Worte zum Menschsein

by Phil Bosmans

Der weithin bekannte Menschenfreund Phil Bosmans hat mit seiner aufrechten, lebensnahen Weisheit unzählige Herzen berührt. Dieser Band ist für viele Menschen zum Begleiter geworden.

Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

Phil Bosmans was een Vlaamse pater en schrijver.

Phil Bosmans in de Nederlandstalige Wikipedia

Phil Bosmans was a Flemish priest and writer.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

in my memory this is another spiritual supermarket book, with minimal changes it would be broadly acceptable to most faith traditions, which I suppose is to say no more than given the range of human experience most people have related or similar problems and successful religions have developed broadly similar responses. Two ideas abide. One is the ambition to be like an oasis, to try to give or to be something positive for others, this bothers me slightly as metaphors can, what if a large caravan arrives at your oasis - the camels drink all the water and the people eat all the dates then chop down all the palm trees for fire wood. The other was 'the Cross is a reality in every life' which at first had no impact until shortly after I saw somebody's life fall apart, again though images and catch phrases can limit as much as support our thinking, in this case I was one of a team working abroad, we'd just had lunch, I wandered back into our subterranean work room and saw my colleague - he looked as though a hole had been pierced through the bottom of his being and his soul had leaked out. This was curious because he'd seemed alright over lunch. Suddenly he was deeply depressed and I in sheepdog mode would chase him out of his flat to eat sausages and drink a beer, since I have a touching faith in the healing power of our traditional foods, somehow the poor fellow managed to get committed into a mental health facility where he had to participate in talking therapies despite being anglophone and in a foreign country - this he had to do with a pocket dictionary, upsets are not always crosses to be born, they can also be deeply absurd. The traditional languages can blunt our openness to experience things as they are as we try to shoehorn them into forms that don't fit and pinch and rub instead.