Today’s Reflection August 22


Jesus, in whom the fullness of God dwells, has become our home. By making his home in us, he allows us to make our home in him. By entering into the intimacy of our innermost self, he offers us the opportunity to enter into his own intimacy with God. By choosing us as his preferred dwelling place, he invites us to choose him as our preferred dwelling place. . . To those who are tortured by inner or outer fear, and who desperately look for the house of love where they can find the intimacy their hearts’ desire, Jesus says, ‘You have a home . . . I am your home . . . claim me as your home . . . it is right where you are . . . in your innermost being . . . in your heart.’ The more attentive we are to such words, the more we realize that we do not have to go far to find what we are searching for. The tragedy is that we are so possessed by fear that we do not trust our innermost self as an intimate place but anxiously wander around hoping to find it where we are not. We try to find that intimate place in knowledge, competence, notoriety, success, friends, sensations, pleasure, dreams, or artificially induced states of consciousness. Thus we become strangers to ourselves, people who have an address but are never home and hence can never be addressed by the true voice of love.

– Henri Nouwen

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