I am the beloved child of a loving creator.

Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen (Nouen), (Nijkerk, 1932 – Hilversum, 1996) was a Dutch-born Catholic priest and writer who authored 40 books about spirituality. 

Nouwen's books are still being read today. 



His books include The Wounded Healer, In the Name of Jesus, Clowning in Rome, The Life of the Beloved and The Way of the Heart. After nearly two decades of teaching at the Menninger Foundation Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and at the University of Notre Dame, Yale University and Harvard University, he went to work with mentally challenged people at the L'Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto, Canada.

”We are not what we do. We are not what we have. We are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth. I am the beloved child of a loving creator.”

”Gratitude flows from the recognition that who we are and what we are gifts to be received and shared.”

 His spirituality was influenced notably by his friendship with Jean Vanier. At the invitation of Vanier, Nouwen visited L'Arche in France, the first of over 130 communities around the world where people with developmental disabilities live with those who care for them. In 1986 Nouwen accepted the position of pastor for a L'Arche community called "Daybreak" in Canada, near Toronto.

One of Nouwens' major ongoing themes involved his struggle reconciling his depression with his Christian faith. In Return of the Prodigal Son, for example, Nouwen describes love and forgiveness as unconditional.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Nouwen

Jean Vanier, CC GOQ (born 1928) is a Canadian Catholic philosopher turned theologian, humanitarian and the founder of L'Arche-wiki ( L'Arche Canada | Home ), an international federation of group homes for people with developmental disabilities and those who assist them.

“We are born in extreme fragility,
and we die in extreme fragility.
Throughout our lives we remain vulnerable,
and at risk of being wounded.
Each child is so vulnerable, so fragile
and without any defenses!”
Jean Vanier | Home

Vanier is the son of the 19th Governor General of Canada, Major-General Georges Vanier and was born in Geneva, while his father was on diplomatic service in Switzerland.

Major-General Georges Vanier
( 1888 – 1967 )

Someone at Toastmasters mentioned John Locke and a clean slate today. He also mentioned:

• -          Let your conscious be your guide. (Good advice for children)

• -          People that let you down are a lesson to be more discerning and careful with people in your life.

John Locke FRS ( 1632 – 1704 ), widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism,^[ was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers.

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.

 Tabula rasa, meaning blank slate in Latin, is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception.  
“On this clean slate, let my true function be written for me.”Lesson 65 ACIM

What worries you, masters you. John Locke

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts. John Locke

“It is an established opinion among some men, that there are in the understanding certain innate principles; some primarily notions, characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first being and brings into the world with it. It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the falseness of this supposition...
Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. 1689.