Henri Nouwen's "Spiritual Formation" was deeply insightful and helpful. It is recommended that this book be read slowly and thoughtfully, and so I devoted a week to each of the book's seven chapters. At the end of each of the chapters, there are reflection questions and opportunities to journal thoughts down; as someone who can zip through a book quickly, it was difficult at times to take this work so slowly, but it allowed for me to really chew on the meat of the text, and to get something from it that was formational and transformational.

The seven chapters all focus on a "movement." The "movements" that were especially helpful to me were the movement from resentment to gratitude (Chapter Four) and the movement from fear to love (Chapter Five). One of my favorite aspects of this book is Nouwen's incorporation of the spiritual disciple of "visio divina," which is Latin for "sacred seeing." Nouwen includes in this book a number of color reprints of works of art that have been especially helpful to him in his spiritual formation and in these "movements." Some of these works are paintings from Van Gogh, others are icons from throughout Church history, another is a sculpture, and still another is a piece done by members of L'Arche Daybreak in Toronto, Canada. Meditating on and really "seeing" these images were helpful for me as I worked through the course of the book, and were wonderful, concrete examples of the "movements" Nouwen speaks of.