Item 1756 - Living in the center enables us to care

3 p. of textual records

This item is a report of a talk given by Henri Nouwen to the 75th Annual Catholic Health Assembly and published in ‘Health Progress’, July-August, 1990, pp. 52 -54. This item, not written by Henri Nouwen, is reporting on the talk he gave at the assembly and it is difficult at points to know what Nouwen said and what is paraphrase. Nouwen made a number of points about the healthcare worker’s need to keep close to God. He spoke of being open to the life of the spirit by looking at four gestures that recur in the scriptures: Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it. Nouwen is reported as elaborating these points and then moves on to the disciplines required ‘to train your life to care for people’. The four disciplines Nouwen elaborated were: the discipline of the mind, the discipline of the heart, the discipline of the spirit and the discipline of the body. The concluding paragraph of this article states, ‘In the end, Fr Nouwen said, “What matters is whether your true identity is a child of God”. This centering, he says, is what enables you to remain in service of life, not survival.

Published as part of "General Sessions" in Health Progress 71, no. 6 (July - August 1990): 52-54.
This article is a paraphrase of a talk by Henri Nouwen.

Added by L Joson, 15 November 2017