Can You Drink the Cup by Henri J. M. Nouwen Highlights

Highlights

• One thing I learned from it all: drinking wine is more than just drinking. You have to know what you are drinking, and you have to be able to talk about it. Similarly, just living life is not enough. We must know what we are living. A life that is not reflected upon isn’t worth living.

• 9). The cross of Jesus is likewise the standard of healing, not just healing from physical wounds, but healing from the human condition of mortality.

• Jesus’ unconditional yes to his Father had empowered him to drink his cup not in passive resignation but with the full knowledge that the hour of his death would also be the hour of his glory. His yes made his surrender a creative act, an act that could bear much fruit. His yes took away the fatality of the interruption of his ministry.

New highlights added 2024-06-03 at 9:13 PM

• Thus, as we lift up our cup in a fearless gesture, proclaiming that we will support each other in our common journey, we create community.

• Lifting our cup means sharing our life so we can celebrate it. When we truly believe we are called to lay down our lives for our friends, we must dare to take the risk to let others know what we are living. The important question is, “Do we have a circle of trustworthy friends where we feel safe enough to be intimately known and called to an always greater maturity?”

• With his unique blessing, Trevor had set the tone for a joyful and fruitful meeting. The cup of sorrow and joy had become the cup of blessings. Many people feel cursed—cursed by God with illnesses, losses, handicaps, and misfortunes. They believe their cup doesn’t carry any blessings. It is the cup of God’s wrath, the cup Jeremiah speaks of when he says: For Yahweh, the God of Israel said this to me, “Take this cup of the wine of wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it; they will drink and reel and lose their wits, because of the sword I am sending among them.…You will say to them, ‘Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Israel, says this: Drink! Get drunk! Vomit! Fall, never to rise again, before the sword that I am sending among you!’

• The surprise of it all is that it is often the least among us who reveal to us that our cup is a cup of blessings. Trevor did what nobody else could have done. He

• To celebrate life is to raise up life, make it visible to each other, affirm it in its concreteness, and be grateful for it.

• It is so easy for us to live truncated lives because of hard things that have happened in our past, which we prefer not to remember. Often the burdens of our past seem too heavy for us to carry alone. Shame and guilt make us hide part of ourselves and thus make us live half lives. We truly need each other to claim all of our lives and to live them to the fullest. We need each other to move beyond our guilt and shame and to become grateful, not just for our successes and accomplishments but also for our failures and shortcomings. We need to be able to let our tears flow freely, tears of sorrow as well as tears of joy, tears that are as rain on dry ground. As we thus lift our lives for each other, we can truly say: “To life,” because all we have lived now becomes the fertile soil for the future.

• The enormous individualism of our society, in which so much emphasis is on “doing it yourself,” prevents us from lifting our lives for each other. But each time we dare to step beyond our fear, to be vulnerable and lift our cup, our own and other people’s lives will blossom in unexpected ways.

• At worst, drinking together is saying, “We trust each other enough that we don’t want to poison each other.” At best, it is saying, “I want to get close to you and celebrate life with you.”

• one moment people shouted “Hosanna”; a moment later they cried: “Crucify him.” Jesus took it all in, not as a hero adored and then vilified, but as the one who had come to fulfill a mission and who kept his focus on that mission whatever the responses were.

• These addictions, compulsions, and obsessions reveal our entrapments. They show our sinfulness because they take away our freedom as children of God and thus enslave us in a cramped, shrunken world. Sin makes us want to create our own lives according to our desires and wishes, ignoring the cup that is given to us. Sin makes us self-indulgent.

• But when we start living life as entertainment, we lose touch with our souls and become little more than spectators in a lifelong show. Even very useful and relevant work can become a way of forgetting who we really are. It is no surprise that for many people retirement is a fearful prospect. Who are we when there is nothing to keep us busy?

• As long as we live our deepest truth in secret, isolated from a community of love, its burden is too heavy to carry. The fear of being known can make us split off our true inner selves from our public selves and make us despise ourselves even when we are acclaimed and praised by many.

• When we are fully committed to the spiritual adventure of drinking our cup to the bottom, we will soon discover that people who are on the same journey will offer themselves to us for encouragement and friendship and love. It has been my own most blessed experience that God sends wonderful friends to those who make God their sole concern.

• Drinking our cup involves carefully choosing those actions which lead us closer to complete emptying of it, so that at the end of our lives we can say with Jesus: “It is fulfilled” (John 19:30). That indeed, is the paradox: We fulfill life by emptying it. In Jesus’ own words: “Anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39).

• Actions that lead to overwork, exhaustion, and burnout can’t praise and glorify God. What God calls us to do we can do and do well. When we listen in silence to God’s voice and speak with our friends in trust we will know what we are called to do and we will do it with a grateful heart.