Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of physical touch and emotional connection, highlighting the deeper need for genuine love beyond superficial desires.
Henri Nouwen's quote sheds light on the vital human needs for physical affection and emotional intimacy. It suggests that while our bodies crave touch and connection, these desires often mask a deeper longing for genuine love. By transcending mere physical pleasures, we can achieve a sense of wholeness and unity, nurturing our true selves and fostering meaningful relationships.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of relationships, this quote can remind listeners of the deeper connections we need.
The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. God loves us, not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love.
The immense joy in welcoming back the lost son hides in the immense sorrow that has gone before....our brokenness may appear beautiful, but our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.
Suffering invites us to place our hurts in larger hands. In Christ we see God suffering – for us. And calling us to share in God’s suffering love for a hurting world. The small and even overpowering pains of our lives are intimately connected with the greater pains of Christ. Our daily sorrows are anchored in a greater sorrow and therefore a larger hope.
To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, welcome, to accept.
Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. (Finding My Way Home)
Becoming the beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.
I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.
Any place you love is the world to you.
Love's very pain is sweet,_x000D_ _x000D_ But its reward is in the world divine_x000D_ _x000D_ Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.
If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.
As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.
All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.
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