i write to believe.

Holy Trinity by Andrei Rublev (1410) As we place ourselves in front of the icon in prayer, we come to experience a gentle invitation to participate in the intimate conversation that is taking place among the three divine angels and to join them around the table.  The movement from the Father toward the Son and the movement of both Son and Spirit toward the Father become a movement in which the one who prays is lifted up and held secure. (Henri Nouwen)

It is my growing conviction that in Jesus the mystical and the revolutionary ways are not opposites, but two sides of the same human mode of experiential transcendence. I am increasingly convinced that conversion is the individual equivalent of revolution. Therefore every real revolutionary is challenged to be a mystic at heart, and he who walks the mystical way is called to unmask the illusory quality of human society. - Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

For the longest time I have been feeling so constricted and chained.  Emotions have become unsettling and I have been trying to navigate them this way for the longest time now.  Most often I sink into self-condemnation for the lack of understanding the rhythms of these emotions and why they drown me every so often.  Reading Henri Nouwen has enlightened me because he finally finds a way to describe what I have been feeling.  It's liberating and painful at the same time.  It shows how much I am and have been wounded.  It shows why I have been aching.  And it shows why I have never felt interior freedom. Resentment is a passion, a paralyzing set of complaints that make us feel angry and frustrated with the people and institutions on which we have made ourselves dependent. Passion, in the older sense of the word, is a suffering (pathos = suffering) and a frustration of the power to act rationally due to an overwhelming emotion. Sometimes this helplessne...

Most Christian Leaders are used to thinking in terms of large-scale organization: getting people together in congregations, schools, and hospitals and running the show as a circus director.  They have become unfamiliar with, and even somewhat afraid of, the deep and significant movements of the Spirit within.  I am afraid that in a few decades the Church will be accused of having failed at its most basic task: to offer people creative ways to communicate with the divine source of human life.   But how can we avoid this danger?  I think by no other way than to enter the heart, the center of our existence, and become familiar with the complexities of our inner lives.  As soon as we feel at home in our own house--discover the dark corners as well as the light spots, the closed doors as well as the drafty rooms--our confusion will evaporate, our anxiety will diminish, and we will become capable of creative work and a spiritually informed life. The key work here is...