Quotes from Henri Nouwen

A friend once wrote: "Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.

Whether I am the younger son or the elder son, God's only desire is to bring me home.

John Henry Newman views the visible world as a veil "so that all that exists or happens visibly, conceals and yet suggests, and above all serves, a greater system of persons, facts and events beyond itself."

Truth does not mean an idea, concept, or doctrine, but the true relationship.

But as we come to God with our hurts—honestly, not superficially—something life changing can begin slowly to happen. We discover how God is the One who invites us to healing. We realize that any dance of celebration must weave both the sorrows and the blessings into a joyful step.

It is far from easy to believe that this is true. Often we go to good men and women with our problems in the secret hope that they will take our burden away from us and free us from our loneliness. Frequently the temporary relief they offer only leads to a stronger recurrence of the same pains when we are again by ourselves.

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.

I've yet to meet anyone who has come closer to Jesus by forsaking the church.

In the end, a life of prayer is a life with open hands—a life where we need not be ashamed of our weaknesses but realize that it is more perfect for us to be led by the Other than to try to hold everything in our own hands.

But when I forget that voice of the first unconditional love, then these innocent suggestions can easily start dominating my life and pull me into the "distant country."

We cannot see God in the other person. Only God in us can see God in the other person.

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.