Quotes from Henri Nouwen

Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently from the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.

A good host is the one who believes that his guest is carrying a promise he wants to reveal to anyone who shows genuine interest.

I reached a healthy place in which I was able to stop projecting my needs on another human being. We both came to understand that each of us is limited in our capacity to be for another what is needed, and learned to forgive each other for not being God.

Christ invites us to remain in touch with the many sufferings of every day and to taste the beginning of hope and new life right there, where we live amid our hurts and pains and brokenness.

Mourning our losses is the first step away from resentment and toward gratitude. The tears of our grief can soften our hardened hearts and open us to the possibility to say "thanks.

People we meet, some great in the eyes of the world and some almost invisible to the larger society, are often conduits of God's wisdom.

Silence is the discipline that helps us to go beyond the entertainment quality of our lives.

Jesus makes it clear that the way to God is the same as the way to a new childhood. The innocence that is reached through conscious choices. The Beatitudes offer me the simplest route for the journey home, back into the house of my Father. And along this route I will discover the joys of the second childhood: comfort, mercy, and an ever clearer vision of God. It's a place where I can live in freedom without obsessions and compulsions.

When the younger son was no longer considered a human being by the people around him, he felt the profundity of his isolation, the deepest loneliness one can experience. He was truly lost, and it was this complete lostness that brought him to his senses.

Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate.

Your way of being present to your community may require times of absence, prayer, writing, or solitude. These too are times for your community.

God looks at his people as children of a family who are happy that those who have done only a little bit are as much loved as those who accomplish much.