shadowwonder

Last week I had the chance to visit with a long-time friend.  As we talked about what we’d been doing lately, she told me about her family’s recent annual vacation to the beach with her adult children, husband, parents, and sister.  As she described what they did that week, I asked her whether they liked to cook or eat out.  “We usually do a little of both, but this time, we did more eating out than usual.  My son has become a foodie of sorts," she smiled, "and he brought a whole list of restaurants he wanted to try.  So my husband and I ended up going to many of them with him.” As she talked about their time with their son, she paused.  “You know, he hasn’t joined us on our vacation the past few summers, so we were really glad he wanted to come.  And I was just struck by –and so grateful to see—how respectful he was . . . how honoring.  We just had a   wonderful   time together.” Through our conversations over many years, my friend has shared that parenting this chi

Since the beginning of 2017, I have been participating in an online book club hosted by an organization called  Renovaré   (thanks, Mom and Dad, for the sweet Christmas gift).  Although I've encountered many quotations from Henri Nouwen's writings, I hadn't read an entire book.  And I wasn't disappointed; reading his  Life of the Beloved  has not only been timely for me, but also profoundly impactful. Nouwen, a Catholic priest, wrote the book at the request of a friend, NYT  journalist Fred Bratman, a secular Jew, who asked him to discuss Christian faith in a way that "speaks to men and women in a secularized society" in a way that "he and his friends 'could hear.'"   Life of the Beloved  is the result of that request. I won't discuss the content of the book here (there is my thinly disguised attempt to encourage you to read it for yourself--it's that good).  What's fascinating, though, is that  Nouwen initially considered h