Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.
Interpretation
Friendship is essential to personal growth and spirituality.
In this quote, Henri Nouwen emphasizes the vital role that friendship plays in one's spiritual development. He suggests that relationships with others are foundational to understanding oneself and engaging with the deeper aspects of life, highlighting that connecting with friends nourishes the spirit and fosters personal growth.
In practice
In a speech about personal development, one might say, 'As Henri Nouwen beautifully expressed, friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.'
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 β for us. And calling us to share in Godβs 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.
We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friendβs presence, is concerned with the common world.
All I required to be happy was friendship and people I could admire.
Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friendship will discover and remedy, and which would remain for ever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attentive to every misery.
I think they ought to know. You do them a disservice by not confiding something this important to them.β βI didnβt want ββ ββ to worry or frighten them?β said Dumbledore, surveying Harry over the top of his half-moon spectacles. βOr perhaps, to confess that you yourself are worried and frightened? You need your friends, Harry. As you so rightly said, Sirius would not have wanted you to shut yourself away.
Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.
The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.
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