Befriending the Stranger

I love this simple book, It is beautifully mystical, it fully understands the power of divine love to transform lives including our own, and if we applied it to ourselves and to all people in the world, our world would be transformed into paradise. Would that we could think this way undistorted by our human inclination to worship power, image, control, and wealth. Where is it getting us? The elite and the select few are fighting each other leaving a worldwide path of destruction and are ignoring the poverty and suffering of the rest of the world.

A beautifully written book about how to apply and live the Gospels in our daily lives. A fresh, modern-day look at the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to become more sensitive to the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ who suffer for no reason of their own.

Jean Vanier has long been one of our most respected and admired spiritual speakers, activists and scholars who put the Word into Action. In the twilight of his years this great soul and heart of peace and of compassion yet lives an act of Love for God. Let us embrace if not his Spirit, then his books, those writings and speeches and sermons and exhortations to selfless compassion for others, for God, for the rejected, the disabled, the poor. Let us weep with his community once more and feel his loving embrace healing our hurt and bringing us to God's love. Here in this book Jean Vanier teaches us to Befriend the Stranger. As ever with his books, it originally began as sermons or talks or speeches, here not at Harvard Divinity School invited by Henri Nouwen as in From Brokenness to Community (Harold M. Wit Lectures), but to members of his Arche community stationed in the Dominican Republic. As ever it discusses those friends and community members. Originally published as La source des larmes (The source or spring of tears) in 2001, this English translation was published in 2005 by the remarkable Eerdmann Publishing House. In his introduction Vanier explores that briefest of Biblical verses which reports Jesus wept. and the significance of that theological phenomenom for us. Read it without weeping and you must read it once more, slowly, meditatively, until the path to your own heart is opened to you, the path to God's Spirit, the path to service of humanity and God's Creation, the path to which Our Holy Father recently exhorted us in Sacramento de La Caridad: Sacramentum Caritatis, the path to repentance, to reconciliation and to pardon, free of rejection but of compassion and community and solidarity. This substantial work proceeds through the six days plus conclusion of these talks, basing each day upon a biblical verse. We first explore the mysterious words of Jesus in Luke 19 "I want to stay in your house today" as GOd calls us into the world of Love. We then hear that we are "precious in my eyes and honoured and I love you" as in Isaiah 43 verse 4, that we are loved by God, as are the weak and marginalized whom we befriend as we go down to meet Jesus. Day three challenges us with the words of John chapt. 4 "If you but knew the gift of God" touching our words, the wounds of our rejections, opening to us the deep rejections others have known and overcome in community of Love, discovering the source of the living waters, teaching us to welcome that person within us who is weak and poor. Day Four draws us to "Love one another as I have loved you" as Jesus commanded us in John Chapter 15. We learn here to live together, to get along, to stay with Jesus, to forgive and to be forgiven. Day five brings us through the mystery of Calvary, suffered even by Jesus Christ, who cried "O God, my God, why have you forsaken me" We learn to enter into that pain, the mystery of the cross. We learn to be compassionate as Mary was comparssionate. Upon Da