The Living Reminder by Henri Nouwen, 39-41.  One of my all-time favorite books and authors.

One of the mysteries of life is that memory can often bring us closer to each other than can physical presence.  Physical presence not only invites but also blocks intimate communication.  In our pre-resurrection state our bodies hide as much as they reveal.  Indeed, many of our disappointments and frustrations in life are related to the fact that seeing and touching each other does not always create the closeness we seek.  The more experience in living we have, the more we sense that closeness grows in the continuous interplay between presence and absence.

In absence, from a distance, in memory, we see each other in a new way.  We are less distracted by each other’s idiosyncracies and are better able to see and understand each other’s inner core.

When I am away from home, I often express myself in letters in a much more intimate way than when I am with my family. And when I am away from school, students often write letters in which they say things they were never able to express when I was around.

In memory, we are able to be in touch with each other’s spirit, with that reality in each other which enables an always deepening communication.  There is little doubt that memory can distort, falsify, and cause selective perception.  But that is only one aspect of memory.  Memory also clarifies, purifies, brings into focus, and calls to the foreground hidden gifts.  When a mother and father think of their children who have left home, when a child remembers his parents, when a husband and wife call each other to mind during long periods of absence, when friends recall their friends, it is often the very best that is evoked and the real beauty of the other that breaks through into consciousness.  When we remember each other with love we evoke each other’s spirit and so enter into a new intimacy, a spiritual union with each other.  At the same time, however, the loving memory always makes us desire to be in touch again, to see each other anew, to return to the shared life where the newly found spirit can become more concretely expressed and more deeply embedded in the mutuality of love.  But a deeper presence always leads again to a more purifying absence.  Thus the continuous interplay between presence and absence, linked by our creative memory, is the way in which our love for each other is purified, deepened, and sustained.

I miss you all, so very much.