June 28, 2026

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us more deeply into it.

Nouwen wrote this in the early 1970s, during a period when he was teaching at Notre Dame and feeling the tension between his inner life and the chaos of the Vietnam War era. He was watching fellow ministers burn out or check out, retreating into either activism or isolation. This line was his pushback against both extremes. Equanimity, for Nouwen, was not detachment from the world's pain but the capacity to stay present to it without being destroyed by it.