Henri Nouwen
The mystery of the spiritual life is that Jesus desires to meet us in the seclusion of our own heart, to make his love known to us there, to free us from our fears, and to make our own deepest self known to us Each time you let the love of God penetrate deeper into your heart it leads to a love of ourselves that enables us to give whole-hearted love to our fellow human beings. In the seclusion of our hearts we learn to know the hidden presence of God; and with that spiritual knowledge we can lead a loving life.Collection: Spiritual
I trust in you, Lord, but keep helping me in my moments of distrust and doubt.Collection: Inspirational
The joy that compassion brings is one of the best-kept secrets of humanity. It is a secret known only to a very few people, a secret that has to be rediscovered over and over again.Collection: Compassion
My hope is that the description of God's love in my life will give you the freedom and the courage to discover... God's love in yours.Collection: Giving
I am beginning now to see how radically the character of my spiritual journey will change when I no longer think of God as hiding out and making it as difficult as possible for me to find him, but instead as the one who is looking for me while I am doing the hiding.Collection: Spiritual
Who can take away suffering without entering it?Collection: Suffering
Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.Collection: Pain
Everything changes radically from the moment you know yourself as being sent into this world.Collection: World
When we learn to move through suffering, rather than avoid it, then we greet it differently. We become willing to let it teach us. We even begin to see how God can use it for some larger end.Collection: Moving
The dance of life finds its beginnings in grief......Here a completely new way of living is revealed. It is the way in which pain can be embraced, not out of a desire to suffer, but in the knowledge that something new will be born in the pain.Collection: Pain
Living a spiritual life requires a change of heart, a conversion. Such a conversion may be marked by a sudden inner change, or it can take place through a long, quiet process of transformation. But it always involves an inner experience of oneness.Collection: Spiritual
It's an incredible mystery of God's love that the more you know how deeply you are loved, the more you will see how deeply your sisters and your brothers in the human family are loved.Collection: Brother
Real greatness is often humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. Some of the greatest works of art and the most important works of peace were created by people who had no need for the limelight. They knew that what they were doing was their call, and they did it with great patience, perseverance, and love.Collection: Perseverance
If you feel a great loneliness and a deep longing for human contact, you have to be extremely discerning...and ask yourself whether this situation is truly God given. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain. 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.Collection: Spiritual
Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing-sicknes s, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death--can take that love away.Collection: Love
The real question is: how can I live so that my death will be fruitful for others?Collection: Real
When you have loved deeply, that love can grow even stronger after the death of the person you love. That is the core message of Jesus.Collection: Jesus
I want my work to create space where people can meet God, rather than give them something they can "apply" to their daily life.Collection: Space
We just have to recognize life for what it is: a gift to be grateful for, not a property to cling to, hoard, or defend.Collection: Grateful
Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own.Collection: Community
It's good to have a prayer on your lips wherever you go.Collection: Prayer
We have probably wondered in our many lonesome moments if there is one corner in this competitive, demanding world where it is safe to be relaxed, to expose ourselves to someone else, and to give unconditionally. It might be very small and hidden, but if this corner exists, it calls for a search through the complexities of our human relationships in order to find it.Collection: Order
What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.Collection: Love Life
Is my growing old making me any closer to Christ? Am I only getting older or am I getting more godly?Collection: Godly
A few years ago I met an old professor at the University of Notre Dame. Looking back on his long life of teaching, he said with a funny wrinkle in his eyes: I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I slowly discovered that my interruptions were my work.Collection: Teaching
Jesus came to announce to us that an identity based on success, popularity and power is a false identity- an illusion! Loudly and clearly he says: 'You are not what the world makes you; but you are children of God.Collection: Jesus
When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.Collection: Inspirational
It's not easy to sit and trust that in solitude God will speak to you - not as a magical voice but that God will let you know something gradually over the years. And in that word from God you will find the inner place from which to live your life. Solitude is where spiritual ministry begins. That's where Jesus listened to God. That's where we listen to God.Collection: Spiritual
For many, religion has to do with what we are allowed to do and not allowed to do. In the end, that doesn't bear fruit.Collection: Fruit
Prayer and action...can never be seen as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Prayer without action grows into powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation.Collection: Prayer
As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.Collection: Thinking
Without Pentecost the Christ-event - the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus - remains imprisoned in history as something to remember, think about and reflect on. The Spirit of Jesus comes to dwell within us, so that we can become living Christs here and now.Collection: Spiritual
Solitude is the furnace of transformation.Collection: Solitude
Ministry in no way is a privilege...it is the core of the Christian life. No Christian is a Christian without being a minister.Collection: Christian
Our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.Collection: Compassion
When we give generously, with an abundance mentality, what we give away will multiply.Collection: Giving
Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.Collection: Heart
What is forgotten cannot be healed, and that which cannot be healed easily becomes the cause of greater evil.Collection: Evil
Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.Collection: Thanksgiving
Prayer is the way to both the heart of God and the heart of the world - precisely because they have been joined through the suffering of Jesus Christ Praying is letting one's own heart become the place where the tears of God's children merge and become tears of hope.Collection: Jesus
Jesus invites us to abide in his love. That means to dwell with all that I am in him. It is an invitation to a total belonging, to full intimacy, to an unlimited being-with. The light of the Spirit reveals to us that love conquers all fear.Collection: Spiritual
Where are you getting your affection? Who's touching you? Who's holding you? Who makes you feel alive? Who says, "You are a beautiful person, you are the beloved of God, don't forget it"? That's an important discipline.Collection: Beautiful
Reading with children is an enormous gift to them. It's a great honor to invite children to read with adults.Collection: Children
Christmas is believing that the salvation of the world is God's work, and not mine.Collection: Believe
Ministers are tempted to join the ranks of those who consider it their primary task to keep other people busy … But our task is the opposite of distraction … how to keep them from being so busy that they can no longer hear the voice of God who speaks in silence.Collection: Opposites
Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.Collection: Christian
When you're on the bus or subway or in your car, why busy your mind with all the garbage of advertisements? Why fill your mind with television and radio? Somehow you have to decide what your mind will receive. I don't mean you shouldn't ever go to movies or watch television, but control what enters your mind and heart. It's not just a question of pushing bad things out but also a question of holding on to something really good.Collection: Heart
The difference between rich and poor is not that the rich sin is more than the poor, that the rich find it easier to call sin a virtue.Collection: Differences
Hiddenness is the place of purification. In hiddenness we find our true selves.Collection: Self