THE
SPIRITUAL WISDOM OF
HENRI NOUWEN
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I
am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be
completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his
or her own vulnerable self.
Everyone
was saying that I as doing really well, but something inside was telling me
that my success was putting my own soul in danger.
One
of the main sufferings experienced in the ministry is that of low
self-esteem. Many priests and ministers today increasingly perceive
themselves as having very little impact. They are very busy, but they do
not see much change. It seems that their efforts are fruitless.
They face an ongoing decrease in church attendance and discover that
psychologists, psychotherapists, marriage counselors, and doctors are often
more trusted than they. One of the most painful realizations for many
Christian leaders is that fewer and fewer young men feel attracted to follow in
their footsteps.
The
secular world around us is saying in a loud voice, “We can take care of
ourselves. We do not need God, the church, or a priest. We are in
control.“
The
leader of the future will be the one who dares to claim his irrelevance in the
contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows him or her to enter into a
deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success and to
bring the light of Jesus there.
To
live a life that is not dominated by the desire to be relevant but is instead
safely anchored in the knowledge of God’s first love, we have to be
mystics. A mystic is a person whose identity is deeply rooted in God’s
first love.
Many
of us feel like failed tightrope walkers who discovered that we did not have
the power to draw thousands of people, that we could not make many conversions,
that we did not have the talents to create beautiful liturgies, that we were
not as popular with the youth, the young adults, or the elderly as we had hoped,
and that we were not as able to respond to the needs of our people as we had
expected.
The
mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and
varied conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of
God. Therefore, true ministry must be mutual. When the members of a
community of faith cannot truly know and love their shepherd, shepherding
quickly becomes a subtle way of exercising power over others and begins to show
authoritarian and dictatorial traits. The world in which we live—a world
of efficiency and control—has no models to offer to those who want to be
shepherds in the way Jesus was a shepherd. Even the so-called “helping
professions” have been so thoroughly secularized that mutuality can only be
seen as a weakness and a dangerous form of role confusion.
When
people have little intellectual capacity, they let their hearts—their loving
hearts, their angry hearts, their longing hearts—speak directly and often
unadorned.
The
long painful history of the Church is the history of people ever again tempted
to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being
led. Those who resisted this temptation to the end and thereby give us
hope are the true saints.
Too
often I looked at being relevant, popular, and powerful as ingredients of an
effective ministry. Jesus sends us out to be shepherds and Jesus promises
a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hand and be led to
places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern
for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal
and mutual ministry, and from a leadership built on power to a leadership in
which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people
What
is new is that we have moved from the many things to the
Jesus,
in whom the fullness of God dwells, has become our home by making his home in us. He allows us to make our home in him.
By entering into the intimacy of our innermost self he offers us the
opportunity to enter into his own intimacy with God. By choosing us as
his preferred dwelling place, he invites us to choose him as our preferred
dwelling place. This is the mystery of the incarnation. Here we
come to see what discipline in the spiritual life means. It means a
gradual process of coming home to where we belong and listening there to the
voice which desires our attention. Home is the place where that first
love dwells and speaks gently to us. Prayer is the most concrete way to
make our home in God.
The
art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains
in the dark. Let’s rejoice in the little light we carry and not ask for
the great beam that would take all shadows away.
Words
can give us the feeling of having stopped too long at one of the little
villages that we pass on our journey, of having been motivated more by
curiosity than by service. Words often make us forget that we are
pilgrims called to invite others to join us on the journey.
It
will be a world of constant care and attention; a world of very small
progressions; a world of new feelings, emotions, and thoughts; a world of
affections that come from places invisible in “normal” people.
Laura
is going to be important for all of us in the family. We have never had a
“weak” person among us. We all are hard working, ambitious, and
successful people who seldom have to experience powerlessness. Now Laura
enters and tells us a totally new story, a story of weakness, brokenness,
vulnerability, and total dependency. Laura, who will always be a child,
will teach us the way of Christ as no one will ever be able to do.
If
we start discovering, writing letters, attending classes, visiting people, and
cooking food are not a series of random events that prevent us from realizing
our deepest self, but contain within themselves the transforming power we are
looking for, then we are beginning to move from time lived as chronos to time
lived as kairos. Kairos means the opportunity. It is the right
time, the right moment, the chance of our life. When our time becomes
kairos, it opens up endless new possibilities and offers us a constant
opportunity for a change of heart.
The
contemplative life is not a life that offers a few good moments between the
many bad ones, but a life that transforms all our time into a window through
which the invisible world becomes visible.
The men and women of
today are often thought of as anonymous members of the lonely crowd: the men and women of tomorrow will be the
children of this lonely crowd. Christian
leadership will be shaped by three characteristics which the men and women of
tomorrow share: inwardness,
fatherlessness, and convulsiveness.
The current
generation is the inward generation which gives absolute priority to the
personal and withdraws into the self in a remarkable way.
It is a painful fact
to realize how poorly prepared most Christian leaders prove to be when they
serve as spiritual leaders. Most of them
are used to thinking in terms of large-scale organization and running the show
as a circus director. They are
unfamiliar with, and even somewhat afraid of, the deep and significant
movements of the spirit. I am afraid
that in a few decades the church will be unable to offer men creative ways to
communicate with the source of human life.
When man is no longer able to look beyond his own
death and relate himself to what extends beyond the time and space of his life,
he loses his desire to create and the excitement of being human.
The compassionate man
stands in the midst of his people but does not get caught in the conformist
forces of the peer group, because through his compassion he is able to avoid
the distance of pity as well as the exclusiveness of sympathy. Compassion is born when we discover in the
center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also
that our neighbor is really our fellow man.
For a compassionate
man nothing human is alien: no joy and
no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.
This compassion is
authority because it does not tolerate the pressures of the in-group, but
breaks through the boundaries between languages and countries, rich and poor,
educated and illiterate. This compassion
pulls people away from the fearful clique into the large world where they can
see that every human face is the face of a neighbor. Thus the authority of compassion is the
possibility of man to forgive his brother, because forgiveness is only real for
him who has discovered the weakness of his friends and the sins of his enemy in
his own heart and is willing to call every human being his brother. A fatherless generation looks for brothers
who are able to take away their fear and anxiety, who can open the doors of
their narrow-mindedness and show them that forgiveness is a possibility which
dawns on the horizon of humanity.
The compassionate man
who points to the possibility of forgiveness helps others to free themselves
from the chains of their restrictive shame, allows them to experience their own
guilt, and restores their hope for a future in which the lamb and the lion can
sleep together.
The danger is that
instead of becoming free to let the spirit grow, the future minister may
entangle himself in the complications of his own assumed competence and use his
specialism as an excuse to avoid the much more difficult task of being
compassionate. The task of the Christian
leader is to bring out the best in man and to lead him forward to a more human
community; the danger is that his skillful diagnostic eye will become more an
eye for distant and detailed analysis than the eye of a compassionate partner. And if priests and ministers of tomorrow
think that more skill training is the solution for the problem of Christian
leadership for the future generation, they may end up being more frustrated and
disappointed than the leaders of today.
All over the world,
people are victims of persecution, war, and starvation. All over the world there is hatred, violence,
and abuse. For a while, we lived with
the illusion that the period of concentration camps was far behind us, that a
holocaust such as that which occurred during the Second World War would no
longer be humanly possible. But what is
happening today shows how little we have really learned. The true sin of humanity is that men and
women created to be brothers and sisters became again and again each other’s
enemies, willing to destroy each other’s lives
When God wants to die
with and for us, we too must die with and for each other. Tragically, however, we think about our death
first as an event that separates us from others. It is departing, it is leaving others behind,
it is the ending of precious relationships, the beginning of loneliness. Indeed, for us, death is primarily a
separation and, worse, an irreversible separation. But Jesus died for us so that our death no
longer need be just separation. His
death opened for us a possibility of making our own death a way to union and
communion.
Jesus completed his
mission on earth through being the passive subject of what others did to him.
We must trust that
the death of those before us, just as our own death, will make other lives
fruitful for generations to come.
The
many contradictions in our lives—such as being home while feeling homeless,
being busy while feeling bored, being popular while feeling lonely, being believers
while feeling many doubts—can frustrate, irritate, and even discourage
us. They make us feel that we are never fully present. Every door
that opens for us makes us see how many more doors are closed. But there
is another response. The same contradictions can bring us into touch with
a deeper longing for the fulfillment of a desire that lives beneath all desires
and that only God can satisfy. Contradictions, thus understood, create
the friction that can help us move toward God.
What
if the events of our history are molding us as a sculptor molds his clay, and
if it is only in a careful obedience to these molding hands that we can
discover our real vocation and become mature people? Then our life will
indeed be a different life because then fate becomes opportunity, wounds a
warning, and paralysis an invitation to search for deeper sources of
vitality. Then we can look for hope in the middle of crying cities,
burning hospitals, and desperate parents and children. Then we can cast
off the temptation of despair and speak about the fertile tree while witnessing
the dying of the seed. Then indeed we can break out of the prison of an
anonymous series of events and to listen to the God of history who speaks to us
in the center of our solitude and respond to his ever new call for conversion.
Self-affirmation
and self-emptying are not opposites because no man can give away what he does
not have.
Jesus
calls us to recognize that gladness and sadness are never separate, that joy
and sorrow really belong together, and that mourning and dancing are part of
the same movement.
We
cannot live a spiritual life in secrecy. We cannot find our way to true
freedom in isolation. Silence without speaking is as dangerous as
solitude without community.
The
great mystery of intimacy in the family is that it does not exclude others but
rather includes them in that intimacy. When a family is deprived of
solitude and intimacy there is no space for strangers. But when there is
love, an unlimited space opens for others. In that love, strangers can
become friends, yes, even members of the family. So we see how indeed the
family can become the basis of the Christian community.
Compassion
is something other than pity. Pity suggests distance, even a certain condescendence.
I am too busy to really pay attention to the man who reaches out to me.
My money replaces my personal attention and gives me an excuse to walk
on. Compassion means to become close to the one who suffers. But we
can come close to another person only when we are willing to become vulnerable
ourselves.
Imagine
your having no need at all to judge anybody. Imagine your having no
desire to decide whether someone is a good or bad person. Imagine your
being completely free from the feeling that you have to make up your mind about
the morality of someone’s behavior. Imagine that you could say: “I
am judging no one!” Wouldn’t that be true inner freedom? “Judging
others is a heavy burden.”
Our
lives vibrate between two darknesses. We hesitantly come forth out of the
darkness of birth and slowly vanish into the darkness of death. We move
from dust to dust, from unknown to unknown, from mystery to mystery.
I
am deeply aware of my own tendency to want to go from communion to ministry
without forming community. My individualism and desire for personal
success ever and again tempt me to do it alone and to claim the task of
ministry for myself. But Jesus himself didn’t preach and heal
alone.
A
Christian is a Christian only when he unceasingly asks critical question
of the society in which he lives and continuously stresses the necessity for
conversion, not only of the individual but also of the world. A Christian
is a Christian only when he refuses to allow himself or anyone also to settle
into a comfortable rest. He remains dissatisfied with the status
quo. And he believes that he has an essential role to play in the
realization of the new world to come—even if he cannot say how that world will
come about. A Christian is a Christian only when he keeps saying to
everyone he meets that the good news of the Kingdom has to be proclaimed to the
whole world and witnessed to all nations.
Everyone
who wants to change society is in danger of putting himself above it and being
more conscious of the weaknesses of others than of the weakness in his own
soul. The reformer, who is convinced that things have to become
different, is out to convert the world but is tempted at the same time to think
that he himself does not need conversion. Instead of seeing himself as a
full member of that same society that needs reform, he might approach it with
the fantasy of a redeemer who himself is untouchable and is always right and
just. He might be very critical of capitalism and the waste of money but
not see that his own style of life would be impossible without the capitalistic
society he condemns. He might feel that many people should have a better
life and more human respect but at the same time be unable to listen to people,
accept their criticism, and believe that he can learn from them. He might
always be busy going from one meeting to another and forget that he himself
tends to lose contact with the sources of his own existence and become deaf to
the voice that calls from within. He might even be afraid to be alone and
face the fact that he himself is in just as much need of change as the world he
wants to convert.
More
subtle then the desire for power, and the most difficult to overcome, is the
desire for thanks.
The
presence of Christ in the Eucharist becomes a “special problem” only when we
have lost our sense of his presence in all that is, grows, lives, and dies.
Every
time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself:
These feelings strong as they may be are not telling me the truth about
myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am
the beloved from all eternity and am held safe in an everlasting embrace.
The
more deeply you live your spiritual life, the easier it will be to discern the
difference between living with God and living without God, and the easier it
will be to move away from the places where God is no longer with you.
I
have a deep sense, hard to articulate, that if we could really befriend death
we would be free people. So many of our doubts and hesitations,
ambivalences and insecurities are bound up with our deep-seated fear of death.
If
I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never
get around to what is essential.
I
used to complain about all the interruptions to my work until I realized that
these interruptions were my work.
As
long as we keep running around anxiously trying to affirm ourselves or being
affirmed by others, we remain blind to One who has loved us first, dwells in
our heart, and has formed our truest self.
We
are part of a chain of wounds and needs that reach far beyond our own memories
and aspirations.
When Jesus says: “Do
not be afraid; it is I,” he reveals a new space in which we can move freely
without fear. This intimate space is not
a fine line between distance and closeness, but a wide field of movement in
which the question of whether we are close or distant is no longer the guiding
question.
God so much desired
to fulfill our deepest yearning for a home that God decided to build a home in
us. Thus we can remain fully human and
still have our home in God. In this new
home the distinction between distance and closeness no longer exists. God, who is furthest away, came closest, by
taking on our mortal humanity. Thus God
overcomes all distinctions between “distant” and “close” and offers us an
intimacy in which we can be most ourselves when most like God.
We are so possessed
by fear that we do not trust our innermost self as an intimate place but
anxiously wander around hoping to find it where we are not. We try to find that intimate place in
knowledge, competence, notoriety, success, friends, sensations, pleasure, dreams,
or artificially induced states of consciousness. Thus we become strangers to ourselves, people
who have an address but are never home and hence can never be addressed by the
true voice of love.
Here we come to see
what discipline in the spiritual life means.
It means a gradual process of coming home to where we belong and
listening there to the voice which desires our attention. When we grasp the truth that we already have
a home, we may at last have the strength to unmask the illusions created by our
fears and continue to return again and again and again.
The handicapped
people have learned that it is impossible to live together as wounded people if
they simply depend on each other to provide the intimate home they seek. Our wounds, whether visible or hidden, are
too deep for us to offer each other a place totally free from fear. We often put superhuman demands on each other
and when these demands are not met we feel hurt and rejected. In a community of deeply handicapped people
this is especially visible. Handicapped
people ask for constant attention and are often unable to express gratitude or
return favors. Bonds that last cannot be
based simply on good, better, or excellent interpersonal relationships but must
be rooted outside the many devices and desires of the wounded human heart. Rooted in a bond that existed before and
beyond human togetherness, bonds of true intimacy rest in the divine
covenant. This is the covenant of God’s
faithfulness expressed in the promises made to Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses
and the prophets, and made fully visible in the incarnation of Jesus.
God alone is free
enough from wound to offer us a fearless space.
In and through God we can be faithful to each other: in friendship, marriage, and community. This intimate bond with God, constantly
nurtured by prayer, offers us a true home.
We can live together in this home without asking for much more than a
willingness to constantly confess our weaknesses to each other and to always
forgive each other. Jean Vanier
considers this divine covenant the basis of every form of human
faithfulness. We can only stay together
when the “staying power” comes from the One who comes to us to stay. When we know ourselves to be deeply anchored
in that divine covenant, we can build homes together. Only then can our limited and broken love
reflect the unlimited and unbroken love of God.
Those who have
entered deeply into their hearts and found the intimate home where they
encounter their Lord, come to the mysterious discovery that solidarity is the
other side of intimacy. They come to the
awareness that the intimacy of God’s house excludes no one and includes
everyone. They start to see that the
home they have found in their innermost being is as wide as the whole of
humanity.
We who belong to Christ
belong to all of humanity. We cannot
live in intimate communion with Jesus without being sent to our brothers and
sisters who belong to that same humanity that Jesus has accepted as his own.
Not solidarity but
fragmentation is the most visible quality of the way people relate to each
other. Only a heart filled with perfect
love can perceive the unity of humanity.
This requires divine perception.
God sees his people as one, as belonging to the same family and living
in the same house. Living in the
intimacy of God’s house, we gradually come to know the mysterious truth that
the God who loves us with a perfect love includes all people in that love
without diminishing in any way the unique quality of God’s love for each
individual person.
While the needs of
the world clamor for our attention, hundreds of capable, intelligent men and
women spend their time, often all of their time, feeding broken people, helping
them walk, just being with them, and giving them the small comfort of a loving
word, a gentle touch, or an encouraging smile.
To anyone trying to succeed in our society, which is oriented toward
efficiency and control, these people are wasting their time. What they do is highly inefficient,
unsuccessful, and even useless. Jean
Vanier, however, believes that in this useless work for the poor the truth of
God’s perfect love for all people is revealed.
A seed will never
grow if we pull it out of the ground daily to check its progress; likewise, the
fruits of our own and others’ lives will never mature if we want to control
every stage of their development.
Products need constant maintenance in order to prevent breakdown. Fruits, on the other hand, ask only for the
rich soil, water, air, and sunlight of a caring environment in order to
flourish. Jesus cared deeply for the
people he met. He did not control or
dominate them, but through his words and actions offered them an opportunity to
search for new directions and make new choices.
Severely handicapped
people often sense the mood of their assistants and the atmosphere in their
foyer with an uncanny accuracy. When
there is harmony and peace in the house they are happy and content, but when
there is conflict and tension in the air they often pick it up and act it out
before their assistants are fully aware of it.
They are true barometers of the human spirit. And, as one assistant said: “It is not always easy to live with people
who so directly reveal to you your own ups and downs.” Handicapped people are very vulnerable. They cannot hide their weaknesses and are
therefore easy victims of maltreatment and ridicule. But this same vulnerability also allows them
to bear ample fruit in the lives of those who receive them. They are grateful people. They know they are dependent on others and show
this dependence every moment; but their smiles, embraces, and kisses are
offered as spontaneous expressions of thanks.
They know that all is pure gift to be thankful for. They are people who need care. When they are locked up in custodial
institutions and treated as nobodies, they withdraw and cannot bear fruit. They become overwhelmed by fears and close
themselves to others. But when they are
given a safe space, with truly caring people whom they can trust, they soon
become generous givers who are willing to offer their whole hearts.
Handicapped people
help us see the great mystery of fecundity.
They pull us out of our competitive, production-oriented lives and
remind us that we too are handicapped persons in need of love and care. They tell us in many ways that we too do not
need to be afraid of our handicap, that we too can bear fruit as Jesus did when
he offered his broken body to his Father.
It is a tragedy of
history that we have proved more eager to steal the material fruits of the
labor of the poor than to receive the spiritual fruits of their lives.
It is as important
for the rich to be converted by the poor as it is to share their wealth with
the poor. As long as we only want to
give and resist becoming receivers, we betray our desire to stay in control at
all costs. Thus we remain in the house
of fear.
This suffering woman,
surrounded by those who loved her, was giving me the fruit of her suffering:
trust in God, gratitude, gentleness, and care.
She was sent to me as much as I was sent to her. She was ministering to me as much as I was
ministering to her. She was offering me
a word of consolation and strength that only she could speak, since she had
suffered so much.
What if we could see
our southern neighbors first of all as people who pray with great devotion, who
love their children and families deeply, who write lovely poems, and who have a
spirit of joy and gratitude? Wouldn’t we
want to receive these gifts, we who have become too busy to pray, too lonely to
keep our families together, too pragmatic for poetry, and too preoccupied with
ourselves to be joyful or grateful?
If giving and
receiving the fruits of God’s intimate love for all people were our main
concern, peace would be near. Little of
this peace is visible in our world, but wherever and whenever people leave the
house of fear and start to share their gifts in the house of love, true mission
occurs and true peace-making begins.
Life needs to be
celebrated. Without celebration, no life
can flourish.
Those who live
ecstatic lives are always moving away from rigidly fixed situations and
exploring new, unmapped dimensions of reality.
Here we see the essence of joy.
Joy is always new. Whereas there
can be old pain, old grief, and old sorrow, there can be no old joy. Joy is always connected with movement,
renewal, rebirth, change—in short, with life.
There is no tinge of death in God.
God is pure life. Therefore
living in the house of God is living in a state of constant ecstasy, in which
we always experience the joy of being alive.
The house of fear has
no room for ecstasy. Fear keeps us
clinging to the familiar place, or, in the case of acute anxiety, makes us
dissipate ourselves aimlessly. In our
fear-ridden times, these two reactions—routine and rootlessness—are quite
visible.
Fear can make us into
wanderers who go from one place to another without direction or goal. Our emotions and feelings then become like a
wild river that leaves its bed and destroys the land instead of irrigating it. Lashing out, self-mutilation, erratic
talking, running away, aimless wandering—all can be responses to a fear that
has become too great for us to face.
Their anxiety
suggests an immense loneliness which nobody can penetrate, a homelessness that
goes far beyond the need for a caring friend or a hospitable house, a
rootlessness that opens up into chasms of human despair.
Our roots offer us a
time, place, and context in which to search for new possibilities. It is hard to search for your own way of
being at home in the world when you have little or no memory of ever having
felt at home. Many young men and women
who have lost their motivation to develop their minds and hearts have little
sense of home. When the world is a
fearful place where you need all of your emotional energy just to survive, you
have little capacity to move from one way of being alive to another.
These young people
walked around as if the whole burden of the world was laid on their
shoulders. They all looked very
seriously preoccupied with many problems, and seemingly responsible for all the
major issues that plague our world.
Their words were heavy, their reflections somber, their emotions
melancholic, their outlook on life pessimistic, and their self-esteem very
low. Few felt at home in their own
world. Often they suffered from strained
relationships with their family, had difficulty in developing close
relationships with their peers, and felt hostile toward people in authority. Often they did not feel at home in their own
bodies either. In many ways they were
estranged, strangers to their past, their present, and their future: no home to
come from, no home to go to, no true movement, no true life, no true joy. Seeing and feeling this deep suffering in my
ambitious, successful friends, I was increasingly overwhelmed by the immense
spiritual crisis of the so-called First World.
Much money and energy
is spent trying to make people happy and relaxed by offering a moment of
artificial bliss. This happiness is as
contrived as the good meal given to a man on death row before his
execution. It tastes good but does not
keep him alive.
Many people hardly
believe anymore in the possibility of a truly joy-filled life. They have more or less accepted life as a
prison and are grateful for every occasion that creates the illusion of the
opposite: a cruise, a suspense novel, a
sexual experience, or a few hours in a heightened state of consciousness.
Our struggle is
essentially a struggle for life. We want
to affirm that the life of each human being, each person, is important
particularly when that person is very poor, very diminished; we try to make
this affirmation not by making speeches but by significant actions. We can’t participate in the big political
struggles or invest our energies in worldwide activities. At every moment, we need to struggle so that
each one can find the security and the human presence alongside him or her
which is needed to help him or her want to live and grow.
They carry the fears
and agonies of the world in the depths of their own hearts. Their experiences of rejection, segregation,
and isolation have marked them for life.
It is impossible to be with them for long without being deeply affected
by the immensity of their inner suffering and being reminded of one’s own.
The
reason Henri Nouwen’s books did not fall into the popular “all about me” genre
of literature current these days is because he always saw his pain, suffering,
anguish, faith, joy, and love as part of the larger picture, part of the human
experience in which we all participate, part of the human experience in which
God’s own self participated Jesus. It was a “living reminder” of the
worldwide human adventure. (Chris Glaser)
Henri
had a way of speaking to you that was at once impassioned, peaceful,
self-effacing, and utterly true to the human experience. (Richard Rohr)