{"id":341,"date":"2016-02-09T22:07:05","date_gmt":"2016-02-10T02:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/theinnerroom\/?p=341"},"modified":"2016-02-16T21:57:56","modified_gmt":"2016-02-17T01:57:56","slug":"reaching-out-with-henri-nouwen-a-lenten-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theinnerroom\/2016\/02\/reaching-out-with-henri-nouwen-a-lenten-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"Reaching Out With Henri Nouwen: A Lenten Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Creaci\u00f3n_de_Ad\u00e1n_(Miguel_\u00c1ngel)\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew 22:27b-40, NRSVCE<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While affirming that these words do in fact sum up the law and the prophets, there are those of us who can\u2019t help wondering whether they don\u2019t also sum up the heart of life\u2019s complexities. To know what is it is to love ourselves is itself a profound difficulty \u2013 to love others, a further difficulty \u2013 and to love God, more difficult still. And we get confused. Fleeing from the shambles inside us, we so often turn to the others in our lives \u2013 whether humans or God \u2013 as means of fleeing the terror we fear inside ourselves; rather than loving others as ourselves, and God over all, we use God and others, making them loci of escapism from the self we can\u2019t come home to. This ends poorly for all involved; we are tormented by a self-delusion we can never quite escape, and those others involved bear the wounds we inflict. This, indeed, is the story of humanity since the first humans felt themselves naked and hid.<\/p>\n

But if this is the human story since Eden, it is also \u2013 in reverse \u2013 the story of Christ\u2019s deliberate journey toward the cross, for it is precisely at His cross that all these matters come to a head. It is here that Christ will resist the temptation to bid others \u2013 whether an army of angels or disciples ready to go to war for him \u2013 to face the darkness that only He can face. It is here He will know the alienation of self far more profound than the weak inventions of modern existentialism, in which He who is God Himself will pray with the Psalmist, \u201cMy God, my God, why have you forsaken me\u201d \u2013 and mean it. And it is towards these events \u2013 these crises held in the person of Christ \u2013 that we with Him set our faces like flint. For His work is not to endure these things so that we can forgo suffering them. Rather, it is to endure them so that our own version of this walk towards death, our ars moriendi<\/em>, will not be alone \u2013 even as it is to endure them so that His own life \u2013 His resurrection \u2013 will likewise not be alone; that where He is, there we\u00a0may\u00a0also be. And regardless of where we are individually on this journey toward the cross, Lent is our yearly way of marking it, reminding us of its centrality in our spiritual journeys, and causing us to reflect on our own progress down this road with Christ.<\/p>\n

In this spirit, we at the Inner Room invite you to join us as we contemplate such Lenten matters along with one of the most spiritually and pastorally sensitive Christian authors of the twentieth century, Henri Nouwen. Various of us writing for the Inner Room have been marked by his deep and measured reflections on the interactions of God, others, and self in a book that (in good Nouwenian fashion) plays down its own brilliance through the humble title, Reaching Out<\/em><\/a>. While our intention is neither to work through the book in a formal, programmatic way, nor to limit posts to reflections on this book, we are proposing it as something of a touchstone for orienting our thoughts as we proceed with Christ toward Jerusalem, the very heart of the tangle of complexity consisting of God, others, and self. We invite you to join us, and pray that we, you, and others may be blessed as we all walk together toward the cross in Jerusalem that is yours, mine, and, most importantly, His.<\/p>\n

Stay in touch! Like The Inner Room on Facebook:<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Inner Room<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u201cYou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.\u201d Matthew 22:27b-40, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2529,"featured_media":352,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[47,147,68,521,146,144,145],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cross","tag-god","tag-henri-nouwen","tag-lent","tag-others","tag-reaching-out","tag-self"],"yoast_head":"\nReaching Out With Henri Nouwen: A Lenten Journey<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. 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