Gracias

This entry is mostly going to be an excerpt from a book that i am reading. Its name is
Gracias! A Latin American Journal. by Henri Nouwen. It is the journal he kept in the 1980s as a missionary who went to study Spanish and work in Peru and Bolivia. It holds the every day experience of his language learning, his struggle in a new culture, and his desire to seek after god in the things that he saw, the people he met, and the hardships that he could not stop.

Lets be honest, i am a very critical person who is very critical of the intents and value of many things, including missionary work-especially as a result of a thousands of years of ´missionary-colonialism.´ However, Nouwen is a person who seems to be continually searching after truth, life and hope. and throughout the previous pages of this book i have felt as though he were tellingme my own story. This most recent entry, came as an answer to a question i have been posing for months. and so i am challenged and pulled outside of myself by his words, as i hope you experience too, if you choose to read this exerpt..

p.s. ill have some pictures up by the end of the week, after a dinner i am making tomorrow night for my host family as a thankyou for the time ive spent with them. i will be moving out on friday or saturday to my new location...and the rest of the journey continues..

(Gracias, A Latin American Journal by Henri Nouwen)pg 47-49

Saturday, November 21

God Exists. When I can say this with all that I am, I have the gnosis (the knowledge of God) about which St John speaks and the Memoria Dei (th memory of God)about which St. Basil writes. To say with all that we have, think, feel and are: God Exists, is the most world-shattering statement that a human being can make...When we say this from the heart, everything trembles in heaven and on earth. Because when God exists, all that is flows from God.

When I want to know if i ever have come to the true knowledge, the gnosis, of Gods existence, i have simply to allow myself to become aware of how i experience myself. It doesnt take much to realize that i am constantly with myself. i am aware of all the various parts of my body and i know when i am hurting and when not. i am aware of my desire for food and clothing and shelter. i am aware of my sexual urges and my need for intimacy and community. i am aware of my feelings of pity, compassion, and solidarity, my ability to be of service and my hope to give a helping hand. i am aware of my intellectual, physical, and artistic skills and my drive to use them. i am aware of my anger, my lust, my feelings of revenge annd resent ment, and even at times my desire to harm, indeed, what is central to me is: I Exist . My own existence fills me , and wherever I turn I find myself again locked in my own self-awareness: I exist. Although experiences of hatred are different from experiences of love, and although a desire for power is different from a desire to serve, they all are the same insofar as they identify my existence as what really counts.

However, as soon as i say, God exists, my existence no longer can remain in the center, because the essence of the knowlege of God reveals my own existence as deriving its total being from God. That is the true conversion experience. I no longer let the knowledge of my existence be the center from which i derive, project, deduct, or intuit the existence of God; I suddenly or slowly find my own existence revealed to me in and through the knowledge of God. Then it becomes real for me that i can love myself and my neigbor only because God has loved me first. The life-converting experience is not the discovery that i have choices to make that determine the way i live out my existence, but the awareness that my existence itself is not in the center. Once i ´know´ God, that is, once i experience Gods love as the love in whih all my human experiences are anchored, i can only desire one things: to be in that love. Being anywhere else, then, is shown to be illusory and eventually lethal.

All of these reflections have taken a new urgency for me, during these weeks in Bolivia. It slowly dawned on me that so much, if not most, of our energy and attention goes to the question of our own existence. We wonder how we are doing, how we feel, how we will serve in Latin America, and how we will organize our next day, weekend, year, or decade.

We try hard to make responsible and moral choices that give us a sense that at least we are searching in the right direction. But all of this, the good as well as the bad, the responsible as well as the irresponsible, the acts of lust as well as the acts of service, lose their power over us when we realize that God exists, before and after, in the past and in the future, now and forever, and that in and through the knowledge of that divine existence i might get a small glimpse of why there is an I and a he,she, we, and they. Then all questions only have one answer:God...

this has been part one. part two of the entry will follow.
love. chau.amy