Quotes by Henri Nouwen
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Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.

The friend who cares makes it clear that whatever happens in the external world, being present to each other is what really matters. In fact, it matters more than pain, illness, or even death.

The central question is, Are the leaders of the future truly men and women of God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God's  presence, to listen to God's voice, to look at God's beauty, to touch God's incarnate Word and to taste fully God's infinite goodness.

Lord Jesus, master of both the light and the darkness, send your Holy Spirit upon our preparations for Christmas. We whose hearts are heavy seek the joy of your presence. We are your people, walking in darkness, yet seeking the light. To you we say, 'Come Lord Jesus!'

Be sure that you make a difference in the world.

I loved to teach, I loved my students, but I wanted to find a community. I prayed: Lord, show me where you want me to go. I will go wanted wherever you call me -- but please be clear.

I speak of God's love and grace and redemption and freedom, but when I say in the context of this community, it is heard differently. To be with people so obviously broken, so obviously handicapped, and here to discover real joy and peace -- that makes the Word of God come alive.

Live, work, and travel with handicapped people, so I can stay close to them. But since I am often busy with many things, it's a constant struggle to keep the handicapped members of our community in the center of my life.

We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for.

Prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.

It's an incredible mystery of God's love that the more you know how deeply you are loved, the more you will see how deeply your sisters and your brothers in the human family are loved.

The word that seems best to summarize the desire of the human heart is 'communion.' ...wherever we look it is communion that we seek.

My whole life I have been complaining
that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered
that my interruptions
were my work.

His (Christ's) appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.

My writing has developed drastically . The Return of the Prodigal Son is the most important thing I've done, and my most mature book.

The most important thing I've come to believe in is that people with mental handicaps have a unique mission to bring God's blessing to the World.

Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you.

Jesus invites us to abide in his love. That means to dwell with all that I am in him. It is an invitation to a total belonging, to full intimacy, to an unlimited being-with. The light of the Spirit reveals to us that love conquers all fear.

You don't have to run around world proving you're lovable.

Friendship and love are impossible without a mutual vulnerability.

When I could no longer cling to my normal supports I discovered that true support and real safety lie far beyond the structures of our world.

In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face, and in the hands of the oppressor I recognize my own hands. Their flesh is my flesh, their blood is my blood, their pain is my pain, their smile is my smile.

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.

Prayer requires that we stand in God's presence with open hands, naked and vulnerable, proclaiming to ourselves and to others that without God we can do nothing. As disciples, we find not some but all of our strength, hope, courage, and confidence in God. Therefore, prayer must be our first concern.

If you feel loved, you can do a thousand things. If you feel rejected, everything becomes a problem.

I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.

The real question is: how can I live so that my death will be fruitful for others?

Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others.

When we approach fundraising in a spirit of gratitude, our confidence in our mission does not depend on how the person we are with responds to our request! We are free to remain secure in God's love with our hearts set joyfully on the kingdom.

The real 'work' of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.

If you want to know anything about community, you have to realize that the contemplative side is essential. Community without retreating and quiet time never survives.

It is freeing to become aware that we do not have to be victims of our past and can learn new ways of responding. Forgiveness is love practiced among people who love poorly. It sets us free without wanting anything in return.

I am very grateful that I am in touch with so many different church groups. I am always very moved by the fact that so many people -- practically over the spectrum of the Christian world -- are responding to my writing.

Which questions guide our lives? Which questions do we make our own? Which questions deserve our undivided and full personal commitment? Finding the right questions is crucial to finding the answers.

The main question is not, how can we hide our wounds...but how can we put our woundedness in service to others.

Ministry means the ongoing attempt to put one's own search for God, with all the moments of pain and joy, despair and hope, at the disposal of those who want to join this search but do not know how.

Simply being with someone is difficult because it asks of us that we share in the other's vulnerability, enter with him or her into the experience of weakness and powerlessness, become part of the uncertainty, and give up control and self-determination.

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved.

Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.

Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.

Our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

I often wonder if my knowledge about God has not become my greatest stumbling block to my knowledge of God.

Jesus didn't live alone. He had Peter, John, and James around him. There were the Twelve and the other disciples. They formed circles of intimacy around Jesus. We too need these circles of intimacy, but it's a discipline.

We can be unhappy about many things, but jy can still be there... It is important to become aware that at every moment of our life we have an opportunity to choose joy... It is in the choice that our true freedom lies, and that freedom is, in the final analysis, the freedom to love.

Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be.

Our spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. This, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.

Our life is full of brokenness -- broken relationships, broken promises, broken expectations. How can we live with that brokenness without becoming bitter and resentful except by returning again and again to God's faithful presence in our lives.

But still -- that is our vocation: to convert the hostis into a hospes, the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.

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.

True Hospitality is welcoming the stranger on her own terms. This kind of hospitality can only be offered by those who've found the center of their lives in their own hearts.

The Church is the body of Christ fashioned by baptism and the Eucharist.

Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

That is our vocation: to convert the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.

Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.

Often we come home from a sharing session with a feeling that something precious has been taken away from us or that holy ground has been trodden upon.

The university has become a place that prepares you for the fights in the world.

The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.

Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply.

To be baptized means to make the passage with the people of Israel and with Jesus from slavery to freedom and from death to new life. It is a commitment to a life in and through Jesus.

That's prayer to let God's Word speak deep within you and tell you, You are my beloved. You don't have to take an eye for an eye. No, no you're too rich for that.

Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint.

Spiritual maturity is not knowing what to do with your whole life, but just knowing what to do next.

Every time there are losses, there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing...that is a friend who cares.

Somewhere we know that without silence, words lose their meaning.

In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.

God is a God of the present. God is always in the moment, be that moment hard or easy, joyful and painful.

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.

In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered.

Ministers are powerless people who have nothing to boast of except their weaknesses. But when the Lord whom they serve fills them with His blessing they will move mountains and change the hearts of people wherever they go.

The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.

The evangelical movement has become just a bit victimized by a success-oriented culture, wanting the church -- like the corporation -- to be successful.

Most Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.

Asking people for money is giving them the opportunity to put their resources at the disposal of the Kingdom.

Ministry is the least important thing. You cannot not minister if you are in communion with God and live in community.

To be a minister means above all to become powerless, or in more precise terms, to speak with our powerlessness to the condition of powerlessness which is so keenly felt but so seldom expressed by the people of our age.

The resistance to praying is like the resistance of tightly clenched fists. This image shows a tension, a desire to cling tightly to yourself, a greediness which betrays fear.

Too many of us are lonely ministers practicing a lonely ministry.

One of the main tasks of theology is to find words that do not divide but unite, that do not create conflict but unity, that do not hurt but heal.

The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.

Prayer is the most concrete way to make our home in God.

The real enemies of our life are the 'oughts' and the 'ifs.' They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and now.

For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved.

A life without a lonely place, that is, without a quiet center, becomes destructive.

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 spiritual life is not a life before, after, or beyond our everyday existence. No, the spiritual life can only be real when it is lived in the midst of the pains and joys of the here and now.

Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on.

Jesus didn't say, 'Blessed are those who care for the poor.' He said, 'Blessed are we where we are poor, where we are broken.' It is there that God loves us deeply and pulls us into deeper communion with himself.

Prayer is the beginning and the end, the source and the fruit, the core and the content, the basis and the goal of all peacemaking.

Our first responsibility in the midst of violence is to prevent it from destroying us.