The Genesee Diary by Henri J.M. Nouwen PDF Free

The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery is Henri Nouwen’s journal of his seven-month stay in the Abbey of the Genesee in upstate New York. His reflections on daily life with the Trappists are funny, wise, and often profound–resembling Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk, but a bit less thematically structured and more down to earth. Nouwen’s goal is simply to record what it’s like to pass the time in a cloistered community. He spends part of his stay there reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which helps awaken a hunger for a richer experience of life that he subsequently satisfies by learning to slow down. In his first week at the monastery, Nouwen writes, “I have so many ideas I want to write about, so many books I want to read, so many skills I want to learn–motorcycle maintenance is now one of them–and so many things I want to say to others now or later, that I do not SEE that God is all around me and that I am always trying to see what is ahead, overlooking him who is so close.” Then, looking forward to being planted in one place among the Trappists, he writes, “Maybe I need to get stuck,” to learn to see God. He does, and he does. –Michael Joseph Gross