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.
Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house; favored old barren reason from my bed, and took the daughter of the vine to spouse.
Only God can give us a selfless love for others, as the Holy Spirit changes us from within. This is one reason we must receive Christ, for apart from His Spirit we can never be freed from the chains of selfishness, jealousy, and indifference. Will others see Christ's love in your life today?
When I experience Love I must go to God. When I experience non-attachment God must come to me.
You have been hiding so long aimlessly drifting in the sea of my love Even so You have always been connected to me Connected, revealed in the known in the unmanifest I am life itself
But Colin's only understanding of love was of limitless loyalty, boundless tolerance.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.