By prayer, community is created as well as expressed.
Interpretation
Prayer fosters a sense of community among individuals, both in its creation and expression.
Henri Nouwen emphasizes the role of prayer in bringing people together, stating that it not only creates a shared bond among individuals but also serves as a way to express that bond. Through collective prayer, individuals can cultivate a sense of belonging and strengthen their connections with one another.
In practice
In a church gathering, to highlight the importance of unity, one might say, 'By prayer, community is created as well as expressed, as we all come together in faith.'
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.
Anyone who's lost someone to cancer will say this, that you have to struggle to try to remember the person before the diagnosis happened, because they really do change - as anyone would change.
They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.
An unconscious, gentle process whereby people who want to be loving attempt to be so by telling little white lies, by withholding some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving.
Relationships, not achievements or the acquisition of things, are what matters most in life.
When you kill somebody's little sister with a missile, he's going to hate you forever. And the next generation will hate you even more.
How do you live with one person for 13 years and another for eight and find both as alien as strangers?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.