I’m concluding my series on Henri Nouwen’s book Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life with the final chapter from his first section, which deals with the movement from loneliness to solitude. For several days before I began reading this chapter, I had not responded well to events at home, such as my children acting like children, for goodness’ sake. Nouwen’s words at the beginning of this chapter (entitled “A Creative Response”) caught me up short:
As long as we are trying to run away from loneliness we are constantly looking for distractions with the inexhaustible need to be entertained and kept busy. We become the passive victims of a world asking for our idolizing attention. We become dependent on the shifting chain of events leading us into quick changes of mood, capricious behavior and, at times, revengeful violence. Then our life becomes a spastic and often destructive sequence of actions and reactions pulling us away from our inner selves. (34)
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