Blessed are the forgotten...

‘When you keep going anxiously to the mailbox in the hope that someone “out there” has thought about you; when you keep wondering if and what your friends are thinking of you; when you keep having hidden desires to be a somewhat exceptional person in this community; when you keep having fantasies about guests mentioning your name; when you keep looking for special attention from the abbot or any one of the monks; when you keep hoping for more interesting work and more stimulating events – then you know that you haven’t even started to create a little place for God in your heart.

When nobody writes anymore; when hardly anyone even thinks of you or wonders how you are doing; when you are just one of the brothers doing the same things as they are doing, not better or worse; when you have been forgotten by people – maybe then your heart and mind have become empty enough to give God a real chance to let his presence be known to you.’

So wrote Henri Nouwen in “The Genesse Diary”, a journal he kept while living in a Trappist monastery for seven months.

I wish I had read this book before my return home. I think it would have made my interaction with friends and family more God-centered.

Returning Ms are a touchy lot – at least that’s what I found myself to be. At my worst, I got impatient when people asked too many questions about life here. Sometimes they asked the wrong questions, which also bothered me. Then there were others who didn’t ask any questions at all, and that annoyed me too! Early on I recognized that the problem was with me, not with others. But that understanding did little to chase away the shroud of superficiality that came over those encounters.

Reading Nouwen’s words has clarified my vision of what went wrong. He often wrote about the “false and compulsive self” that craves attention, applause, recognition. The false self feeds on what others can give as its sustenance, instead of being rooted in God. The false self is constantly restless, in search for the spotlight, for more affirmation. It fears above all, solitude, because that’s when the inner demons of insecurity and inadequacy come out to wreck havoc in the mind. But without solitude, and a willingness to confront the ugliness within, the fragmented self cannot find healing.

Lately, I have been using those long hours of power cuts to seek solitude – another issue that Nouwen wrote extensively about. True solitude, he says (and I paraphrase), is about getting rid of the “scaffolding” of life – the phone calls, email, books, words, music etc – those things that we surround ourselves with, which stop us from truly seeing the state of our inner man. Solitude is not what we often think it is – as a time to be alone and to “do my own thing”.

Nouwen’s words held up a mirror in which I saw myself. At the heart of my touchiness was really the insecure and defiant self speaking interchangeably.

Do people still care? Do they still remember me? How do they remember me?

So what if they don’t? They won’t understand afterall!

But now I find myself thinking, perhaps being forgotten, and being genuinely ok with that, is really the path to blessedness. Think about it. It means becoming someone who is completely without any shred of vanity or self-consciousness or anxiety. In such a heart, I see God being at home and being very happy...