing Jesus, reading his words, and praying create an increasing clarity about evil and good, sin and grace, Satan and God. This clarity calls me to choose the way to the light fearlessly and straightforwardly. The more I come to know Jesus, the more I also realize how many such choices have to be made and how often. They involve so much more than my public acts. They touch the deepest recesses of the heart, where my most private thoughts and fantasies are hidden.

Reflecting on my life, I saw how opaque it has been. I often did one thing while saying another, said one thing while thinking another, thought one thing while feeling another. I found many examples in which I had even lied to myself. . . .

How to go from this opaqueness to transparency? A transparent life is a life without moral ambiguities in which heart, mind, and gut are united in choosing for the light. I am discovering the importance of naming the darkness in me. By no longer calling the darkness anything else but darkness, the temptation to keep using it for my own selfish purposes gradually becomes less. . . .

A hard task is given to me—to call the darkness darkness, evil evil, and the demon demon. By remaining vague I can avoid commitment and drift along in the mainstream of our society. But Jesus does not allow me to stay there. He requires a clear choice for truth, light, and life. When I recognize my countless inner compromises, I may feel guilty and ashamed at first. But when this leads to repentance and a contrite heart, I will soon discover the immense love of God, who came to lead me out of the darkness into the light and who wants to make me into a transparent witness of his love.  --Henri Nouwen

"She asked why I was so black. I asked why she was so white. She said she was born that way. Same here, I replied."  --Lawrence Hill

"You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it, and responsible for changing it."  -- Grace Lee Boggs

"In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others."  -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Beauty of Letter Writing

As I was writing letters today, I realized that writing letters is a much more intimate way of communicating than making phone calls. It may sound strange, but I often feel closer to friends I write than to friends I speak with by phone.

When I write I think deeply about my friends, I pray for them, I tell them my emotions and feelings. I reflect on our relationship, and I dwell with them in a very personal way. Over the past few months I have come to enjoy letter writing more and more. In the beginning it seemed like a heavy burden, but now it is a relaxing time of the day. It feels like interrupting work for a conversation with a friend.

The beauty of letter writing is that it deepens friendships and makes them more real. I have also discovered that letter writing makes me pray more concretely for my friends. Early in the morning I spend a little time praying for each person to whom I have written and promised my prayers.

Today I feel surrounded by the friends I am writing to and praying for. Our love for each other is very concrete and life giving. Thank God for letters, for those who send them, and for those who receive them. 

--Henri Nouwen

"We must first of all love ourselves. But as we grow we must love others. We must love them as our own fulfillment. Then we must come to love them in order to fulfill them, to develop their capacity to love, and finally we must love others as ourselves in and for God."  —Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

"Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals to us what is alive in us. The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves: “I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write.” Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes one has, trusting that they will multiply in the giving. Once we dare to “give away” on paper the few thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden underneath these thoughts and gradually come in touch with our own riches."  --Henri Nouwen

[Reactions to victims pardoning offenders shows] how deeply uncomfortable we all are with forgiveness, with mercy, with grace. It demonstrate[s] how (depending on what we need it to be in any given moment) we see such grace as either a giant eraser coming down from the sky and whipping clean every consequence or as the Path of Fools, destined to uphold and establish forever every cruelty, every injustice, every barbarism. The truth, however, is much grander: forgiveness and grace are the tools by which God will repair the broken cosmos, the means through which the Creator will at last restore His creation. And our ability to participate in this grand restoration is an act of the Divine economy, a blessing not a burden. And, ultimately, not something that needs us. God could do it alone. He simply prefers to do it with us."  --Katherine Kelaidis

"Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society."  -- John Lewis

"Just imagine if all the energy that goes into fighting other people and reinforcing the belief in separateness was instead directed at showing respect for people. What if the five R's of restorative justice—respect, relationship, responsibility, repair, and reintegration—were guiding principles of our activism?"  —G. Scott Brown

 "I know how great a temptation it is in times of anguish and agony to look away from our painful center and expect peace and a sense of inner wholeness to come from some external source. But I am increasingly convinced that, at times of anguish and agony, we have to choose a contained life where we can be in the presence of people who hold us safe and bring us in touch with the unconditional affective love of God. Do not get involved in experiences of living that will lead to dissipation. What is so important is to have a deep sense of inner safety, of being held by a love that is in no way using you, manipulating you, or “needing” you."  --Henri Nouwen

 "A country which prefers guns to flowers will live the beauty of the flowers only in its graveyards."  —Mehmet Murat Ildan

Spiritual Freedom

"Freedom belongs to the core of the spiritual life; not just the freedom that releases us from forces that want to oppress us, but the freedom also to forgive others, to serve them, and to form a new bond of fellowship with them. In short, the freedom to love and to work for a free world."  --Henri Nouwen

"Religion without humanity is very poor human stuff."  —Sojourner Truth

"Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination."    --Wendell Berry

"Peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting."  -- Barack Obama

"In the flush of love's light / we dare be brave / And suddenly we see / that love costs all we are / and will ever be. / Yet it is only love / which sets us free."  -- Maya Angelou

"Going high doesn’t mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty. Going high means taking the harder path. It means scraping and clawing our way to that mountain top."  -- Michelle Obama

"You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope. In such an event, courage is the authentic form taken by love."  -- Thomas Merton

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."  —Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

"It is time to be honest about our beliefs and who we are as individuals. If you hold things to be sacredness and deny the true sacredness of life, you are failing at being a human being. Enough death. Enough violence. Enough half-hearted rhetoric that seeks to demonize the poor and oppressed. It is time to be honest and open about where you stand."  —Jerry Monroe Maynard

"It makes no one safer to make our cities and the world a battlefield. The frenzied concern for our safety and comfort driving so much of our wars has made our lives far more dangerous. . . . Gigantic multinational 'defense' systems gobble up resources, while programs intended for social well-being are cut back."  —Kathy Kelly

Poverty is a Quality of the Heart

"Poverty is the quality of the heart that makes us relate to life, not as a property to be defended but as a gift to be shared. Poverty is the constant willingness to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward to new, unknown experiences. Poverty is the inner understanding that the hours, days, weeks, and years do not belong to us but are the gentle reminders of our call to give, not only love and work, but life itself, to those who follow us and will take our place. He or she who cares is invited to be poor, to strip himself or herself from the illusions of ownership, and to create some room for the person looking for a place to rest. The paradox of care is that poverty makes a good host. When our hands, heads, and hearts are filled with worries, concerns, and preoccupations, there can hardly be any place left for the stranger to feel at home."  --Henri Nouwen

Receiving the Gifts of Others

"A gift only becomes a gift when it is received; and nothing we have to give—wealth, talents, competence, or just beauty— will ever be recognized as true gifts until someone is open to accept them. This all suggests that if we want others to grow— that is, to discover their potential and capacities, to experience that they have something to live and work for—we should first of all be able to recognize their gifts and be willing to receive them. For we only become fully human when we are received and accepted."  --Henri Nouwen

"I think part of Gandhi's greatness was that he didn't want to be a servant; he wanted to be of service. It is very easy to be a servant, but very difficult to be of service. When you are of service, you're there whether you like it or not, whether it's Sunday, Monday, or a holiday. You're there whenever you are needed."  --Cesar Chavez

Our Gifts Are Not The Same As Our Talents

"More important than our talents are our gifts. We may have only a few talents, but we have many gifts. Our gifts are the many ways in which we express our humanity. They are part of who we are: friendship, kindness, patience, joy, peace, forgiveness, gentleness, love, hope, trust, and many others. These are the true gifts we have to offer to each other.

"Somehow I have known this for a long time, especially through my personal experience of the enormous healing power of these gifts. But since my coming to live in a community with mentally handicapped people, I have rediscovered this simple truth. Few, if any, of those people have talents they can boast of. Few are able to make contributions to our society that allow them to earn money, compete on the open market, or win awards. But how splendid are their gifts!"  --Henri Nouwen

Let Go

"The world is only evil when you become its slave. The world has a lot to offer—just as Egypt did for the children of Jacob—as long as you don’t feel bound to obey it. The great struggle facing you is not to leave the world, to reject your ambitions and aspirations, or to despise money, prestige, or success, but to claim your spiritual truth and to live in the world as someone who doesn’t belong to it. . . . All the good things our world has to offer are yours to enjoy. But you can enjoy them truly only when you can acknowledge them as affirmations of the truth that you are the Beloved of God. The truth will set you free to receive the beauty of nature and culture in gratitude, as a sign of your Belovedness. That truth will allow you to receive the gifts you receive from your society and celebrate life. But that truth will also allow you to let go of what distracts you, confuses you, and puts in jeopardy the life of the Spirit within you."  --Henri Nouwen

 "Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. Love, for Gandhi, was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation."  —Martin Luther King Jr.

"Hope is not a form of guarantee, it's a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark."  —John Berger

"Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future."  -- Maya Angelou

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones; and then when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake."  --Victor Hugo

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." —C.G. Jung

"Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them."  --- Madeleine L'Engle

We Are Seen by God’s Loving Eyes

"The greatest spiritual battle begins—and never ends—with the reclaiming of our chosenness. Long before any human being saw us, we are seen by God’s loving eyes. Long before anyone heard us cry or laugh, we are heard by our God who is all ears for us. Long before any person spoke to us in this world, we are spoken to by the voice of eternal love."  --Henri Nouwen

"To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others―even those with whom we are in conflict―love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is eternal."  —Chris Hedges

Nothing Human is Alien

"Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty that the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends’ eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate man nothing human is alien; no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying."  --Henri Nouwen

Being is More Important than Doing

"I suspect that we too often have lost contact with the source of our own existence and have become strangers in our own house. We tend to run around trying to solve the problems of our world while anxiously avoiding confrontation with that reality wherein our problems find their deepest roots: our own selves. In many ways we are like the busy executive who walks up to a precious flower and says: “What for God’s sake are you doing here? Can’t you get busy somehow?” and then finds the flower’s response incomprehensible: “I am sorry, but I am just here to be beautiful.”

"How can we also come to this wisdom of the flower that being is more important than doing? How can we come to a creative contact with the grounding of our own life?"  --Henri Nouwen

 "What will make [humans] change, deeply, fundamentally, radically? [They have] had crisis after crisis, [they have] had a great many shocks, [they have] been through every kind of misfortune, every kind of war, personal sorrow and so on...What will make a human being leave the way [they are] going, and move in a totally different direction?"  —Jiddhu Krishnamurti in conversation with David Bohm

Sowing Love

"You know something about brokenness. You know about the broken world. You know about brokenness in your country. But most personally, you know it in your more intimate life. You know we are broken people and we suffer very intimate pains. The pain of a desire for intimacy that hasn’t been fulfilled . . . the pain of a relationship that did not work . . . the pain of an addiction that is so hard to confess . . . The secret pain of loneliness that can bite us so much . . . And what I would like to say to you is don’t be afraid of your pain, but dare to embrace it. If you are wounded, and I know that you and I are, put your brokenness under the blessing.

"We are called to give our lives to others, so you and I can bear fruit. And all brokenness, and all dying, and all suffering is there to allow you to enter into solidarity with the whole human family, and to give yourselves to others so that your life can bear fruit. God asks you not to have a successful life but to have a fruitful life."  --Henri Nouwen

"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the one who hated, and this was an immutable law. . . . I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."  —James Baldwin

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day, saying, “I will try again tomorrow.”   --Mary Anne Radmacher

"All miracles are due to the silent and effective working of invisible force. Nonviolence is the most invisible and the most effective."  —Mohandas K. Gandhi

"If we don’t work with our own mind and perceptions, no political or economic revolution will really change the deep habits that keep us caught in our own emotional struggles—which lead to most of our struggles with other people. If we don’t notice and work with our projections, we won’t be able to reduce the suffering of ourselves and others. Nor will we be able to fulfill our longing and commitment to wake up for the benefit of all living beings."  —Pema Chodron

We Are Called To Be Fruitful

"You have to be really aware of the difference between fruitfulness and success because the world is always talking to you about your success. Society keeps asking you: “Show me your trophies. Show me, how many books have you written? Show me, how many games did you win? Show me, how much money did you make? Show me. . . .” And there is nothing wrong with any of that. I am saying that finally that’s not the question. The question is: “Are you going to bear fruit?” And the amazing thing is that our fruitfulness comes out of our vulnerability and not just out of our power. Actually it comes out of our powerlessness. If the ground wants to be fruitful, you have to break it open a little bit. The hard ground cannot bear fruit; it has to be raked open. And the mystery is that our illness and our weakness and our many ways of dying are often the ways that we get in touch with our vulnerabilities. You and I have to trust that they will allow us to be more fruitful if lived faithfully. Precisely where we are weakest and often most broken and most needy, precisely there can be the ground of our fruitfulness. That is the vision that means that death can indeed be the final healing—because it becomes the way to be so vulnerable that we can bear fruit in a whole new way. Like trees that die and become fuel, and like leaves that die and become fertilizer, in nature something new comes out from death all the time. So you have to realize that you are part of that beautiful process, that your death is not the end but in fact it is the source of your fruitfulness beyond you in new generations, in new centuries."  --Henri Nouwen

"The prophets didn’t spend time blaming or demonizing people for their poverty. Instead they challenged rulers, leaders, and even systems that cause and perpetuate the very conditions that cause poverty and suffering."  -- Adam R. Taylor

"Because we live in a nation that has begun its path to democracy by putting stumbling blocks in our way, we’ve got to start moving those blocks."  --- Stacey Abrams

"Our anger is moral. Our rage is sacred. Our anxiety contains wisdom. Our hearts are telling us the truth. If the truth makes others uncomfortable—good. Show me an alarm clock that makes a sweet sound and I’ll show you an alarm clock I can sleep through."  -- Ralph De La Rosa

"For some decades now, we have been going through a ‘spiritual crisis,’ as I argued elsewhere, and that crisis can be seen as a struggle for the core narrative of our culture. The real ‘culture war’ is between the ‘old story’ that tells us we live in a random universe made of physical particles and an emerging story. This story is, in part, being recovered from a long (and often forgotten) tradition of human wisdom that says, ‘No! We live in a meaningful universe pervaded by consciousness. We are deeply interconnected with one another and the planet on which we live.’"  —Michael Nagler

Know What the Scoop Is

"The contemplative is someone who sees things for what they really are, who sees the real connections, who knows—as Thomas Merton used to say—“what the scoop is.” To attain such a vision, a spiritual discipline is necessary. Evagrius [Ponticus] calls discipline the praktike, removing the blindfolds that prevent us from seeing clearly. Merton, himself very familiar with Evagrius, expressed the same idea. He told the monks of Gethsemani Abbey that the contemplative life is a life in which we constantly move from opaqueness to transparency, from the place where things are dark, impenetrable, and closed to the place where these same things are translucent, open, and offer vision far beyond themselves."  --Henri Nouwen

"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling―their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: we be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them."  —Arundhati Roy

"Each of us must decide whether it is more important to be proved right or to provoke righteousness."  -- Bernice King

Where to Put Our Attention

"Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure. Somewhere we know that without a lonely place our actions quickly become empty gestures. The careful balance between silence and words, withdrawal and involvement, distance and closeness, solitude and community forms the basis of the Christian life and should, therefore, be the subject of our most personal attention."  --Henri Nouwen

"It is the truth that to be a person of faith in America today is to recognize that America desires Jesus slogans over morally grounded Jesus-inspired action."  -- Otis Moss III

"For the millions in a prison

That wealth has set apart—

For the Christ who has not risen,

From the caverns of the heart

For the innermost decision

That we cannot but obey

For what's left of our religion,

I lift my voice and pray;

May the lights in the land of Plenty

Shine on the truth someday."

—Leonard Cohen

"We can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable both in word and deed."  -- bell hooks

"Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with goodness. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don’t be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice. And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a Beloved Community that is finally at peace with itself."  —John Lewis

"If we are mentally trying to understand the other person, we're not present with them in this moment. We are sitting there analyzing them, but we are not with them. Empathic connection involves connecting with what is alive in the other person at this moment."  —Marshall B. Rosenberg, Speak Peace in a World of Conflict

The Sacred and the Holy

"Something very deep and mysterious, very holy and sacred, is taking place in our lives right where we are, and the more attentive we become the more we will begin to see and hear it. The more our spiritual sensitivities come to the surface of our daily lives, the more we will discover—uncover—a new presence in our lives."  --Henri Nouwen