But life can teach us that although the events of the day are out of our hands, they should never be out of our hearts, that instead of becoming bitter our lives can yield to the wisdom that only from the heart a creative response can come forth. When the answer to our world remains hanging between our minds and our hands, it remains weak and superficial. When our protests against war, segregation and social injustice do not reach beyond the level of a reaction, then our indignation becomes self-righteous, our hope for a better world degenerates into a desire for quick results, and our generosity is soon exhausted by disappointments. Only when our mind has descended into our heart can we expect a lasting response to well up from our innermost self.
Many of those who worked hard for civil rights and were very active in the peace movement of the sixties have grown tired and often cynical When they discovered that the situation was out of their hands, that little could be done, that no visible changes took place, they lost their vitality and fell back on their wounded selves, escaped into a world of dreams and fantasies, or joined spitefully the crowd they had been protesting against. It is, therefore, not surprising to find many of the old activists struggling with their frustrations in psychotherapy, denying them by drugs or trying to alleviate them in the context of new cults. If any criticism can be made of the sixties, it is not that protest was meaningless but that it was not deep enough, in the sense that it was not rooted in the solitude of the heart. When only our minds and hands work together we quickly become dependent on the results of our actions and tend to give up when they do not materialize. In the solitude of the heart we can truly listen to the pains of the world because there we can recognize them not as strange and unfamiliar pains, but as pains that are indeed our own. There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed nothing human is strange to us. There we can feel that the cruel reality of history is indeed the reality of the human heart, our own included, and that to protest asks, first of all, for a confession of our own participation in the human condition. There we can indeed respond.
It would be paralyzing to proclaim that we, as individuals, are responsible for all human suffering, but it is a liberating message to say that we are called to respond to it. Because out of an inner solidarity with our fellow humans the first attempts to alleviate these pains can come forth.
~Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: the Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
