The following is excerpts from the book,
"Beloved; Henri Nouwen in Conversation"
with Philip Roderick.

.... heart is the center of our being.
It's not a muscle, but a symbol for the very
center of our being. Now the beautiful thing
about the heart is that the heart is the place
we are mostly ourselves. It's like a core of
our being. It's the spiritual center of our being.
Solitude and silence are ways to get to the heart.
The heart is the place where God speaks to us,
where we hear the voice who calls us beloved.
This is precisely in the most intimate place.

....Prayer and solitude are ways to listen to
that soft, little voice. ....If you enter deeper
and deeper into the place, you not only meet
God, but you meet the whole world there.

.... A lot of people contact me who have
absolutely no sense of God, who I love deeply,
who love me deeply. So I am not saying that
if you don't believe in God, you're not a good
person. Some of the best people are often
people who have no formal religious interest,
and a lot of religious people are very
narrow-minded and extremely anxious.

These lines are hard to draw, but I do believe
that you continue to see people searching for
the Spirit, searching for something that
transcends the earth.
It is our belief that the human spirit is given to
us by God, and the human heart is given to us
by God.

We are called to "Live larger."
If our life is just made up of little things,
it is no longer satisfying.
People are looking for a larger beauty and
a larger sense of life.

Whenever human spirit is active,
you see community, you see solitude,
you see questions about silence,
you see prayer, you see worship.
Sometimes human spirit expresses itself
in ways that are formally religious.

Where a human spirit extinguishes - and
that's what you see a lot - you get violence,
you get very narcisstic behavior,
self-absorption, addiction, people getting totally
lost, suicide, destruction and darkness.
So there it is - if you look around.