Item 1780 - Blessed

5 p. of textual records

This item is a 5 page article by Henri Nouwen entitled ‘Blessed’, published in Living Prayer, Vol. 25, No.4, July-August, 1992, pp. 3 – 7. This article is identified as an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Nouwen entitled, The Life of the Beloved. Nouwen opens with two stories of blessing; one about a young man at a Bar Mitzvah being blessed by his parents and the other about a woman at the L’Arche community of Daybreak asking for a blessing. In each story Nouwen speaks of our need to be blessed, ‘To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer’. Nouwen goes on, ‘ We also need an ongoing blessing that allows us to hear in an ever-new way that we belong to a loving God who will never leave us alone…’ Nouwen goes on to offer two suggestions for claiming our blessedness. The first is prayer in which, over time as we learn stillness, we can ‘hear’ God’s word of blessing. The second is ‘the cultivation of presence’. In this, Nouwen suggests, we learn to be present to the blessings that come to us each day, no matter how busy or unhappy or worried. Nouwen concludes, ‘ As you and I walk the streets of the cities in which we live, we can have no illusions about the darkness…Yet all of these people yearn for a blessing. That blessing can be given only by those who have heard it themselves.’

Published in Living Prayer 25, no. 4 (July-August 1992): 3-7.
Reference copy available in file.
This article is an excerpt from, Nouwen, Henri: Life of the Beloved, Spiritual Living in a Secular World, The Crossroad Publishing Co., New York, N.Y., 1992.

Added by L Joson, 21 November 2017