- Henri Nouwen -
The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery
These touching quotes are writings from the journal of Henri Nouwen during his
seven month stay in a Trappist monastery.
Today I imagined my inner self as a place crowded with pins and needles. How could I receive anyone in my prayer when there is no real place for them to be free and relaxed? When I am still so full of preoccupations, jealousies, angry feelings, anyone who enters will get hurt. I had a very vivid realization that I must create some free space in my innermost self so that I may indeed invite others to enter and be healed. To pray for others means to offer others a hospitable place where I can really listen to their needs and pains. Compassion, therefore, calls for a self-scrutiny that can lead to inner gentleness.
If I could have a gently "interiority" -- a heart of flesh and not of stone, a room with some spots on which one might walk barefooted -- then God and my fellow humans could meet each other there.
Then the center of my heart can become the place where God can  hear the prayers for my neighbors and embrace them with his love.
The evening prayers called Compline (meaning: to make the day complete) form one of the most intimate moments of the monastic day. It is the moment during which all the monks are present, even those who sometimes have to be absent during other prayers, and during which you sense a real togetherness. The prayers are always the same. Therefore, nobody needs a book. Everyone can stand wherever he wants, and therefore no lights are necessary. All is quiet in the house. It is the beginning of what the monks call the great silence which lasts from 6:30 p.m. until 5:30 a.m.
Compline is such an intimate and prayerful moment that some people in the neighborhood come daily to the Abbey to join in this most quiet prayer of the day.
I start to realize that the psalms of Compline slowly become flesh in me; they become part of my night and lead me to a peaceful sleep.
Ponder on your bed and be still: Make justice your sacrifice and trust in the Lord.
I will lie down in peace and sleep comes at once for You alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety. (Pr. 4)

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High and abides in the shade of the Almighty says the Lord: "My refuge, my stronghold, my God in whom I trust!"
...It is he who will free you from the snare of the fowler who seeks to destroy you; he will conceal you with his pinions and under his wings you will find refuge. (Psalm 90)
Slowly these words enter into the center of my heart. They are more than ideas, images, comparisons: They become a real presence. After a day with much work or with many tensions, you feel that you can let go in safety and realize how good it is to dwell in the shelter  of the Most High.
Monks go to a monastery to find God. But monks who live in a monastery as if they had found God are not real monks. I came here to come "closer" to God, but if I ever were to make myself believe that I am any closer to God than anyone else, I would just be fooling myself. God should be sought, but we cannot find God. We can only be found by him.
One of the monks said to me today, "monks are like children: very shy and very sensitive. When you ruffle them they tend to withdraw. They are not like college students who can take some mental pushing and pulling. They are very vulnerable, and if you come on too strong, they might respond by hiding themselves from you."
Often I have said to people, "I will pray for you" but how often did I really enter into the full reality of what that means? I now see how indeed I can enter deeply into the other and pray to God from his center. When I really bring my friends and the many I pray for into my innermost being and feel their pains, their struggles, their cries in my own soul, then I leave myself, so to speak, and become them, then I have compassion. Compassion lies at the heart of our prayer for our fellow human beings. When I pray for the world, I become the world; when I pray for the endless needs of the millions, my soul expands and wants to embrace them all and bring them into the presence of God. But in the midst of that experience I realize that compassion is not mine but God's gift to me. I cannot embrace the world, but God can. I cannot pray, but God can pray in me. When God became as we are, that is, when God allowed all of us to enter into his intimate life, it became possible for us to share in his infinite compassion.
  In praying for others, I lose myself and become the other, only to be found by the divine love which holds the whole of humanity in a compassionate embrace.
When manual work no longer leads us closer to God, we are no longer fully realizing our vocation to pray without ceasing.  How can manual work be prayer? It is prayer when we not only work with our hands but also with our hearts, that is, when our work brings us into closer relationship with God's creation and the human task of working on God's earth.
Spiritual reading also should be done from the heart. It should bring us into more intimate contact with God who reveals himself to us in Scripture, in the lives of the saints and in the refelctions of the theologians.
When manual work and spiritual reading are no longer prayer but only a way to earn money or be intellectually stimulated, we lose purity of heart; we become divided and are no longer single-eyed and single-minded. It is obvious that the simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. The simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort; it is not a spontanious simplicity.
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