Withholding Nothing
April 5, 2009
Excerpt from Clowning In Rome, Henri Nouwen:
We want to be men and women who love and worship God, but we also want to protect a little corner of our inner lives for ourselves. We cling to a protected space where we might sometimes hide out with our own secret thoughts, our dreams and fantasies, and our play with our own mental fabrications. When we begin to think about living and thinking always in God’s loving presence we experience the immediate temptation to select carefully the thoughts that we bring into our conversations with God and the ones we reserve for our own private time.
What makes us so frightened and stingy? Maybe we wonder if God can handle all that goes on in our minds and hearts. Is God up to accepting our hateful thoughts, our cruel fantasies and our shameful dreams? Can our compassionate Brother handle our primitive images, our inflated illusions, and our exotic mental castles? Or do we want to hold onto our own pleasurable imaginings and stimulating reveries, afraid that in showing them to our Lord, we may have to give them up? We shuffle forward and backward, desiring intimate communion and seduced to selfish introspection. Fear mixes with our yearnings and greed with our generosity, and we gradually become aware of how much those secret meanderings are most in need of Love’s healing touch.
…By refusing to share these thoughts, we limit our own healing, erecting little altars to the mental images we are withholding from the divine conversation.”
