Connections&  
July 8 -- 14th Sunday of the Year

• "Into whatever house you enter, first say, 'Peace to this household.'"   Luke 10:1-12, 17-20
  

'Adam's Peace'
The late Father Henri Nouwen was a bestselling author, much sought-after speaker and retreat leader, and honored professor at Harvard University.  In the mid-1980s, needing a break from his demanding schedule of travel, lecturing and deadlines, Father Nouwen was invited to spend some time with friends at Toronto's Daybreak Community--a "family" of six mentally  handicapped individuals and the four adults who lived with them.  At Daybreak, Father Nouwen met Adam, a resident who had a deep impact on the priest.  Father Nouwen wrote:
     "[Adam] is a 25-year-old man who cannot speak, cannot dress or undress himself, cannot walk alone, cannot eat without help.  He does not cry or laugh& He suffers from severe epilepsy and, despite heavy  medication, sees few days without grand mal seizures."
     To many people, Adam would be considered a virtual "vegetable," but not to Father Nouwen.  "As my fears gradually lessened, a love emerged in me so full of tender affection that most of my other tasks seemed boring and superficial compared with the hours spent with Adam.  Out of his broken body and broken mind emerged a most beautiful human being offering me a greater gift than I would ever offer him."
     "[My career was] so marked by rivalry and competition, so pervaded with compulsion and obsession, so spotted with moments of suspicion, jealousy, resentment and revenge."  But Adam gave Father Nouwen the gift of peace.  "Adam's peace, while rooted more in being than in doing and more in the heart than in the mind, is a peace that calls for community& Adam, in his total vulnerability, calls us together as a family."
[From "Adam's Peace" by Henri Nouwen, from World Vision, September 1988.]

CONNECTION:  In his helplessness, Adam revealed to Father Nouwen and the other members of the Daybreak Community the sense of peace and attitude of joy that begins with recognizing God's presence in our lives.  Adam proclaims the "peace" that Jesus commissions the seventy-two disciples of the Gospel and us to proclaim in our own time and place--peace that is centered in a spirit of gratitude to our loving and gracious God, peace that compels us to embrace Christ's attitude of humility and servanthood, peace that enables us to bring forth the good within others, peace that is returned to us in  extending the blessing of that peace to others. ¦