The Living Reminder Quotes

“Good memories offer good guidance. We all have had the experience that in times of distress, failure, and depression it is the good memories which give us new confidence and hope. When the night is dark and everything seems black and fearful, we can hope for a bright new day because we have seen a bright day before. our hope is built on our memories. Without memories there are no expectations. We do not always realize that among the best things we can give each other are good memories: kind words, signs of affection, gestures of sympathy, peaceful silences, and joyful celebrations. At the time they all may have seemed obvious, simple, and without many consequences, but as memories they can save us in the midst of confusion, fear, and darkness.
When we speak about guiding memories we do not necessarily refer to a conscious remembering, an explicit reflection on events in the past. In fact, most of our memories guide us in a prereflective way. They have become flesh and blood in us. Our memories of trust, love, acceptance, forgiveness, confidence, and hope enter so deeply into our being that indeed we become our memories. The fact that we are alive, that our hearts beat, our blood flows, our lungs breathe, is a living memory of all the good care that came our way. It is primarily such incarnate, pulsating memories that carry us through our darkest moments and give us hope. These memories might be dormant during our normal day-to-day living, but in times of crisis they often reveal their great revitalizing power.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Living Reminder: Service and Prayer in Memory of Jesus Christ

“Over the years we have developed the idea that being present to people in all their needs is our greatest and primary vocation. The Bible does not seem to support this. Jesus' primary concern was to be obedient to his Father, to live constantly in his presence. Only then did it become clear to him what his task was in his relationships with people. This also is the way he proposes for his apostles: 'It is to the glory of my Father that you should bear much fruit and then you will be my disciples' (John 15:8). Perhaps we must continually remind ourselves that the first commandment requiring us to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind is indeed the first. I wonder if we really believe this. It seems that in fact we live as if we should give as much of our heart, soul, and mind as possible to our fellow human beings, while trying hard not to forget God. At least we feel that our attention should be divided evenly between God and our neighbor. But Jesus' claim is much more radical. He asks for a single-minded commitment to God and God alone. God wants all of our heart, all of our mind, and all of our soul. It is this unconditional and unreserved love for God that leads to the care for our neighbor, not as an activity which distracts us from God or competes with our attention to God, but as an expression of our love for God who reveals himself to us as the God of all people. It is in God that we find our neighbors and discover our responsibility to them. We might even say that only in God does our neighbor become a neighbor rather than an infringement on our autonomy, and that only in and through God does service become possible.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Living Reminder: Service and Prayer in Memory of Jesus Christ

“The strategy of the principalities and powers is to disconnect us, to cut us off from the memory of God. It is not hard to see how many of our busy actions and restless concerns seem to be disconnected, reminded us of nothing more than the disorder of our own orientation and commitment. When we no longer walk in the presence of the Lord, we cannot be living reminders of his divine presence in our lives. We then quickly become strangers in an alien land who have forgotten where we come from and where we are going. Then we are no longer the way to the experience of God, but rather in the way of the experience of God. Then, instead of walking in God's presence we start walking in a vicious circle, and pulling others into it.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Living Reminder: Service and Prayer in Memory of Jesus Christ

“We have inherited a story which needs to be told in such a way that the many painful wounds about which we hear day after day can be liberated from their isolation and be revealed as part of God's relationship with us. Healing means revealing that our human wounds are most intimately connected with the suffering of God himself. To be a living memory of Jesus Christ, therefore, means to reveal the connections between our small sufferings and the great story of God's suffering in Jesus Christ, between our little life the great life of God with us. By lifting our painful forgotten memories out of the egocentric, individualistic, private sphere, Jesus Christ heals our pains. He connects them with the pain of all humanity, a pain he took upon himself and transformed. To heal, then, does not primarily mean to take pains away but to reveal that our pains are part of a greater pain, that our sorrows are part of a greater sorrow, that our experience is part of the great experience of him who said, 'But was it not ordained that the Christ should suffer and so enter into the glory of God?' (cf. Luke 24:26)”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Living Reminder: Service and Prayer in Memory of Jesus Christ

“When the soil is not plowed the rain cannot reach the seeds; when the leaves are not raked away the sun cannot nurture the hidden plants. So also, when our memories remain covered with fear, anxiety, or suspicion the word of God cannot bear fruit.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Living Reminder: Service and Prayer in Memory of Jesus Christ

“[M]ost of our human emotions are closely related to our memory. Remorse is a biting memory, guilt is an accusing memory, gratitude is a joyful memory, and all such emotions are deeply influenced by the way we have integrated past events int our way of being in the world. In fact, we perceive our world with our memories. Our memories help us to see and understand new impressions and give them a place in our richly varied life experiences...
It is no exaggeration to say that the suffering we most frequently encounter in the ministry is a suffering of memories. They are the wounding memories that ask for healing. Feelings of alienation, loneliness, separation; feelings of anxiety, fear, suspicion; and related symptoms such as nervousness, sleeplessness, nail-biting - these all are part of the forms which certain memories have taken. These memories wound because they are often deeply hidden in the center of our being and very hard to reach. While the good memories may be present to us in outer signs such as trophies, decorations, diplomas, precious stones, vases, rings, and portraits, painful memories tend to remain hidden from us in the corner of our forgetfulness. It is from this hidden place that they escape healing and cause so much harm.
Our first and most spontaneous response to our undesirable memories is to forget them. When something painful has happened we quickly say to ourselves and to each other: 'Let's forget it, let's act as if it did not happen, let's not talk about it, let's think about happier things.' We want to forget the pains of the past - our personal, communal, and rational traumas - and live as if they did not really happen. But by not remembering them we allow the forgotten memories to become independent forces that can exert a crippling effect on our functioning as human beings. When this happens, we become strangers to ourselves because we cut down our own history to a pleasant, comfortable size and try to make it conform to our own daydreams. Forgetting the past is like turning our most intimate teacher against us. By refusing to face our painful memories we miss the opportunity to change our hearts and grow mature in repentance.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Living Reminder: Service and Prayer in Memory of Jesus Christ