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the minister is called to recognize the sufferings of his time in his own heart and make that recognition the starting point of his service. Whether he tries to enter into a dislocated world, relate to a convulsive generation, or speak to a dying man, his service will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which he speaks.
Nuclear man is a man who has lost naïve faith in the possibilities of technology and is painfully aware that the same powers that enable man to create new life styles carry the potential for self-destruction.
Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction.
Nuclear man, like Peter, does not live with an ideology. He has shifted from the fixed and total forms of an ideology to more fluid ideological fragments
Nuclear man no longer believes in anything that is always and everywhere true and valid. He lives by the hour and creates his life on the spot.
He is primarily looking for experiences that give him a sense of value.
Christianity is reduced to an all-encompassing ideology, nuclear man is all too prone to be skeptical about its relevance to his life experience.
When man is no longer able to look beyond his own death and relate himself to what extends beyond the time and space of his life, he loses his desire to create and the excitement of being human.
Here man becomes aware that the choice is no longer between his world or a better world, but between no world or a new world.
we are challenged to look into the eyes of the young men and women of today,
prevent us from handing them over to the enemy and enable us to lead them out of their hidden places into the middle of their people where they can redeem us from our fears.
Instead of the father, the peer becomes the standard.
being excommunicated by the small circle of friends to which they want to belong can be an unbearable experience.
we no longer witness any desire to leave the safe place and to travel to the father’s house which has so many rooms,
enter ourselves first of all into the center of our existence and become familiar with the complexities of our inner lives.
Christian leader is, therefore, first of all, a man who is willing to put his own articulated faith at the disposal of those who ask his help.
servant of servants, because he is the first to enter the promised but dangerous land, the first to tell those who are afraid what he has seen, heard and touched.
Christian leader leads man to confession, in the classic sense of the word: to the basic affirmation that man is man and God is God, and that without God, man cannot be called man.
deep human encounter in which a man is willing to put his own faith and doubt, his own hope and despair, his own light and darkness at the disposal of others who want to find a way through their confusion and touch the solid core of life.
lead his people out of the land of confusion into the land of hope. Therefore, he must first have the courage to be an explorer of the new territory in himself and to articulate his discoveries as a service to the inward generation.
Compassion
not only an inward generation asking for articulation but also a fatherless generation looking for a new kind of authority,
Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.
For a compassionate man nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.
But he will look critically at what is going on and make his decision based on insight into his own vocation, not on the desire for popularity or the fear of rejection.
The contemplative critic takes away the illusory mask of the manipulative world and has the courage to show what the true situation is.
But he is not afraid to die, since his vision makes him transcend the difference between life and death and makes him free to do what has to be done here and now, notwithstanding the risks involved.
contemplative critic has the sensibility to notice the small mustard seed and the trust to believe that “when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches.” (Mt. 13.31–32)
He is not a naïve optimist who expects his frustrated desires to be satisfied in the future, nor a bitter pessimist who keeps repeating that the past has taught him that there is nothing new under the sun; he is rather a man of hope who lives with the unshakable conviction that now he is seeing a dim reflection in a mirror, but that one day he will see the future face to face.
man of prayer is, in the final analysis, the man who is able to recognize in others the face of the Messiah and make visible what was hidden, make touchable what was unreachable.
his articulation of God’s work within himself he can lead others out of confusion
compassion he can guide them out of the closed circuits of their in-groups to the...
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Why should a healthy-looking, intelligent man show himself and make himself really present to a man in whom the forces of death are at work?
often find their ministers distant men who do not want to burn their fingers.
The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.
In short: “Who can take away suffering without entering it?” The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.
Faith in the value and meaning of life, even in the face of despair and death, is the second principle of Christian leadership.
Christian leader is not a leader because he announces a new idea and tries to convince others of its worth; he is a leader because he faces the world with eyes full of expectation, with the expertise to take away the veil that covers its hidden potential.
Many ministers, priests and Christian laymen have become disillusioned, bitter and even hostile when years of hard work bear no fruit, when little change is accomplished.
when a man enters with his fellow man into his fear of death and is able to wait for him right there, “leaving the safe place” might turn out to be a very difficult act of leadership. It is an act of disciple-ship in which we follow the hard road of Christ, who entered death with nothing but bare hope.
This service requires the willingness to enter into a situation, with all the human vulnerabilities a man has to share with his fellow man.
Messiah, the story tells us, is sitting among the poor, binding his wounds one at a time, waiting for the moment when he will be needed.
wounded healer, the one who must look after his own wounds but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others.
Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift.
our loneliness reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be destructive when misunderstood, but filled with promise for him who can tolerate its sweet pain.
that no love or friendship, no intimate embrace or tender kiss, no community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition.
Such false hope leads us to make exhausting demands and prepares us for bitterness and dangerous hostility when we start discovering that nobody, and nothing, can live up to our absolutistic expectations.
For a deep understanding of his own pain makes it possible for him to convert his weakness into strength and to offer his own experience as a source of healing to those who are often lost in the darkness of their own misunderstood sufferings.
This experience tells us that we can only love because we are born out of love, that we can only give because our life is a gift, and that we can only make others free because we are set free by Him whose heart is greater than ours.
minister is not a doctor whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, he deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared.
