Devotional - Friday, August 20th

Excerpt from: Out of Solitude (Nouwen, 1974)



Pages 31-32


Out of His solitude Jesus reached out his caring hand to the people in need. In the lonely place his care grew strong and mature. And from there he entered into a healing closeness with his fellow human beings.


Jesus indeed cared. Being pragmatists we say: “That is obvious: he fed the hungry, made the blind see, the deaf hear, the crippled walk and the dead live. He indeed cared.” But by being surprised by all the remarkable things he did, we forget that Jesus did not give food to the many without having received some loaves and fishes from a stranger in the crowd; that he did not return the boy of Nain to his widowed mother without having felt her sorrow, that he did not raise Lazarus from the grave without tears and a sigh of distress that came straight from the heart. What we see, and like to see, is cure and change. But what we do not see and do not want to see is care, the participation in the pain, the solidarity in suffering, the sharing in the experience of brokenness. And still, cure without care is as dehumanizing as a gift given with a cold heart.