Ubi Caritas: Nouwen Meditation: Know Yourself

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Nouwen Meditation: Know Yourself

Now & Then Podcast

Transformed by God's love, South African Denis Jacobs now ministers to prisoners using Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. Denis shares the inspiring story of the Father to the Fatherless initiative in this episode of Henri Nouwen, Now & Then.

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DAILY MEDITATION | JUNE 27, 2023

Know Yourself

There can hardly be a better image of caring than that of the artist who brings new life to people by his honest and fearless self-portrait. Rembrandt painted his sixty-three self-portraits not just as “a model for studies in expression” but as a “search for the spiritual through the channel of his innermost personality.”* Rembrandt felt that he had to enter into his own self, into his dark cellars as well as into his light rooms, if he really wanted to penetrate the mystery of man’s interiority. Rembrandt realized that what is most personal is most universal. While growing in age he was more and more able to touch the core of the human experience, in which individuals in their misery can recognize themselves and find “courage and new youth.” We will never be able to really care if we are not willing to paint and repaint constantly our self-portrait, not as a morbid self-preoccupation, but as a service to those who are searching for some light in the midst of the darkness.

The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, "God I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector... But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven but was beating his breast and singing, "God be merciful to me, a sinner!"

LUKE 18:11, 13 (NRSV)

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