Henri J. M. Nouwen
Abraham and Sarah. Isaac and Rebecca. Jacob and Rachel, all of them recognized this blessing and thus became the fathers and mothers of our faith. They persevered on their long and arduous life journeys because they never forgot that they were blessed. Jesus also sensed this blessing after John the Baptist baptized him in the Jordan. A voice came from heaven: "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased." That was the blessing, and it was this blessing that gave Jesus the inner strength in every praise and shame, in all admiration and rejection that awaited him. Just like Abraham and Sarah, Jesus never lost the deepest awareness that he was "Blessed." I tell you all this because I know how both you and I can be fickle. Today we feel magnificent, tomorrow utterly miserable. Today we are full of new thoughts, tomorrow everything seems grim and desolate. Today we think we can conquer the world, but tomorrow we feel overwhelmed by the slightest effort. These fluctuations in mood show that we no longer have in our ear the blessing that Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, and Jesus of Nazareth perceived, and that we must also hear.
If we are tossed up and down by the light waves on the surface of our existence, we easily become victims of a world that manipulates us at will; instead, if we keep in our ear the strong, kind voice that blesses us, we can move through life with a solid foundational feeling that all is well and that we are securely rooted in God.
You must have gone through many troublesome times in your life when you felt rather that you were accompanied by a curse than a blessing. And I can say the same about myself. Yes, I even believe that many people suffer from the difficult feeling that they live under a curse.
When I hear what people talk about at meals, in pubs, during work breaks, it occurs to me that they complain and curse an immense number of things in a spirit of passive resignation. Many, and sometimes we are included in this, perceive ourselves as victims in a world we cannot change, and the daily press certainly provides no assistance to help us do anything about this feeling. The sense that we live under a curse comes to mind more easily than the sense that we live in a blessing, and there would be plenty of reasons to reinforce this belief. We might say, "Just look at what is happening in the world. Look at the hungry, the refugees, the prisoners, the sick and the dying… Look at all the misery, injustice, and wars… Look at how we struggle daily to maintain our relationships, our work, our health…" Where is there any blessing to be seen for miles around? The feeling that we live under a curse arises easily. We easily hear the inner voice that tells us we are deceitful, bad, corrupt, worthless, useless, doomed to disease and death. Doesn't it seem easier for us to think that we are cursed than that we are blessed? And yet I tell you as a beloved child of God: you are blessed. Good words hold true for you – words that speak the truth. Curses, even if loudly and ruthlessly proclaimed, do not tell the truth. They are lies, which are easy to believe, but still lies. However, when the blessing speaks the truth about who you and I are, and when the curse deceives us – there is a very concrete question: How can we hear the blessing and claim it? If the reality that we are blessed is not just a feeling, but the truth that shapes and gives meaning to our ordinary lives, we must be willing to see and experience this blessing unequivocally.
I want to encourage you with two exercises that may help you to become aware that you are blessed: prayer and being in the presence.
Two Prompts
First, prayer. For me personally, prayer is increasingly becoming an opportunity to consciously hear the blessing. I have read and written much about prayer, but when I go to a quiet place to pray, it becomes clearer that while I tend to say many things to God, the real essence of prayer lies in being silent, listening to the voice that speaks good about me. That may sound self-indulgent, but it is actually a demanding exercise. I have such a great fear of being damned and that I must hear that I am not good or not good enough, that I quickly succumb to the temptation to start talking and out of fear continue talking endlessly. It requires real effort to gently push aside many voices and silence them, which challenge my goodness, and rely on hearing the voice that blesses me. Have you ever tried to spend a whole hour doing nothing but listening to the voice that dwells deep in your heart? When the radio isn’t playing, the TV isn’t running, there’s no book to read, no one to talk to, no work to be done, no necessary phone calls – how do you feel in that time? Often, nothing better comes to mind than a flood of things that we actually still have to take care of, so vividly that we decide to give up the uncomfortable silence for that moment and get back to work. It is not at all easy to truly immerse oneself in silence and to go beneath the surface of all those urgent and demanding voices of our world to listen there to the quiet inner voice that says: "You are my beloved child; in you I am well pleased." But if we have the courage to befriend our solitude and get used to our silence, we will get so far that we will hear this voice. I do not mean to say that one day you will hear this voice with your physical ears. I am not talking about a hallucinatory voice, but about a voice that we can perceive with the ear of faith, the ear of the inner heart.
Perhaps you will only realize afterward that it was that voice that blessed you. You thought that during the time of listening there was not much more than a lot of confused thoughts, but then you find out that you look forward to your next half hour of silence and that you miss it when you cannot afford it once. The Spirit of God reveals himself very quietly, very gently – and very secretly. He does not impose himself. But at the same time, he instills himself very persistently, very strongly, and very deeply. He changes our hearts fundamentally. Faithful practice of prayer will show you that you are God's beloved son and will give you the strength to bless others as well.
My second prompt for how you could more consciously live your life out of blessing lies in the exercise of presence. By presence, I mean the conscious expectation of all the blessings that come to you day by day and year after year.
The problem with our modern way of life is that we are too distracted. We seek our confirmation in the wrong places? In any case, we do not recognize that we are blessed at all. Often, people say something good about us, but we reject it with remarks like: "But that doesn’t matter; it's nothing at all." and so forth. These clichés seem to be displays of modesty, but in reality, they are a sign that we are not vigilant and attentive enough to truly accept the good that is being said to us. For us business people, it does not seem easy at all to really accept such positive assertions. The fact that few people say words of blessing to others may be a sad result of the state that there are hardly any people who are willing and able to accept such blessings. It has become exceedingly difficult for us to retain, listen to, pay attention to, and gratefully accept what is offered to us.
This attentive expectation can open our eyes to the various ways in which we are remembered with blessings: the blessing of a poor person who stops us on the street, the blessing of blooming trees and fresh flowers that give us a sense of new life, the blessing of music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Most of all, however, the blessing comes to us in words of gratitude, encouragement, affection, and love. We do not need to invent these diverse forms of blessing. They are already here: they surround us from all sides. But we must hope for and accept them. They do not impose themselves on us. They quietly and gently remind us of that marvelous, strong, but hidden voice of the one who calls us by name and speaks good about us.
I therefore sincerely hope that both of these prompts, to cultivate prayer and expectation, will help you live better from the awareness that you are blessed and are continually being blessed. I cannot strongly enough emphasize how important it is to claim this blessing. If you do not claim your blessing, you quickly find yourself in the land of the damned. This land of no one between the land of the blessed and the land of the damned is very narrow or may not even exist at all. Therefore, you have a choice as to which land you want to live in, and you must choose it anew in every moment.
(These lines are written by the author to his "non-believing" friend Fred.)
Published from the book of the same name in Karmelimpulse III/1993.
Translated by Dr. Vojtěch Pola
