An incredible gift from a generous friend upon her graduation from high school allowed our oldest daughter, Kinsey, to take one person on a trip. For a while I thought I would be the person, but somehow Kinsey’s brother displaced her dad. I was not too heartbroken, happy that my kids love each other enough to want to hang out together. They chose to backpack on their spring break through Italy and fly home from Paris. Through quite a few adventures, brother and sister made it home this past Saturday. (Mom and Dad are still praising God!) As we got word they arrived in Italy last Sunday in time for church in St. Peter’s Square, I thought of Henri Nouwen’s book entitled, “CLOWNING IN ROME.”
My friend Joe recently discovered another book by Henri Nouwen entitled, “CAN YOU DRINK THE CUP?” This priest, a native of Holland who taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard before spending the remainder of his life serving mentally handicapped adults at L’Arche Daybreak Community in Toronto, Canada, had the most incredible way of sharing profound truths in simple ways. He taught that the secret to ‘rejoicing in the Lord’ is the recognition that God has given each of us a cup to drink. He divided this small book into three parts: holding the cup, lifting the cup, and drinking the cup. He completed this writing in February of 1996, 8 months before his death. Here’s a taste of Nouwen’s wisdom and the familiar story of our Savior and two of his eager followers:
It is important to be very specific when we deal with the question: ‘How do we drink our cup?’ We need some very concrete disciplines to help us fully appropriate and internalize our joys and sorrows and find in them our unique way to spiritual freedom. I would like to explore how three disciplines – the discipline of silence, the discipline of the word, and the discipline of action can help us drink the cup of salvation. The first way to drink our cup is in silence.
This might come as a surprise, since being silent seems like doing nothing, but it is precisely in silence that we confront our true selves. The sorrows of our life often overwhelm us to such a degree that we will do everything not to face them. Radio, television, newspapers, books, films, but also hard work and busy social life can be ways to run away from ourselves and turn life into a long entertainment.
The word ‘entertainment’ is important here. It means literally ‘to keep (‘tain’ from the Latin ‘tenere’) someone in between (‘enter’).’ Entertainment is everything that gets and keeps our mind away from things that are hard to face. Entertainment keeps us distracted, excited, or in suspense. Entertainment is often good for us. It gives us an evening or a day off from our worries or fears. But when we start living life as entertainment, we lose touch with our souls and become little more than spectators in a lifelong show. Even very useful and relevant work can become a way of forgetting who we really are. Silence is the discipline that helps us go beyond the entertainment quality of our lives. There we can let our sorrows and joys emerge from their hidden places and look us in the face, saying: ‘Don’t be afraid; you can look at your own journey, its dark and light sides, and discover your way to freedom.’ At first the silence might only frighten us. In silence we start hearing the voices of darkness: our jealousy and anger, our resentment and desire for revenge, our lust and greed, and our pain over losses, abuses, and rejections. These voices are often noisy and boisterous. They may even deafen us. Our most spontaneous reaction is to run away from them and return to our entertainment. But if we have discipline to stay put and not let these dark voices intimidate us, they will gradually lose their strength and recede into the background, creating space for the softer gentler voices of the light. These voices speak of peace, kindness, gentleness, goodness, joy, hope, forgiveness, and, most of all, love. They might at first seem small and insignificant, and we may have a hard time trusting them. However, they are very persistent and they will grow stronger if we keep listening. They come from a very deep place and from very far. They have been speaking to us since before we were born, and they reveal to us that there is no darkness in the One who sent us into the world, only light. They are part of God’s voice calling us from eternity: ‘My beloved child, my favorite one, my joy.’
The enormous powers of our world keep drowning out these gentle voices. Still they are the voices of truth. (From: “CAN YOU DRINK THE CUP? pp 93-96)
“Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. ‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘we want you to do for us whatever we ask.’ ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ he asked. They replied, ‘Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.’ ‘You don’t know what you are asking,’ Jesus said. ‘Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?’ ‘We can,’ they answered. Jesus said, ‘You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.’” (Mark 10:35-40)