“Many people in this life suffer because they are anxiously searching for the man or woman, the event or encounter, which will take their loneliness away. But when they enter a house with real hospitality, they soon see that their own wounds must be understood not as sources of despair and bitterness, but as signs that they have to travel on in obedience to the calling sounds of their own wounds.”
— Henri Nouwen (1932–1996)
We all have that sense that we’re not at home here. Our struggling and our striving, never quite feeling at complete peace, always being drawn to one distraction or another, finding it hard to focus, all point to a goal we feel is just there on the horizon — we can see it but it appears elusive.
And then we have Nouwen completely confound our thinking by telling us that the healing we seek is closer than we ever thought. It is in entering the wound that we find ourselves in the house of hospitality, because it’s in entering our wound by facing it that we face Jesus and enter into His presence.
Being there with Jesus we find we’re perfectly safe to be at one with our pain, and when at last we do this, we find we always had this unconquerable capacity within us. THIS is the encounter we’ve always been called to. It’s what we always believed for.
When we arrive there all of what doesn’t make sense begins to make sense and we accept it.
Out of the nucleus of our own wounds we find every sense of direction, for our wound can be approached when we’re in the house of hospitality, and we find right there our datum point. It’s our meaning for life, because it’s our capacity to overcome what’s happened to us.
The house of hospitality, therefore, is the unity of God and our hospitality with ourselves.
In hospitality, all come and are perfectly at home. And “all” is all of us, our self, as a single human unit, unified with God.
In hospitality, we find protection, space, openness, and true sight. We see things as they are, and our wound is seen for what IT is. It’s not just enshrouded with pain as a barrier to sight and feeling.
What we can see and touch we can feel, and we can contemplate, and we can keep facing, and as we’re home right there, direction comes.
Once we’re no longer dissuaded from entering into the wound, once we see we can reside there, with Jesus, because He modelled how to do it, we face the wound, and the wound actually becomes pivotal in our personal revival. And life begins... for the first time, OR again!
Image: Katherine Hanlon
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