People with handicaps teach me that being is more important than doing, the heart is more important than the mind, and caring together is better than caring alone.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the value of existence and compassion over achievement and intellect.
Henri Nouwen highlights the profound lessons learned from individuals with disabilities, suggesting that one's essence is defined more by who they are and how they connect with others rather than by their actions or intellect. He points out that love and compassion are fundamental to our shared humanity, emphasizing that collective caring fosters deeper connections than solitary efforts.
In practice
In a speech about community service, one might refer to this quote to inspire collective action.
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.
The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.
The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.
Charity is the cement that unites communities to God and individuals to each other_x000D_ so that he who contributes to the union of hearts in a community_x000D_ binds it indissolubly to God.
War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
He had put his hand up in class, a declaration of existence, a claim that he knew something. And that was forbidden to him. They could give a number of reasons for why they had to torment him; he was too fat, too ugly, too disgusting. But the real problem was simply that he existed, and every reminder of his existence was a crime.
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