A little quiet time — away from work and the constant interruptions of daily life — ought to be just what the doctor ordered for those seeking more spiritual focus in their lives.

Alms, prayer and fasting are the broad categories the Church requires in the season of Lent. But let your heart and your devotion lead you over to the bookshelf, and you might find a path into the formal disciplines of Lent through spiritual reading.

It’s not entirely clear that Michael Higgins and Kevin Burns are all that interested in Henri Nouwen as a writer or a priest.  They’ve got bigger fish to fry — namely the Roman Catholic priesthood itself.

There’s a real difference between our achievements and our fruitfulness, between our successes and the actual good that we bring into the world.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser will be a leader at the 2017 National Catholic Mission, addressing the theme “Our final gift,” based on Fr. Henri Nouwen’s thesis that death can be our final gift to others. Fr. Rolheiser addressed that concept in a 2001 column reprinted here with his blessing.

As one of the 20th century’s pre-eminent Christian spiritual voices, the Catholic priest and missionary Henri Nouwen touched millions of people worldwide with his moving lectures and 39 published books.

TORONTO – Fr. Henri Nouwen is still trying to help us understand. He’s been dead 20 years, but he’s still there talking to us about our gifts and our failures, our hopes and our doubts, God and love and sin and community and loneliness.

TORONTO - Almost 20 years after his death, the extent of Fr. Henri Nouwen’s influence in the Catholic community is still being discovered.

The renowned spiritual writer Henri Nouwen made no secret about the fact that he was emotionally over-sensitive and that he suffered, sometimes to the point of clinical depression, from emotional obsessions. At times, he, a vowed celibate, was so overpowered by the feeling of being in love with someone who was hopelessly unavailable that he became psychologically paralyzed and needed professional help.

Although I grew up in a loving, safe and nurturing family and community, one of the dominant memories of my childhood and teenage years is that of being restless and somehow discontent. My life always seemed too small, too confined, a life away from what was important in the world. I was forever longing to be more connected to life and I feared that other people didn’t feel that way and that I was somehow singular and unhealthy in my restlessness.