May 2007 The Road to Daybreak A Spiritual Journey by Henri J M Nouwen

. A New Beginning This is the first day of my new life! Though it sounds melodramatic, I cannot avoid feeling that something significant is starting today. My decision to leave Harvard Divinity School and move to France to live for at least a year with Jean Vanier and his L'Arche community in Trosly took many tears and many sleepless nights. It came after a period of many hesitations and inner debates. But as I drove away from the carriage house which for a year had been the center of my life at Harvard, I felt as if I were moving towards a new freedom. When Madame Vanier, Jean's eighty-seven-year-old mother, threw her arms around me as I stepped into her house this morning, it felt like coming home. It is so good to be back. Nine months ago I finished a thirty-day retreat here. At the time I had no idea I would be back so soon, but now I know that the retreat prepared me to say good-bye to the academic world and to start looking for a community of people who could lead me closer to the heart of God. This afternoon I heart something like an inner voice telling to start keeping a journal again. Ever since my trip to Latin America four years ago, I had given up daily writing. But it suddenly dawned on me that this year is going to be a year of prayer, reading, and writing while listening carefully to the inner movements of the spirit and struggling with the question "How do I follow Jesus all the way?" How better to keep in touch with God's work in me than by recording what is happening to me day after day? If this is really going to be a year of discernment, an honest journal might help me as much now as it has in the past. The enormous contrast between my busy, noisy, and nerve-wracking last days in Cambridge and this utterly quiet, still day in Trosly moves me deeply. As I walked the narrow streets of this little French village this afternoon without seeing a person or hearing a car, I wondered if I were on the same planet. The six-and-a-half-hour night flight from Logan Airport in Boston to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris makes the distance between there and here seem so small. But Cambridge and Trosly are much farther apart than a night's flight. They represent two very different worlds: Cambridge - a world of academic intensity, institutional rivalry, intellectual competition, and ever mounting excitement; Trosly - a world of quiet village living, community celebration, the sharing of human vulnerabilities, and an always new invitation to let Jesus be the center of everything.

- To Be Continued - © Copyright Shalom 2007. All rights reserved.