homeward

 

“Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body’s deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body’s superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.”  –Henri Nouwen

 

This morning I posted these lines, simply because I liked them. No apparent reason. Ha! Once posted, they began to speak … asking that I look a little deeper: What is it you yearn for? How do you differentiate everyday touching (such as with family and friends, by men and women, strangers and acquaintances) from intimate and sexual touch? Do you receive them differently, give one more weight than the other? How much touch gets past the censor, sinks to your core? What are you afraid of?

 

Henri Nouwen (1932 – 1996), Dutch-born catholic priest and writer, taught at Yale and Harvard divinity schools, and spent his last ten years living with intellectually disabled people at L’Arche community in Toronto.