Person-hood

Nouwen suggests that a healthy soul will have a hidden place. Solitude, he says, is the place that hiddenness is cultivated and hospitality is the space given to others to have a hidden part of themselves.

He cautions against a too facile openness. This seems difficult to my mind. How can this closedness foster community? Perhaps an easy openness belies a shallow unexamined soul.  In solitude, in that hidden center, we find God and experience God in us.  We deepen the well within us. We find who we were created to be - our solitary uniqueness that we offer in intimacy to God.  Then we are free to share what we can with others.  From that well, we can offer the stores of our person-hood to those with whom we are forming communion. Yet there will remain much that cannot be verbalized, and more yet that the discipline of Silence bids us to keep cherished and within.



This idea of recognizing the person-hood of another is powerful to me.  As Nouwen rightly points out, we can treat others as though they only existed in the periphery of a world at which we are the center. They exist only to serve, love, annoy and hurt us. When we view them this way they are not persons but accessories of our selfish lives.

I have found that in contemplating the otherness of people I only grow in love for them. I gaze at my wife and realize that she has a personality, hopes, dreams, and wounds of her own. She loves me of her own unique will. And my heart melts. I look at my children and see their unique gifts, their daily discoveries, their vivid imaginations and creativity.  They become real to me. And my heart melts. They are no longer objects of frustration, responsibility and affection, but they are persons, souls, and children of God.  God and I love them together.

Even in thinking about people who rub me the wrong way, people who have injured me, as I recognize that they are real persons in their own right, my heart melts toward them.

Nouwen suggests that never will such contemplation result in hatred. Always it will increase love.  Our solitude gives rise to this contemplation, and we recognize and honor the unique solitary hiddeness of the people around us.