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With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life QUOTES

With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life QUOTES

1 " The word "Eucharist" means literally "act of thanksgiving." To celebrate the Eucharist and to live a Eucharistic life has everything to do with gratitude. Living Eucharistically is living life as a gift, a gift for which one is grateful. But gratitude is not the most obvious response to life, certainly not when we experience life as a series of losses! Still, the great mystery we celebrate in the Eucharist and live in a Eucharistic life is precisely that through mourning our losses we come to know life as a gift. "

― Henri J.M. Nouwen , With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life

2 " This cry for mercy is possible only when we are willing to confess that somehow, somewhere, we ourselves have something to do with our losses. Crying for mercy is a recognition that blaming God, the world, or others for our losses does not do full justice to the truth of who we are. At the moment we are willing to take responsibility, even for the pain we didn't cause directly, blaming is connected into an acknowledgement of our own role in human brokenness. The prayer for God's mercy comes from a heart that knows that this human brokenness is not a fatal condition of which we have become the sad victims, but the bitter fruit of the human choice to say "No" to love. "

― Henri J.M. Nouwen , With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life

3 " Mourning our losses is the first step away from resentment and toward gratitude. The tears of our grief can soften our hardened hearts and open us to the possibility to say “thanks. "

― Henri J.M. Nouwen , With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life

4 " We cannot see God in the other person. Only God in us can see God in the other person. "

― Henri J.M. Nouwen , With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life

5 " The word of the Eucharist makes us part of the great story of our salvation. Our little stories are lifted up into God's great story and there given their unique place. The word lifts us up and makes us see that our daily, ordinary lives are, in fact, sacred lives that play a necessary role in the fulfillment of God's promises. "

― Henri J.M. Nouwen , With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life

6 " The great temptation of our lives is to deny our role as chosen people and to allow ourselves to be trapped in the worries of our daily lives. Without the word that keeps lifting us up as God's chosen people, we remain, or become, small people, stuck in the complaints that emerge from our daily struggle to survive. "

― Henri J.M. Nouwen , With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life

7 " Only when we recognize the rich network of connections between the Eucharist and our life in the world can the Eucharist be “worldly” and our life “Eucharistic. "

― Henri J.M. Nouwen , With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life

8 " Celebrating the Eucharist requires that we stand in this world accepting our co-responsibility for the evil that surrounds and pervades us. As long as we remain stuck in our complaints about the terrible times in which we live and the terrible situations we have to bear and the terrible fate we have to suffer, we can never come to contrition. And contrition can grow only out of a contrite heart. When our losses are pure fate, our gains are pure luck! Fate does not lead to contrition, nor luck to gratitude. "

― Henri J.M. Nouwen , With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life