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I wanted at least to avert the temptation of not entering any doors at all out of fear of the closed ones.
For all ministers are called to recognize the sufferings of their time in their own hearts, and make to that recognition the starting point of their service. Whether we try to enter into a dislocated world, relate to a convulsive generation, or speak to a dying person, our service will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which we speak.
People have lost naïve faith in the possibilities of technology and are painfully aware that the same powers that enable us to create new life styles also carry the potential for self-destruction.
creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction.
Most of us see such an abundance of material commodities around us that scarcity no longer motivates our lives, but at the same time we are groping for direction and asking for meaning and purpose.
the problem is not that the future holds a new danger, such as a nuclear war, but that there might be no future at all.
modern people can by characterized by (1) a historical dislocation, (2) a fragmented ideology, and (3) a search for new immortality.
Only when we feel ourselves responsible for the future can we have hope or despair; but when we think of ourselves as the passive victims of an extremely complex technological bureaucracy, our motivation falters and we start drifting from one moment to the next, making life a long row of randomly chained incidents and accidents.
When we wonder why the language of traditional Christianity has lost its liberating power for those who live in the modern age, we have to realize that most Christian preaching is still based on the presupposition that we see ourselves as meaningfully integrated with a history in which God came to us in the past, is living under us in the present, and will come to liberate us in the future. But when our historical consciousness is broken, the whole Christian message seems like a lecture about the great pioneers to someone on an acid trip.
Those who live in the modern age no longer believe in anything that is always and everywhere true and valid. We live by the hour and create our lives on the spot.
When Christianity is reduced to an all-encompassing ideology, those of us who live in the modern age are all too prone to be skeptical about its relevance to our life experience.
the paralysis of all humans in the modern age who have lost the source of their creativity, which is their sense of immortality. When we are no longer able to look beyond our own deaths and relate ourselves to what extends beyond the time and space of our individual lives, we lose both our desire to create and the excitement of being human.
My own involvement in the spasms and pains of those living in the modern age makes me suspect that there are two main ways by which we try to break out of our cocoons and fly: the mystical way and the revolutionary way.
prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.
the choice is no longer between our present world or a better world, but between a new world or no world.
Their goal is not a better human being, but a new human being; one who relates to the self and the world in ways which are still unexplored but which belong to our hidden potentials.
The life of these new humans is not ruled by manipulation and supported by weapons, but is ruled by love and supported by new ways of interpersonal communication.
great revolutionary leaders and the great contemplatives of our time meet in their common concern to liberate those who live in the modern age from their paralysis.
For a Christian, Jesus is the one in whom it has indeed become manifest that revolution and conversion cannot be separated in the human search for experiential transcendence.
His appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.
he also remains for modern humanity the way to liberation and freedom.
“the inward generation.” It was the generation that gave absolute priority to the personal and that tended, in a remarkable way, to withdraw into the self. This
The greatest complaint of the Spanish mystics St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, was that they lacked a spiritual guide to lead them along the right paths and enable them to distinguish between creative and destructive spirits. We hardly need emphasize how dangerous the experimentation with the interior life can be. Drugs, as well as different concentration practices and withdrawal into the self, often do more harm than good. On the other hand it also is becoming obvious that those who avoid the painful encounter with the unseen are doomed to live a supercilious, boring, and
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It is possible that the Church could be accused of having failed in its most basic task: to offer people creative ways to communicate with the source of human life.
It can become a true celebration when the liturgical leader is able to name the space where joy and sorrow touch each other as the place in which it is possible to celebrate both life and death.
So the first and most basic task of contemporary Christian leaders is to lead people out of the land of confusion into the land of hope. Therefore, they must first have the courage to be explorers of the new territory within themselves and to articulate their discoveries as a service to the inward generations.
Compassion must become the core, and even the nature, of authority. Christian leaders are people of God only insofar as they are able to make the compassion of God with humanity—which is visible in Jesus Christ—credible in their own world.
Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence, not only that God is God and humans are human, but also that our neighbor really is our fellow human being.
For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.
ministers may entangle themselves in the complications of their own assumed competence and use their specialism as an excuse to avoid the much more difficult task of being compassionate.
But Christian ministers who have discovered in themselves the voice of the Spirit and have rediscovered their fellow human beings with compassion might be able to look at the people they meet, the contacts they make, and the events they become a part of, in a different way. They might uncover the first glimpse of the new world behind the veil of everyday life. As contemplative critics they keep a certain distance to prevent becoming absorbed in what is most urgent and most immediate, but that same distance allows them to bring to the fore the real beauty of the world and of humanity, which is
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Christian leaders are called to help others affirm this great news, and to make visible in daily events the fact that behind the dirty curtain of our painful symptoms there is something great to be seen: the face of God in whose image we are shaped.
they are rather people of hope who live with the unshakable conviction that now they are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror, but one day they will see the future face-to-face.
Isolation is among the worst of human sufferings,
The emptiness of the past and the future can never be filled with words, but only by the presence of a human being. Because only then can hope be born, that there might be at least one exception to the “nobody and nothing” lament—a hope that will inspire the whisper, “Maybe, after all, someone is waiting for me.”
None of us can offer leadership to anyone unless we make our presence known—that is, unless we step forward out of the anonymity and apathy of our surroundings and make the possibility of fellowship visible.
Human beings can keep their sanity and stay alive as long as there is at least one person waiting for them. The human mind can indeed rule the body even when there is little health left.
Rather they are two human beings who reawaken in each other the deepest human intuition—that life is eternal and cannot be made futile by a biological process.
basic principles of Christian leadership: first, personal concern, which asks people to give their lives for others; second, a deep-rooted faith in the value and meaning of life, even when the days look dark; and third, an outgoing hope that always looks for tomorrow, even beyond the moment of death. And all these principles are based on the one and only conviction that, since God has become human, it is human beings who have the power to lead their fellows to freedom.
It is an illusion to think that a person can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there. Our lives are filled with examples telling us that leadership requires understanding, and understanding requires sharing. So long as we define leadership in terms of preventing or establishing precedents, or in terms of being responsible for some kind of abstract “general good,” we have forgotten that no God can save us except a suffering God, and that no one can lead others except the one who is crushed by their sins.
But for a person with a deep-rooted faith in the value and meaning of life, every experience holds a new promise, every encounter carries a new insight, and every event brings a new message. But these promises, insights, and messages have to be discovered and made visible.
Without hope, we will never be able to see value and meaning in the encounter with a decaying human being and become personally concerned.
Leadership therefore is not called Christian because it is permeated with optimism against all the odds of life, but because it is grounded in the historic Christ-event, which is understood as a definitive breach in the deterministic chain of human trial and error, and as a dramatic affirmation that there is light on the other side of darkness.
the more I think about loneliness, the more I think that the wound of loneliness is actually like the Grand Canyon—a deep incision in the surface of our existence that has become an inexhaustible source of beauty and self-understanding.
The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift.
Making one’s own wounds a source of healing, therefore, does not call for a sharing of superficial personal pains, but for a constant willingness to see one’s own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the human condition that we all share.
hospitality embraces two concepts: concentration and community.
When our souls are restless, when we are driven by thousands of different and often conflicting stimuli, when we are always “over there” between people, ideas, and the worries of this world, how can we possibly create the room and space where others can enter freely without feeling themselves unlawful intruders?
Paradoxically, by withdrawing into ourselves, not out of self-pity but out of humility, we create the space for others to be themselves and to come to us on their own terms.
And when we have finally found the anchor place for our lives within our own center we can be free to let others enter into the space created for them, and allow them to dance their own dance, sing their own song, and speak their own language without fear. Then our presence is no longer threatening and demanding, but inviting and liberating.
