Saints, People Like Us Through baptism we become part of a family much larger than our biological family. It is a family of people set apart by God to be light in the darkness. These set-apart people...
Real loneliness comes when we have lost all sense of having things in common. When
Our lives are unique stones in the mosaic of human existence -- priceless and irreplaceable.
Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face o...
One of the greatest tragedies of our culture is that millions of young people spend many hours, days, weeks and years listening to lectures, reading books and writing papers with a constantly increasi...
One day a young fugitive, trying to hide himself from the enemy, entered a small village. The people were kind to him and offered him a place to stay. But when the soldiers who sought the fugitive ask...
Often you will catch yourself wanting to receive your loving God by putting on a semblance of beauty, by holding back everything dirty and spoiled, by clearing just a little path that looks proper. Bu...
Often we are preoccupied with the question How can we be witnesses in the Name of Jesus? What are we supposed to say or do to make people accept the love that God offers them? These questions are expr...
Nouwen’s wisdom is a fusion of the psychological and the spiritual.
More enslaving than our occupations, however, are our preoccupations. To be pre-occupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there. This is worrying in the more specific sense of the w...
Many consumerist economies stay afloat by manipulating the low self-esteem of their consumers and by creating spiritual expectations through material means.
Let’s dare to enter into an intimate relationship with God without fear, trusting that we will receive love and always more love.
Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love.
Jesus is the obedient one. The center of his life is this obedient relationship with the Father. This may be hard for us to understand because the word obedience has so many negative connotations in o...
Jesus does not speak about a change of activities, a change in contacts, or even a change of pace. He speaks about a change of heart.
Isn’t the little child poor, gentle, and pure of heart? Isn’t the little child weeping in response to every little pain? Isn’t the little child the peacemaker hungry and thirsty for uprightness and th...
Is this not in large part due to our inability to face the pain of our loneliness? By running away from our loneliness and by trying to distract ourselves with people and special experiences, we do no...
If prayer, understood as an intimate relationship with God, is indeed the basis of all relationships—to ourselves as well as to others.
I have also learned to catch the darkness early, not to allow sadness to grow into depression or let a sense of being rejected develop into a feeling of abandonment. Even in the renewed and deepened f...
I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.