Friday, February 19, 2021

Nouwen Meditation: Being at Home

Now & Then Podcast

In this week’s episode of “Now & Then”, New York Times best-selling author Father James Martin explains what prayer is, how it can transform us, and invites us to connect with a God we don’t understand.

DAILY MEDITATION | FEBRUARY 19, 2021
Being at Home
Creating space for the other is far from an easy task. It requires hard concentration and articulate work.... Indeed, more often than not, rivalry and competition, desire for power and immediate results, impatience and frustration, and most of all, plain fear make their forceful demands and tend to fill every possible empty corner of our life. Empty space tends to create fear. As long as our minds, hearts, and hands are occupied, we can avoid confronting the painful questions to which we never gave much attention and that we do not want to surface....

When we think back to the places where we felt most at home, we quickly see that it was where our hosts gave us the precious freedom to come and go on our own terms and did not claim us for their own needs. Only in a free space can re-creation take place and new life be found. The real host is the one who offers that space where we do not have to be afraid and where we can listen to our own inner voices and find our own personal way of being human. But to be such a host we have to first of all be at home in our own house.
"She said to her husband, "I know that this man who often comes this way is a holy man of God. Let's make a small room on the roof and put in it a bed and a table, a chair and a lamp for him. Then he can stay there whenever he comes to us."

1 KINGS 4:9,10 (NIV)
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