The Dow is tired. Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose to a record intraday high yesterday, "then ran out of gas, as investors started to turn their attention toward the holiday break." Most of us know the feeling.

Are you ready for a holiday yet? Doubling up on work so you can take a few days off? Needing to rest and recharge in the days ahead? I'm with you. Yesterday I was digging through some files and came across two long-forgotten essays by Henri Nouwen, the Roman Catholic theologian and spiritual mentor to so many of us. Both helped my soul. I hope sharing them today and tomorrow helps yours. The first:

"Every morning at 6:45 I go to the small convent of the Carmelite Sisters for an hour of prayer and meditation. I say 'every morning,' but there are exceptions. Fatigue, busyness, and preoccupations often serve as arguments for not going. Yet without this one-hour-a-day for God, my life loses its coherency and I start experiencing my days as a series of random incidents and accidents.

"My hour in the Carmelite chapel is more important than I can fully know myself. It is not an hour of deep prayer, nor a time in which I experience a special closeness to God; it is not a period of serious attentiveness to the divine mysteries. I wish it were! On the contrary, it is full of distractions, inner restlessness, sleepiness, confusion, and boredom. It seldom, if ever, pleases my senses. But the simple fact of being one hour in the presence of the Lord and of showing him all that I feel, think, sense, and experience, without trying to hide anything, must please him. Somehow, somewhere, I know that he loves me, even though I do not feel that love as I can feel a human embrace, even though I do not hear a voice as I hear human words of consolation, even though I do not see a smile as I can see a human face.

"Still the Lord speaks to me, looks at me, and embraces me there, where I am still unable to notice it. The only way I become aware of his presence is in that remarkable desire to return to that quiet chapel and be there without any real satisfaction. Yes, I notice, maybe only retrospectively, that my days and weeks are different days and weeks when they are held together by these regular 'useless' times. God is greater than my senses, greater than my thoughts, greater than my heart. I do believe that he touches me in places that are unknown even to myself. I seldom can point directly to those places; but when I feel this inner pull to return again to that hidden hour of prayer, I realize that something is happening that is so deep that it becomes like the riverbed through which the waters can safely flow and find their way to the open sea" ("Friday, December 11," from Gracias! A Latin American Journal [HarperCollins, 1983]).

When last did you spend such a "useless" hour with the Christ of Christmas? Why not today?

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