peace offering

In July, I was staying with my brother and accidentally left a book at his house. I asked about it soon after I left, and he assured me he'd mail it to me.

Sometime in October he called and apologized for not having sent the book. He explained that as a bit of a peace offering that along with the book he was sending another book, by Henry Nouwen. He told me the book was about loneliness and sentimentality.

His reasoning for sending me the book was, "It's my favorite book of his, and I thought that since you just moved to LA by yourself you might be lonely. And I also thought, 'Well, Julie is sentimental, she keeps weird things.'"

He's a good brother. I got good ones.

I just started reading it this week. So far Nouwen has managed to quote Khalil Gibran and Rainer Maria Rilke in the first two chapters, so it's off to a good start. I read the first chapter twice.

The book is really short, and it only took a minute to figure out why: Nouwen does not beat around any bushes, and presents his ideas with unapologetic directness. Here's a good example. Watch how much he covers in a single sentence:

When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game which makes us believe that everything is fine after all.

Yeah, I know. That's why I read the first chapter twice.

They find their food in the suspicion that there is no one who cares and offers love without conditions, and no place where we can be vulnerable without being used. The many small rejections of everyday--a sarcastic smile, a flippant remark, a brisk denial or a bitter silence--may all be quite innocent and hardly worth our attention if they did not constantly arouse our basic human fear of being left totally alone with "darkness ... [as our] one companion left" (Psalm 88). We have become so used to this state of anesthesia, that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us.