Henri Nouwen’s “Inner Voice of Love”: Finding the Path Home

I’m a fan of the writings of Henri Nouwen. Before his death in 1996, the Holland-born author and theologian served as a Catholic priest; taught at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, and at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard; worked with Trappist monks in New York’s Abbey of the Genesee; lived with the poor in Peru; and became pastor at a L’Arche community for the mentally disabled in Canada. Along the way, he wrote over 40 books.

One of the hallmarks of Nouwen’s works is his honest sharing of his personal struggles. This is probably nowhere more apparent than in his Inner Voice of Love, originally a series of “secret journal” entries written during a period of deep depression. In the introduction to the book, Nouwen writes that it was only at the urging of friends that he decided to have The Inner Voice of Love published.

In the book’s pages, Nouwen touches on themes that strike chords with many cross-cultural children and adults, global nomads, and others who are physical or spiritual “strangers in a strange land”—with those who are looking for a community and home to call their own. In fact, it was shortly after he joined the community of L’Arche, what he called his “true home,” that Nouwen was faced with his depression. “Just when I had found a home,” he writes, “I felt absolutely homeless. . . . It was if the house I had finally found had no floors.”

Over the course of the next six months, Nouwen moved from agony “to a new inner freedom, a new hope, and a new creativity.” Following are some of the “spiritual imperatives” that Nouwen wrote to himself during this journey, as he sought the path home:

Coming Home and Trusting Your Heart

Sometimes people who do not know your heart will altogether miss the importance of something that is part of your deepest self, precious in your eyes as well as God’s. They might not know you well enough to be able to respond to your genuine needs. It is then that you have to speak your heart and follow your own deepest calling.

There is a part of you that too easily gives in to others’ influence. As soon as someone questions your motives, you start doubting yourself. You end up agreeing with the other before you have consulted your own heart. Thus you grow passive and simply assume that the other knows better.

Here you have to be very attentive to your inner self. “Coming home” and “being given back to yourself” are expressions that indicate that you have a solid inner base from which you can speak and act—without apologies—humbly but convincingly.

Sharing Your Pain as a Fellow Traveler

You wonder whether it is good to share your struggles with others, especially with those to whom you are called to minister. you find it hard not to mention your own pains and sorrows to those you are trying to help. You feel that what belongs to the core of your humanity should not be hidden. You want to be a fellow traveler, not a distant guide.

The main question is “Do you own your pain?” As long as you do not own your pain—that is, integrate your pain into your way of being in the world—the danger exists that you will use the other to seek healing for yourself. . . .

But when you fully own your pain and do not expect those to whom you minister to alleviate it, you can speak about true freedom. Then sharing your struggle can become a service; then your openness about yourself can offer courage and hope to others.

For you to be able to share your struggle as a service, it is also essential to have people to whom you can go with your own needs. You will always need safe people to whom you can pour out your heart.

You Are Welcome Here

Not being welcome is your greatest fear. . . . It is the deepseated fear that it would have been better if you had not lived.

Everything Jesus is saying to you can be summarized in the words “Know that you are welcome.” Jesus offers you his own most intimate life with the Father. He wants you to know all he knows and to do all he does. He wants his home to be yours. Yes, he wants to prepare a place for you in his Father’s house.

Keep reminding yourself that your feelings of being unwelcome do not come from God and do not tell the truth. The Prince of Darkness wants you to believe that your life is a mistake and that there is no home for you. But every time you allow these thoughts to affect you, you set out on the road to self-destruction. So you have to keep unmasking the lie and think, speak, and act according to the truth that you are very, very welcome.

(Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom, New York: Doubleday, 1996)

[photo: “To die by your side,” by Hugo Marcelo Mendez Campos, used under a Creative Commons license]

Now That the Hobbit Air-Safety Video Has Gone Viral, Here’s a Look at the Prequels

If you think all air-safety videos are boring, then you probably haven’t flown Air New Zealand. Their latest effort, the Hobbit-inspired “An Unexpected Briefing,” has gone well beyond the simple objective of capturing the attention of passengers, as it has gone viral and has already entertained millions of viewers on the ground. While this one is by far the most successful tongue-in-cheek video from “the airline of Middle-earth,” it’s certainly not the first.

Before “An Unexpected Briefing,” there was “Mile-High Madness with Richard Simmons,” “Crazy about Rugby,” featuring the All Blacks, and  “Bare Essentials of Safety,” with the cast/crew dressed only in body paint. Here’s a “best of the best” mash-up of all three versions:

And New Zealand’s national airline has also given us “Ed and Melanie’s Safety Sketch,” with the voice talents of Ed O’Neill (Wreck It Ralph, Modern Family) and Melanie Lynskey (Two and a Half Men, Up in the Air):

Air New Zealand isn’t the only carrier using humor to grab eyeballs for this very important message. Three years ago, the UK’s Thomson Airways recast their video using children. It looks as if their lead spokes-girl might some day become a rival for Deltalina. She certainly has mastered the finger wag.

Who’s Deltalina? She’s Katherine Lee, the flight attendant chosen in 2008 to be the main presenter for Delta’s safety videos. He nickname comes from what some see as her resemblance to Angelina Jolie. Air safety has made Lee a star.

Back in 2007, Virgin American came up with this animated video, featuring such lines as “For the point zero zero zero one per cent of you who have never operated a seat belt before, it works like this.”

And finally, for the point zero zero zero zero one per cent of you who haven’t seen “An Unexpected Briefing,” with its cameos by Peter Jackson and Gollum, here it is. Enjoy.

Related post:
Inflight Magazines: My Virtual Seat-Back Pocket Runneth Over

Waiter, What’s This Maggot Doing in My Soup?

As a boy growing up in rural Missouri, I was very interested in insects and ended up with a rather sizable collection of mounted specimens that I took to the local 4-H fair. Later, when I became a 4-H leader to a younger friend nearby, I passed on what I’d learned. I remember once, after running out of ideas, spicing things up with a snack of deep-fried insects. As I recall, we ate grasshoppers, bees, and possibly cicadas. Little did I know that I could have been on the brink of a future career.

If you travel much outside the US and Europe, you run a good chance of running across insects served up as snacks or side dishes. But if people like China’s Li Jinsui have their way, edible insects will become a global main course.

As reported in Le Monde, Li runs an “insect factory,” which has as its focus the housefly—in particular, the immature housefly, or maggot. You can read the entire article here, but if you need some coaxing, let me whet your appetite with some quotations. Where else can you read such phrases as this?

China’s Maggot Factories Hoping to Feed the World (the headline)
Li says he can deliver about 150kg of maggots a day . . .
As he walks into a room filled with two million flies . . . , and
With the price of wasp larvae on the rise . . .

For Li, raising insects for human consumption isn’t just a novelty. He’s hoping to educate his countrymen, develop his business, and become “the industry’s world leader.” One obstacle that he has to overcome on the maggot front, though, is to figure out how to raise his flies on a diet of rice. That’s because housefly maggots typically feed on animal feces, which makes them unsuitable for human consumption.

Sounds like Li has a lot of educating and persuading to do.

But he’s not alone. There’s a whole movement devoted to “entomophagy,” or the eating of insects. It touts the health and environmental benefits of insect eating and presents it as an effective solution to the problem of feeding a rapidly growing world. For more information, check out these interesting sites:

Also, at NOVA’s “Bugs You Can Eat,” you can follow a couple American journalists, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, as they trek around the world trying a variety of insect and spider dishes. With a twist on the “tastes like chicken” meme, Menzel describes deep-fried tarantulas in Cambodia, saying,

If day-old deep-fried chickens had no bones, had hair instead of feathers, and were the size of a newborn sparrow, they might taste like tarantulas.

And finally, if you’re in the States and want to get your taste buds ready for the insect-eating future, go to HOTLIX to order some “larvets,” hand-dipped chocolate crickets, or other varieties of insect candy. Or go to Hollywood location scout Scott Trimble’s Entomophagy, inspired by “the seeming lack of a concise smartphone-friendly list of American restaurants that serve insect options on their menus.”

Who knows, maybe someday you’ll ask, “Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup?” and his answer will be “Why, adding flavor, protein, and pizazz, of course!”

(Harold Thibault, “China’s Maggot Factories Hoping to Feed the World,”  Worldcrunch, October 1, 2012, translated from “Des Usines d’Insectes pour Nourrir les Chinois,” Le Monde, September 28, 2012;

[photo: “Fly larva,” by Susannah Anderson, used under a Creative Commons license]

Click.Click.Click: Do.Something.Good

With only a click—here—you can test your vocabulary at Word Dynamo. Not a bad return on your investment.

With the same click—here—you can not only test your vocabulary but also facilitate a donation of 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Programme, and it continues for every definition you choose correctly.

That’s because the second click takes you to Free Rice, one of the many Web sites that make a donation to a charity in exchange for you clicking a link. That link sends you to a page with advertisements, and the advertisers are the ones that make the donation, not you.

While Free Rice’s word game might keep you clicking, you might prefer something less challenging, like, say, just pressing your finger without having to read any words other than click here. If that’s more your speed, bookmark some of the sites below, several of which support causes that reach beyond the borders of the US.

The Greater Good Network:

Another place with opportunities to click for several issues is Click to Give, with these categories:

And finally, there are these options at Care2:

Looking for even more choices? Go to these lists:

Of course, if all this benevolence gives you “mouse finger,” take a look at eHow.com for treatment and prevention.

[photo: “air:alone in Kyoto,” by Lali Masriera, used under a Creative Commons license]

Starbucks: Designing a Global Concept

Last week, after a particularly long day, I bought a bag of Chips Ahoy! chocolate-chip cookies and had myself some cookies and milk. Nabisco is an American company, and chocolate-chip cookies are an American original, but eating them made me feel as if I were . . . back in Taiwan. That’s because one evening in Taipei, after a particularly long day, I needed some comfort food. So I grabbed a (very small) box of Chips Ahoy! cookies from the supermarket. It wasn’t that they were a staple of mine in the States. In fact, I don’t remember eating them before moving overseas. That’s why, now that I’m back in Missouri, Chips Ahoy! reminds me of Taiwan. Funny how the mind works.

Something else that reminds me of Taiwan is Starbucks. I’d never been inside one before moving to Taipei, but when we moved to Yong He (now part of New Taipei City), the cafe in our neighborhood became the default location for our weekly team meetings. So now, whenever I see a Starbucks, I think of some I’ve visited in Taiwan: the one underneath Taipei Main Station, the one with the huge second story in downtown Taipei, the one overlooking the harbor in Keelung, the one in the Xi Men Ding night market, and, of course, the one on the corner of an extremely busy intersection in Yong He, just a few blocks from our apartment.

I like Starbucks. I know their drinks are too expensive. And I don’t fit in with the true Starbucks aficionados. But it feels good to me. It feels international to me.

Since its humble origins in Seattle in 1971, Starbucks truly has become an international chain. The Starbuck’s company, which already has over 7,000 cafes outside the US, is making a move to beef up its international presence and plans to open 1,200 stores in the current fiscal year, which started this month. More than half of these openings will be outside the US, with about 500 in Asia. Over half of these 500 will be in China.

Wherever Starbucks opens a cafe, they alter their interiors and menus to fit the country. Take for instance in India, where the country’s first Starbucks just opened in Mumbai this month, serving Indian-grown coffee, murg tikka panini, and tandoori paneer rolls in a cafe that features furniture made from Indian teakwood. And then there’s Taiwan, where the Asian-inspired creations on the menu have given the world green-tea lattes and Frappuccinos.

Take a look at the following video to see how the company’s store designers work to connect each store to its community. Sounds like a cool job to have.

Click here to see a map from The Seattle Times showing Starbucks’ expansion around the world. Or go here for an interactive map from Loxcel that gives statistics for each country and store markers that show addresses and hours of operation. Load the Loxcel map on your smartphone and you can even search for stores that are currently open and click the phone icon to call them directly.

(Melissa Allison, “Starbucks Opens Its First Cafe in India,” The Seattle Times, Oct. 19, 2012; Melissa Allison, “Starbucks Maps Future of Venti-Sized Global Expansion,” The Seattle Times, Aug. 4, 2012)

[photo: “Starbucks Green Tea Cream,” by awee_19, used under a Creative Commons license]

Keep Calm and Roll On Your Carry-On

USA Today reports that 2012 marks the 25th anniversary of the Rollaboard suitcase. After seeing passengers struggling with their luggage, wheeled trolleys, and bungee cords, Bob Plath, a pilot at Northwest Airlines came up with the idea to create a suitcase with a built-in handle and wheels.

Now, two and a half decades later, two new inventors have come up with a product that they hope will change traveling again. The creators are Darryl Lenz, a flight attendant, and her husband, Randy. After they watched parents struggling with their luggage, strollers, and children, they designed a chair that straps on to your wheeled luggage. It’s called the “Ride-On Carry-On.”

We first saw this product on ABC’s Shark Tank, where the Lenzes won backing from investor Barbara Corcoran. Since then, they’ve been featured on several TV shows, including The View, Good Morning America, and Inside Edition. Clips from these shows are available on the Ride-On Carry-On website, but my favorite is this one. Not only does it introduce the product, but it also has that great YOU’VE GOT TO HAVE ONE! infomercial style.

So what are you waiting for? ORDER YOURS TODAY! (Luggage not included.)

But then again, maybe you don’t have kids young enough to ride on your carry-on. Or maybe you’re just not sold on the idea. You’re probably not alone. It’s not easy being an early adapter.

In fact, there’s at least one person who still isn’t a fan of the Rollaboard-style carry-on. Richard Bangs, host of American Public Television’s Richard Bangs’ Adventures with Purpose, tells USA Today that the Rollaboard marked “the beginning of human devolution.” According to Bangs,

It used to be, as we ran through airports carrying our bags,  there was a measure of physical exertion that countered, to a degree, the hours spent motionless in an airline seat. It toned muscles and prepared us for the adventure ahead.

Regardless, the evolution of the suitcase continues. When USA Today asked what’s “next on the horizon,” Michele Marini Pittenger, president of the Travel Goods Association, said, “Luggage that packs itself? Now that would be a problem-solver.”

While that’s probably not going to happen soon, what about luggage that moves itself?

Cutting-edge travelers, I present you hop! “the following suitcase.” Hop! is the brain child of Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, a designer who has studied in Canada, India, Chile, Spain, and Sweden. (Hmmm. . . . I wonder if one of these could work with a Roll-On Carry-On. . . .)

(Jayne Clark, “Rollaboard Luggage Celebrates a Wheelie Big Birthday,” USA Today, August 16, 2012)

[photo: “Blue Suitcase,” by Drew Coffman, used under a Creative Commons license]

Can’t We Just Be Friends? Bridging the Cultural Divide on Campus

 In my last post, on friendships between international and American students, I pulled some statistics from Voice of America’s “Student Union” blog. Actually, rather than a lot of numbers, much of what you’ll find at “Student Union” are first-hand accounts of what it’s like to study in American colleges and universities, while facing the challenges of a new culture.

There’s a lot of insight and candor there, on a great variety of topics. Take, for example, these posts:

But back to the topic of friendships. In my post I cited a recent study that says over half of students from China and other East Asian countries have no close American friends. Under the title “Whose Fault Is It when American and International Students Don’t Mix?” Jessica Stahl discusses a video from the Office for International Students and Scholars at Michigan State University, in which students from China and the US talk about the ins and outs of cross-cultural friendships. Part of what makes the video especially interesting is that the group of four female Chinese students and the group of three male Americans are not interviewed at the same time. While this means they don’t respond directly to what their counterparts are saying, it does give them a greater opportunity for honesty and frankness.

After the introduction, the video opens with a segment called “Forming Friendships: Finding Common Ground.” One of the Chinese students begins by saying, “Finding something in common is really hard, because you don’t make friends with someone without having something in common with them.” I think she makes a good point.

When we meet people, we usually start with questions that will reveal what we have in common. And when we find that we share something—place of origin, interests, likes, beliefs, friends, experiences—we pursue it in conversation to see how good a fit we are. It takes time and patience to get past the superficials to track down deeper commonalities, and people from different cultures often don’t get past the opening conversation . . . or they don’t even begin the conversation in the first place.

On the other hand, just looking like you’re from “someplace else” is enough to draw attention from others with significant cross-cultural experience. So Third Culture Kids often seek out international students, and international students find community among each other, regardless of how far apart their home countries are. But while this can lead to some wonderful opportunities for friendship, it is often a small pool to draw from, and it can further limit one’s feeling of fitting in to the general population.

To pique your curiosity, I’ve transcribed below more of the students’ comments on this topic of making friends. But really, if you’re interested in any aspect of cross-cultural interactions, watch the whole video. It’s 17 minutes long but well worth your time.

FYI: The video description at YouTube states that the panelists are all undergraduate students at Michigan State, and the American students “have all spent time in China and have meaningful Chinese friendships.”

Here are some of the comments made by the Chinese students.

Students’ get-togethers start off by talking about high school life. When they came from the same area, well they have some kind of similar backgrounds and experiences that we don’t really have.

Some Chinese students, when they talk with an American, when they cannot find anything in common, they’ll just keep quiet. So they just ignore you. . . .

They care about their baseball game, football game, everything else, instead of this bunch of Chinese people just arrived.

If you make friends . . . you want to get involved in the American community, they will treat you as either a joke or just ignore you.

I’d rather just be with my Chinese friends.

I’ve met a lot of great American friends who are willing to sit down and listen to you and also share their story.

And by the American students:

For someone who hasn’t been to China before or who doesn’t know the culture, I think it’s going to be difficult for them to kickstart a conversation.

The closest relationships that I’ve had with Chinese students are the ones where the Chinese students make it an effort to also start a relationship as well.

My feeling, from my experience of why Chinese students don’t necessarily form close relationships with Americans and why Americans don’t form necessarily close relationships with  Chinese is more so the flaw of the Chinese students.

Man, all the Asians are always together. You’ll never see one by themselves. They’re always in a group.

Besides those certain things that do make an impact, we’re all very similar, and you don’t need to stress the differences too much, because those are easily overlooked. . . . Differences aren’t a problem. Differences are what make life.

[photo: “When Chopstick Meet Fork & Spoon,” by Lohb, used under a Creative Commons license]

(Too) Many International Students in the US Have No Close American Friends

For several years, while I was serving as a campus minister to international students at the University of Missouri, I kept a photo of a young Taiwanese couple tucked in my Bible. It was one of the those glamour wedding pictures that are popular in Taiwan. The husband, a student at MU, had given me the photo before he and his wife returned to their country. On the back it said, “To Craig, my best friend in America.” The trouble was, I didn’t remember much about him at all.

Of course, I met a lot of students during my five years in campus ministry. But what made this student stand out was that he considered me his best friend. Maybe I had introduced myself to him shortly after his arrival. Maybe I had given him a Bible in Chinese. Maybe I had helped him find some free furniture. Maybe I was his best friend. But that doesn’t mean I was an especially good friend.

According to Open Doors, last year there were over 720,000 international students attending US universities and colleges, and this number doesn’t include dependents who accompanied them. This total was a record high, and the numbers will surely show another increase when new data are released next month.

More Than One in Three Claim No Strong Friendships with Americans

While more and more students are coming to the US for higher education, more and more of them are finding an environment without significant friendships. This is the finding of a recent study, “Intercultural Friendship: Effects of Home and Host Region,” published in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.

As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the article’s author, Elisabeth Gareis, of City University of New York’s Baruch College, found that 38% of students she surveyed reported “no strong American friendships.” Students from East Asia (including China) were more likely than those from English-speaking countries to report a lack of friends, with over half of them claiming no close friendships with Americans.

Not only was there a notable difference between the students’ area of origin, but also with the place of their American university. The study, which included students studying at southern and northeastern institutions, showed that those in the Northeast were less satisfied with their friendship situation than those in the South. Likewise, students in larger metropolitan areas were less happy about their friendships than those in smaller towns.

As for the cause of the problem, 54% of the surveyed students believed that Americans were responsible for the lack of friendships, while 46% blamed their own “internal factors,” such as shyness or a lack of English skills. A report on the study in Inside Higher Ed adds that among East Asian students, nearly 80% blamed their own shortcomings.

(“Open Doors 2011 Fast Facts,” Institute of International Education; Karin Fischer, “Many Foreign Students Are Friendless in the U.S., Study Finds,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 14, 2012; Scott Jaschik, “Friendless in America,” Inside Higher Ed, June 14, 2012)

Students Disagree on Whether Americans Are Trying

Voice of America took an online survey of its Student Union readers, asking “about how American students view their international classmates (and how international students think their American classmates view them).” One hundred ten students responded—54 Americans and 56 internationals—giving the following results:

  • 60% of American students said they “relate to international students as well as or better than Americans”
  • 50% of international students in the survey reported that they “relate to Americans as well as or better than international students”
  • 45% of American respondents said that they try to get to know their international schoolmates, 20% said they do not try, and 35% said that extra effort isn’t needed*
  • 30% of international students answering the survey said that Americans try to get to know them, 50% said the Americans don’t try, and 20% said that no extra effort is needed by the Americans*
    *Results from these last two items are approximations, as they were read from a graph.

(Jessica Stahl, “Why Aren’t Americans and International Students Becoming Friends?” The Student Union, Voice of America, June 19, 2012)

Feelings of Not Belonging in the US

Last year, researchers from Ohio University and CATS College in England asked international students a different set of questions, focusing on their feelings of belonging and what universities can do to help. Inside Higher Ed reports that most students in the survey “rated their sense of belonging as a five out of five and their overall satisfaction with their college as a four out of five.” But when it comes to “belonging in the U.S.”—a feeling that can be strongly influenced by friendships on and off campus—the  majority of students rated that only a two or three.

Many international students feel that their school’s student services can do more. One student said,

I had a difficult time adjusting to the U.S. culture and educational system. I thought it would be cheaper and I made no friends. I asked for help at the office of International students and I was sent to the counseling services. The counselor sent me to the psych ward because she thought I was suicidal—which was not true. It has been a very dramatic experience that schools should consider when having international students.

(Allie Grasgreen, “At Home on Campus, Not in Country,” Inside Higher Ed, April 6, 2011)

See also my post, “Can’t We Just Be Friends? Bridging the Cultural Divide on Campus“

[photo: “CSUN BBQ 19,” by Parker Michael Knight, used under a Creative Commons license]