Quotes from Henri J.M. Nouwen

Dare to lose your life and you will find it.

The loud, boisterous noises of the world make us deaf to the soft, gentle, and loving voice of God. A Christian leader is called to help people hear that voice and so be comforted and consoled.

When you speak to others about your pain without fully owning it, you expect something from them that they cannot give.

Following Jesus means to let go of the "I" and move toward the "other." Following Jesus means to dare to move out of ourselves and to slowly let go of building our "self" up.

The word of the Eucharist makes us part of the great story of our salvation. Our little stories are lifted up into God's great story and there given their unique place. The word lifts us up and makes us see that our daily, ordinary lives are, in fact, sacred lives that play a necessary role in the fulfillment of God's promises.

The time has come to claim your true vocation—to be a father who can welcome his children home without asking them any questions and without wanting anything from them in return. Look at the father in your painting and you will know who you are called to be.

We need you to be a father who can claim for himself the authority of true compassion.

Wouldn't it be good to increase God's joy by letting God find me and carry me home and celebrate my return with the angels? Wouldn't it be wonderful to make God smile by giving God the chance to find me and love me lavishly? Questions like these raise a real issue: that of my own self-concept. Can I accept that I am worth looking for? Do I believe that there is a real desire in God to simply be with me?

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8 NRSV). To be born of the Spirit is to step into a freedom that we never imagined before. It is to trust that the Spirit

The gospel that proclaims the intrinsic worth, sacred value, and essential dignity of human beings encourages our work for equal rights, good housing, good medical care, and good education, and our fight for justice and peace in the world.

The great temptation of our lives is to deny our role as chosen people and to allow ourselves to be trapped in the worries of our daily lives. Without the word that keeps lifting us up as God's chosen people, we remain, or become, small people, stuck in the complaints that emerge from our daily struggle to survive.

El discernimiento es una comprensión espiritual y un conocimiento experimental de cómo Dios está activo en la vida diaria, y se adquiere mediante una práctica espiritual disciplinada. El discernimiento implica una vida de fe y la escucha atenta al amor y la voluntad de Dios, para que de ese modo podamos cumplir nuestra vocación individual y la misión compartida.

And for you who will make this spiritual journey with me, I hope and pray that you too will discover within yourselves not only the lost children of God, but also the compassionate mother and father that is God.

When we look at teaching in terms of hospitality, we can say that the teacher is called upon to create for his students a free and fearless space where mental and emotional development can take place.

We do not have to go after crosses, but we have to take up the crosses that have been ours all along.

While busy with and worried about many things, we seldom feel truly satisfied, at peace, or at home.

Only when we recognize the rich network of connections between the Eucharist and our life in the world can the Eucharist be "worldly" and our life "Eucharistic.

When we worry, we have our hearts in the wrong place. Jesus asks us to move our hearts to the center, where all other things fall into place.

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes.

Many mature, successful men in this life often might still treat God as part of themselves. God is the factotum which comes in handy in times of illness, shock, final exams, in every situation in which we feel insecure. And if it does not work, the only reaction may be to cry louder. Far from becoming the Other, whose existence does not depend on mine, he might remain the easy frame which fits best around the edges of my security.

Being friendly to everybody, he very often has no friends for himself. Always consulting and giving advice, he often has nobody to go to with his own pains and problems. [...] Looking for acceptance, he tends to cling to his counselees [...] In this way he […] never feels safe, is always on the alert, and finally finds himself terribly misunderstood and lonesome.

As I reflect on this reality, it is clear that God is present in the events of my life, yet I act and speak as if I am in control. But

He who thinks that he is finished, is finished. How true. Those who think that they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons.

No tengo que esperar a que todo vaya bien, sino que puedo celebrar cada pequeño indicio que me dice que el reino está cerca (124)