"Turn My Mourning Into Dancing"

by Henri Nouwen

When I go to care for another person a deep part of me longs to say, "Please love me. Without you I cannot live." And before you know it I come not to hold in love but to grab in the intensity of neediness.

We become violent precisely because we expect more from each other than we can give. When we look for divine solutions in others, we make others into god and ourselves into demons. Our hands no longer caress but instead grasp. Our lips no longer kiss or form kind words but bite. Our eyes no longer look expectantly but suspiciously. Our ears do not hear so much as overhear. Every time we think that another person or group of people is finally going to come and take away our fear and anxiety, we will find ourselves so frustrated that, instead of becoming gentle, we will become violent.

Community, then, cannot grow out of loneliness, but comes when the person who begins to recognize his or her belovedness greets the belovedness of the other. The God alive in me greets the God resident in you. When people can cease having to be for us everything, we can accept the fact they may still have a gift for us. They are partial reflections of the great love of God, but reflections nevertheless. We see that gift precisely and only once we give up requiring that person to be everything, to be God. We see him or her as a limited expression of an unlimited love.

To live and serve and worship with others thereby brings us to a place where we come together and remind each other by our mutual interdependence that we are not God, that we cannot meet our own needs, and that we cannot completely fulfill each others' needs. There is something wonderfully humbling and freeing about this. For we find a place where people give one another grace. That we are not God does not mean that we cannot mediate (in a limited way) the unlimited love of God. Community is the place of joy and celebration where we are willing to say, "Yes, we have begun to overcome in Christ."

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We live -always- in situations that can seem only incomplete. We walk with people who always live and love imperfectly. Still, in the midst of people who have loved us well or not so well, God's love reaches to us. If we can make it out above the static and disruptions of noisy lives, we realize it came before anyone touched us or harmed us. This love will always exist, even after we die. Solitude, where we absent ourselves from the myriad voices that tell us otherwise, helps us hear again that voice of love. If you believe that you are the beloved, you can offer forgiveness, even when it cannot be received.

The test of love is our forgiveness of enemies; just as Jesus forgave (Luke 23:34), so we are to. Just as Stephen, the first Christian martyr, followed his Lord when being stoned, he prayed, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them," (Acts 7:60). This is not easy, of course, largely because of the ways we continue to crave attention, affection, influence, power, even after hearing God's word that we are his beloved. These needs are born from our wounds and never seem to be satisfied. When we try to find an explanation for these wounds, we discover how they have been inflicted on us by people who are needy people themselves. Through the generations there seems to run a chain of wounds and needs. And when we try to avoid inflicting wounds ourselves, we discover that even with our best intentions we cannot avoid encountering people who feel rejected, misunderstood, or hurt by us.

Thus there seems to be a long chain of interlocking wounds and needs that stretch back into the long past and forward into our future. This picture drives us to turn love into a kind of mechanical exchange: "I will love you if you love me; I will give to you if you give to me; I will lend to you if you give the same amount." As long as we continue to search for our deepest sense of who we are among other people, we will end up dividing the world into people who are for us and people who are against us, people who accept us and people who reject us - friends and enemies.

The gospel liberates us from the chain of wounds and needs by revealing to us a compassion that can do more than react our of the needs that grow from our wounds. It does so by bringing us into contact with an acceptance that precedes any human acceptance or rejection. And this original love is all-embracing.

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Even when the pain stays, we know how great the difference if another draws close, if another shares with us in it. This kind of comfort comes most fully and powerfully visible in the Incarnation, wherein God comes into our midst - into our lives- to remind, "I am with you at all times and in all places." In Christ God draws near us amid our sufferings.