The Meaning of Openness

You know that I talked a lot about being open,and many keep asking me what is exactly when I said: “I want to be open to myself”. To be open to myself doesn’t mean that I will go to the newspaper and write an article about my life, it doesn’t mean that I will go to the radio station and talk everyday about the desicion of my life; it doesn’t mean that I will go in the middle of Cookeville square and shout to everybody about my life. It just means that I have recognized my brokenness before God and before my intimate friends; that I have made peace to myself in order to go from brokenness to wholenness; that I will leave a life free of judgments to people different than me, because I know I am differet as well. Being open doesn’t mean that I will share my entire life wihall the world. Henry Nouwen says, “When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendship and develop lasting relationships of love.” He adds, “It is our vocation to prevent the harmful exposure of our inner sanctuary, not only for our own protection but also as a service to our fellow human beings with whom we want to enter in a creative communion. Opennes loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed”. So we do not have to know exactly everything about each other and if we do not share everything to you it does not mean that we do not want to have a relationship with you, it just means that we are creating sacread spaces of intimacy; inner sanctuaries where we can let God work in it. Some times we asked many questions trying to understand from our perspective the dilema or problem of our friends, we ask because we want to know beyond what we percieve. Some times we even go further and give some advice to the ones going into a difficulty; but let’s remember that the only ones who can open that inner sanctuary are God and ourselves.

So openness is not something to do or to create, it is an inner acceptance of ourselves so we can truely live in openess to the world.

May you find your openness in your life, may this openness find inner sanctuaries with your fellow human beings.

—from Mexico, at my parent’s house

*painting byKolja Tatic

Waiting Room

I am seating in the waiting room for my second flight to Dallas, Texas. Nashville is gone and I am in the middle of these two connections before I arrive to final destination. There was a sense of sadness when I say good bye to Paula, but at the same time some excitement to be able to see my parents and spend a good and quality time with them. Many changes have occurred in just one week and many more will come. My life seems just as the reality I am living in this airport. I feel like I am in a waiting room waiting for this aircraft to shows up at the end of the gate so I can start waking towards it and board it. I heard one time that happiness is not a destination but a journey; it is not a place to arrive, but a place we already are. We making decisions thinking that this will bring us into a state of happiness, or if we move to the left or right will be better for us because we will be happier; but the reality is that we are already living in that happiness and we just need to keep walking. May be we will flight for a while and arrive to another waiting room, but we are still in the journey. Some times we need our plans to fail, to be canceled so we can re-think where are we heading it. Many people will think that because we changed plans it means that we do not want to go there anymore, but a cancellation doesn’t mean that we will never arrive to the final destination, it could be a delay or a detour,but again, happiness is not a destination.

When this happens and destroys our plans we do not know what to do, Erwin McMannus says that we need some instability and unpredictability, but we are not use to do that because we want things to work the way they supposed to work. When we loose those things we feel as is life is an absolute turbulence. We do not mind for the things we do not like to become uncertain, unpredictable,but are the things we depend on life that we actually based and give us strength to face uncertainty, when we loose these things our life began to sin. This is when we need to realize that a dream comes to a close and to d we need to pursue a new dream. If we are afraid of the turbulence or to the waiting rooms of the “what ifs” where everything is unstable we may loose what will be because we do not have the courage to let go of what was. So the question during these days will be how did I get here, where am I, or where do I need to go from here. Great failures are never overcome by great successes, but by great faithfulness” to ourselves, to the ones we love and to the ones who will stay with us in this new walk,minute by minute, step by step, day by day and one day we will be able to turn back and see how we overcome the greatest failures in life. It is not to put our life together again and everything predictable so we can return to the control our life; but it is about being faithful to believe again in new dreams and keep waiting for the aircraft to arrive to our gate so we can deploy to our new destination.

Silence in Solitude

“How we ever can expect something really new to happen to us if our hearts and minds are so full of our own concerns that we do not even listen to the sounds announcing a new reality”–Henry Nouwen

A wise Yaqui Indian said, “You think and talk much, you must stop talking to yourself”. One of my greatest enemy and the one who makes more destruction in me is myself. But this is not to have negative outcome in life, but to be aware that is not sin, not others, no the world i live, no the internet, not the wife, the mom or the siblings. It is simply myself. Nouwen says that our vocation is to convert “the hostis into a hopes, the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced”. Welcoming the enemy–myself–so he can be a guest and experience brotherhood is one of the most difficult task I have as a messy and broken person in this world, because I need to welcome the things I do not like about myself, the things I hate, and the things that smell pretty bad. How can I make of this enemy of mine to become the guest in my home, where “hospitality, therefore; means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy”.

This free space is called silence in solitude, it is the space where we must quite our noisy humanity and start listen to the beauty within ourselves, to welcome the enemy and the stranger into a place where he can become himself: free. We are not here to live a sinless life, we are here to know that we are loved in our messiness, our brokenness,and in the many imperfections we have.

For the next four weeks I will start a journey of silence in solitude; first by visiting and re-connect with the ones I love and then to re-connect with myself in a trip to a Trappist Monastery.Hopefully at the end of this journey I will have a better understanding of myself so I “can offer a space where I can be encouraged to disarm myself, to lay aside my occupations and preoccupations and to listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in my own center”

*all the quotes comes from the book Reaching Out by Henry J.M. Nouwen

Life in Itself

“We are always in search of a community that can offer us a sense of belonging, but it is important to realize that being together in one place, one house, one city, or one country is only secondary to the fulfillment of our legitimate desire” –Henry J. M. Nouwen.

Today darkness surrounded me and my life was crushing me making all my bones to break. My soul was absent. Today I went through a moment of hopelessness, to be able to be free from this prison that has hold me for so many years. It is this nauseous humanity that has pushed me down and wants to kill me.

But also today, the jail door was opened, the egg shell cracked, the water broke making  life to be pushed away into the world: to be born. ¿What will come now?……only life itself.

“Estamos en busqueda de una comunidad que nos pueda ofrecer un sentimiento de pertenencia, pero es importante que nos demos cuenta que estar juntos en un lugar, en una casa, en una ciudad, o en un país es solo la llenura secundaria de nuestro deseo legitimo“–Henry Nouwen

La oscuridad me rodeo y mi vida misma me aplasto haciendo que mis huesos se quebrantaran y mi alma se desvaneciera. Hoy pase por un momento de desesperanza, de salir de esta jaula que tanto me ha mantenido aprisionado, es esta humanida nauseabunda que me oprime y me mata. Pero hoy tambien, la puerta se abrio, el cascarón se rompió, se rompio la fuente haciendo que la vida se empujara para nacer. ¿Que viene después?……solo la vida misma.