Come and Go Sunday School for Sunday, 27 October 2013
My Books: Modern (2)
“Of making many books there is no end”
We return to the chapter entitled “My Books: Modern” from which we have already shared our reading of Thomas Kelley’s Testament of Devotion on July 28 of this year.
As you remember, the chapter is part of a larger manuscript, in process for over thirty years, which attempts to answer the question of what happens as we spend quiet, prayerful moments with our Bibles and with those books that speak to one’s heart? Books can indeed make a difference!
Saint Augustine (354-430), for example, writes about a story told him by one solid Christian named Ponticianus. The story concerned a member of the Roman Imperial police who happened on a book containing the life of Anthony, an early desert monk (251-356). As he began to read he was inspired to examine his own life in its light. After speaking out excitedly to an accompanying friend, he continued to read. It was observed by those listening, reports Augustine in his Confessions, that
the interior change taking place was one that you [God] alone could see, for his mind was starting to put aside the world and its ways, As he went on reading his heart seemed to be turning over, and at one point he cried out involuntarily as he made his decision for a different kind of life.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968), fifteen centuries later in The Sign of Jonas, “a collection of personal notes and meditations set down during about five years of [his] life in the monastery of Gethsemani,”
writing on the impact of his reading John of the Cross (1542-1591) commented,
I can remember other passage of other books that have hit me with the same impact. They bear witness to moments when I knew, right down to the very depths of my being, that I had found the thing that God wanted for me.
Merton then goes on to name other passages in books he had read that made a similar powerful impact on him.
Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) goes so far as to say that reading is “really a form of prayer.” She has in mind those books that possess the ability to speak to the heart. Such spiritual reading, she writes, is “second only to prayer as a developer and support of the inner life.”
In such reading, she reminds us, “we have access to the hoarded supernatural treasure of the human race.”
Another lady, Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) thoughts almost three centuries earlier, said “Amen” to such. She viewed reading as partaking of mental prayer initiating her into praying as such. During times of spiritual dryness she would never dare to begin prayer without a book.
She adds that “dryness was not usually felt, but it was always felt when I was without a book.”
This said, we come with “My Books: Modern” to an author who providentially crossed my path thirty some years ago. The author was Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996). His little book, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in a Contemporary Society
was given to me around 1980 by a friend, Joe Farrow, then pastor of the Linda Vista Church of the Nazarene in San Diego. Joe, I believe, is now deceased. The impact of this small book was such that when I noticed another book just published by the same author, The Way of the Heart: Desert: Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry,
I immediately sent for it. Although I subsequently devoured several more of Henri Nouwen’s books, this was the book the Spirit of God used to rescue my spirits at a crucial time.
Henri J. M. Nouwen, described by biographer, Michael Ford, as a Wounded Prophet,
was a Dutch-born Roman Catholic priest. Identified by a later biographer, Michael O’Laughlin, as above all God’s Beloved. Nouwen was born in Nijkerk, Holland, on January 24, 1932, and passed away in Hilversum, Holland, on September 21, 1996, while on a visit in transit to St. Petersburg, Russia.
Both during his lifetime and after, he became known throughout the world at all levels of Church and society for his spiritual writings that covered a thirty-year span. Nouwen’s first biographer, the Dutch Protestant pastor, Jurgen Beumer, subtitled his biography of Nouwen as A Restless Seeking for God.
Out of Nouwen’s continuing life-long quest to know God intimately, he knew how to write plainly in a way that speaks to the human heart. Since his death “a small flood of books” both about him and based on his writings have appeared.
As signaled by Beumer’s use of “restless,” Henri Nouwen would never have made a Benedictine monk. The Benedictine vow of “stability” of place would not characterize most of his life. He had “a predisposition for restlessness.”
He was always “on the move” as “a man without a home”
in a relentless quest for a home for his heart and ministry until the later years of his life.
The first-born son of his parents, Nouwen was raised in a Catholic enclave in Nijkirk in a Balkanized religious society. His father was a highly motivated professional, a tax lawyer and professor of law, and his mother was from a more prosperous, artistic, and spiritually-minded family. Henri Nouwen’s father, a strong-willed and demanding man, with whom Henri never attained the intimacy he desired during much of his life though he sought it. But after his mother’s death their mutual efforts to bridge the emotional gap between them gradually brought about a more satisfactory relationship.
As an affectionate child with a longing to be loved,
it was with his thoughtful and sensitive mother, a deeply religious woman interested in literature and mysticism, with whom he had a special bond. She taught him the prayer, “All for you, dear Jesus.”
In this early isolated environment God was very important for him; he knew he wanted to be a priest at five years of age and never changed his mind. Nouwen often said, “it was my mother’s deep and lasting devotion to the Eucharist that was one of the factors, if not the main factor, in my decision to become a priest.”
In addition to Henri Nouwen’s seminary education for the priesthood in Holland—he was ordained in 1957, he studied both religion and psychology at various institutions in both Holland and America.
His teaching career either as a faculty member or a visiting professor was spent at four educational institutions—Notre Dame (1966-1968), the Catholic Theological Institute, Utrecht (1968-1970), Yale Divinity School (71-81, tenured 1974), and Harvard Divinity School (1983-1985).
Nouwen took several breaks from his teaching duties at Yale, two sabbaticals at Abbey of the Genesee (1974, 1979), Fellow at the Ecumenical Institute, Collegeville, Minnesota (1976), and Scholar-in-residence, North American College, Rome (1978). In 1981-1982, having resigned from his tenured position at Yale, Nouwen was given the status of a “family brother” at the Abbey of the Genesee, during which time he spent six months in Bolivia and Peru. Nouwen never felt fully accepted or at home in the ethos of the academic environment.
A restless searching characterized the adult life of Henri Nouwen; he was a man in search of a true home. As he taught “about solitude, inner freedom, and serenity, Nouwen struggled to find freedom from his own compulsions and illusions, which kept him working, speaking, writing, and teaching to the point that he was anything but serene.”
He was often very tired, but his ever-questing self kept him on a “cycle of long hectic days of teaching and service, followed by periods of nervous exhaustion, depression and insomnia.”
Almost a year before he died, he asked in his diary, “Why am I so tired? . . . I wake up with an immense feeling of fatigue and get up only because I want to do some work.”
Throughout his life, Nouwen’s motivation was primarily to live his life for others in the presence of the risen Jesus as he obviously did, but it was also in some sense his “habitual . . . need to be needed.”
“Ultimately,” reports O’Laughlin of Nouwen’s death, “he worked himself to death; . . . he lived so intensely that he burned himself out, . . . like one big candle, casting so much light that he himself was ultimately consumed.”
This restless pattern began to change after an exhausting and spiritually depleting tour in Mexico City, Nicaragua, and the United States. Nouwen accepted an invitation from Jean Vanier (b. 1928)
in 1983 to visit his L’Arche community in France; he stayed six weeks. L’Arche provided a home for people with mental disabilities where they could be provided with care, friendship, education, and spiritual development.
Eventually, after two more visits to the French community, in 1984 and a year during 1985-1986, Nouwen found a true spiritual home for his restless heart and questing ministry when he joined Daybreak, a L’Arche community in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada, in August 1986.
He had long felt deeply that God had called him to minister among the poor, but where and how specifically?
At Daybreak Nouwen served with a new sense of satisfaction as he “as he decided to stop running around giving talks and lectures and instead stay put and live more simply.” He served as Pastor with time free for writing until heart attacks led to his death on September 21, 1996.
As a seemingly compulsive writer, Nouwen wrote a book at each stage of his adult life relating to almost every phase of his life and spiritual journey; his “focus was ever on the experience of faith.”
He authored over forty books in all with over one and one-half million copies sold in North America alone. As Nouwen sought to make the presence of the risen Christ known through speaking, teaching, liturgy, and other ministries he more and more saw writing as an integral part of his ministerial vocation.
Over the span of several years I read a least half of Nouwen’s books. Along with those already referred to above, The Wounded Healer and Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic, I have especially enjoyed !Gracias! A Latin American Journal
and The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming,
“his most profound and memorable book.”
Most recently for the writing of these paragraphs I found his posthumously published Sabbatical Journey: The Dairy of His Final Year, helpful and meaningful.
No doubt many of his other books struck a chord at the time, but they were read so long ago I do not recall precisely how. Nouwen’s friend and confidant Robert Jonas, shortly after the former’s death, created a portrait of this gifted minister. What he penned in his “Introduction” about Nouwen’s books helps us understand the impact of what I will describe out of my own experience:
[Nouwen] courageously stood with one foot in the shadow of self-rejection and one foot in the daylight of God’s love. We know that he stood there for all of us, articulating so simply and beautifully what the wild, dangerous territory between the human and the divine looks like. . . . somehow we know that his every-present, accompanying shadow was there only because of the Light in which he walked.
Back to the Henri Nouwen book most crucial for me, The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry (1981). It came out of his work for a seminar on desert spirituality at Yale Divinity School. Nouwen’s inspiration for the theme came from a story about Abba Arsenius, a well-educated Roman of senatorial rank, who, while praying to know the way of salvation heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always.”
The words flee, be silent, and pray always summarized for Nouwen “the three ways of preventing the world from shaping us in its image and are thus the three ways to life in the Spirit.”
Inspired by this admonition to Arsenius and informed by the desert Fathers and Mothers, Nouwen wrote three simplistic yet profound chapters on Solitude, Silence, and Prayer.
During the Spring Quarter break of 1981, a particularly black moment in my spirits, I remained home alone, my wife being at her teaching task during the day. That week I gave myself in prayerful silence to repeated reading of Nouwen’s thoughts on Solitude, Silence, and Prayer in The Way of the Heart. “Solitude,” as “the furnace of transformation,” the place where we “dwell in the gentle healing presence of our Lord, . . . frees us from the victimizing compulsions of the world.”
The “way to make solitude a reality” is Silence for “silence guards the fire [‘of the Holy Spirit’] within.” We bear our witness in the world “out of silence” for “the Word of God is born out of the eternal silence of God. . . . Silence is the home of the word.”
Prayer or “praying always” translates the hesychia of the Greek Fathers, literally “the prayer of rest,” known also as “the prayer of the heart.”
A hesychast is one “who seeks solitude and silence as the way to unceasing prayer,” the descent of the mind into the heart. This is the prayer that “can continue in our heart and keep us aware of God’s ever-present guidance” in the midst of the struggles of everyday life; it is “the presence of God’s Spirit” by which “our whole day can become a continual prayer.”
These three, “solitude, silence, and unceasing prayer form the core concepts of the spirituality of the desert.”
As I immersed my mind and heart in the witness of The Way of the Heart, into what seemed to be a long, dark, and endless tunnel, a hopeful ray of light began to shine in from the opening in the far distance, and the depressing cloud that had been hovering over my life for almost five years began slowly to disperse. The end was in sight! Within the next two months events transpired that vindicated the return of light to my heart.
What happened that week with The Way of the Heart? The spiritual atmosphere of the desert Fathers and Mothers, the hesychastic spirit with its prayer of the heart, began to soak into the troubled atmosphere of my life with a fresh sense of mental and spiritual freedom. The sky was open again! The traditional prayer for quiet confidence found a place in my devotional life:
O God of Peace, you have taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift me, I pray, to your presence, where I may be still and know that you are God.
Henri Nouwen passed away during a stop in Holland on his way to St. Petersburg to make a documentary on The Return of the Prodigal Son on September 16, 1996.
The day before the massive heart attack that took his life, he celebrated the Eucharist with a friend from Daybreak, Nathan Ball.
It was Nouwen’s custom to celebrate the Eucharist daily, as did his mother, whether in chapels or cathedrals or in small groups, or even by himself, for as he wrote, “The Eucharistic event reveals the deepest human experiences, those of sadness, attentiveness, invitation, intimacy, and engagement. It summarizes the life we are called to live in the Name of God.”
As he wrote to his Father after his mother’s passing, “My whole being is rooted in the Eucharist.”
A friend suggests that “perhaps he was a mystic of the Eucharist”!
There in the presence of the resurrected Lord on his own Emmaus road,
he knew himself to be truly “God’s beloved,” his favorite theme for others as well as for himself.
***
ENDNOTES:
1 Ecclesiastes 12:12.
2 Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992/1941).3 The Confessions of Augustine in Modern English, ed. Sherwood Eliot Wirt (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1971), 111.
4 Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953), 3.
5 Merton, The Sign of Jonas, 28-29.
6 Evelyn Underhill, Concerning the Inner Life (Oxford: One world Publications, l995), 54. Her book was first published with an introduction by Rt. Rev. Charles Lewis Slattery (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1926). Our quotation is on page 63 in this edition.
7 Underhill, Inner life, 57 or 67.
8 Kieran Kavanaugh and 4.9) Rodriguez, tran., The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, “The Book of Her Life,” Volume One (Washington, D.C.” ICS Publications, 2nd ed., 1987), 68-69 (4.9).
9 “The Book of Her Life,” The Collected Works, Volume One, 68 (4.9).
10 Henri J; M. Nouwen’s The Wounded Healer: Ministry in a Contemporary Society (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1972). This was written while he was associate professor (advanced to full professor in 1977) of pastoral theology at Yale University. It has had widespread use as a textbook for ministry.
11 Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: Desert: Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry (New York: Random House Inc., 1983). The original publication was by The Seabury Press, 1981.
12 Michael Ford, Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henry J. Nouwen (New York: Image Books Doubleday, 1999, 2002). He constructed a helpful two-page synopsis of “Henri Nouwen’s Life—A Chronology,” 224-225. Ford’s biography, however, has not been universally accepted as a faithful portrait largely because of its “focus on the shortcomings and psychology of Henri Nouwen.” So O’Laughlin, God’s Beloved, 10. But he did commend it in that “no other book has provided as much information and dealt with the difficult issues (e.g., his sexual orientation) of Henri Nouwen’s life as directly as has Wounded Prophet.”
13 Jurjen Beumer, Henri Nouwen: A Restless Seeking for God (New York: Crossroad, 1997).
14 O’Laughlin, God’s Beloved, 8. Deidre LaNoue, The Spiritual Legacy of Henri Nouwen (New York: Continuum, 2000),, 155-171, contains a seventeen page bibliography by and about Henri Nouwen. And the books keep appearing, recently for example Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird’s edited volumes from the Nouwen archives.
15 Jonas, Henri Nouwen, xxxiv.
16 This was the description of his friend Jean Vanier. LaNoue, Spiritual Legacy), 35.
17 O’Laughlin, God’s Beloved, 17, suggests that there were some “identifiable psychological issues” contributing to this which Nouwen “did a good deal to address” and which O’Laughlin seeks to delve into in his book which he calls “a spiritual biography.”
18 See Henri J. M. Nouwen, A Letter of Consolation (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982), 20-24. This little book is a letter to his father on the death of Henri’s mother. See also Nouwen’s mention of times with his father in his posthumously published book, Sabbatical Journal: The Diary of His Final Year (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998). See especially pages 83-84 where after a time with his father on a trip to Germany he sums up their relationship, writing at ninety-three and sixty-four for example that “thirty years ago the closeness that now exists between us was unthinkable.” He writes of another satisfying trip together on pages 187-190.
19 Not many months before his demise, he wrote of his “inner wound” as an “immense need for affection.” Nouwen, Sabbatical Journal, 25.
20 This was the description of his friend Jean Vanier. LaNoue, Spiritual Legacy), 35.
21 Nouwen, A Letter of Consolation, 64. See Jonas, Henri Nouwen, xxxvi-xxxvii.
22 He attended the Catholic University of Nijmegen, Holland (1957-1964), studied religion and psychology at the Menninger Foundation in Topea, Kansas (1964-1966), and took theological studies at the University of Nijmegan (1970-1971). Twice in his studies at Nijmegan, because of where the quest of his heart and ministry as well as his talents were, Nouwen failed to get the full academic doctorates he desired, first in psychology and then in theology. See O’Loughlin, God’s Beloved, 42-56.
23 At Harvard, in the midst of many “self-appointed guardians of political correctness,” Nouwen was not fully accepted and even accused of “spiritual imperialism” by those who were offended at his direct Christian witness; for him “it was a time of joy and fear” as he determined to be “true to himself” and the gospel. O’Laughlin, God’s Beloved, 132-133, 162.
24 LaNoue, Spiritual Legacy, 23. In Nouwen’s Sabbatical Journal, 94 (see also 100, 132) he admits his nature at this point and how he needs to refocus to fulfill his sabbatical intentions: “without such refocusing I will end up busy, restless, and always looking for human affection. It is time to make a radical choice for solitude, prayer, and quiet writing.” What Nouwen called his “hungry ghost,” “a hunger for attention and affection,” appears often in the Sabbatical Journal. He admits his “true dependence on human affection and love.” His sabbatical as he reports it appears as much a time of people coming and going and his traveling to see friends as it was a time for writing, solitude, and prayer. His love and gift for pastoral ministry was always in evidence.
25 September, 11, 1995. Jonas, Henri Nouwen, xxxiii.
26 Nouwen, Sabbatical Journal, 13; see 47, 53, 55, 183-184, 187, 210. His entry on June 13, 1996 (183), contains the lament, “Why can’t I get rid of fatigue? I keep looking at my bed as the only desirable place to be. Everything exhausts me.”
27 Jonas, Henri Nouwen, xxxiv. Friendships, for example, were very important to Nouwen. During his final sabbatical on September 4, 1995, he stated that “friendship will be as important a concern as prayer. . . . My need for friendship is great, greater than seems ‘normal’.” Nouwen, Sabbatical Journal, 7.
28 O’Laughlin, God’s Beloved, 183-184. See Nouwen, Sabbatical Journal, 210.
29 Jean’s father, George Vanier, was the 19th Governor General of Canada, and his mother, Mammie Vanier, joined him at L’Arche after his father’s death. Jean Vanier was previously a professor of philosophy.
30 O’Loughlin, God’s Beloved, wrote that “at l’Arche he found a home, and he found that the more he set aside his desires, especially his restless search for new people and experiences to fill his heart, the more the simple vulnerability of the core members and the love of the l’Arche community penetrated him and transformed him.
31 LaNoue, Spiritual Legacy, 134.
32 LaNoue, Spiritual Legacy, 34-56. Chapter two of her book, “A Literary Biography of Henri Nouwen,” 12-56, describes how his writings fit in with the progress of his life.
33 O’Laughlin, God’s Beloved, 105.
34 Henri J. M. Nouwen !Gracias! A Latin American Journal (San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1983).
35 Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
36 O’Laughlin, God’s Beloved, 144.
37 Jonas, Henri Nouwen, xiv. His seventy page descriptive introduction prefaces selections from Nouwen’s writings. A significant factor in this description and in what we have noted as Nouwen’s restlessness, etc., was his homosexual orientation of which he was aware at six years old which, he said, was involved in his call to the priesthood. How he dealt with his homosexuality as celibate priest, as one experiencing a worldwide spiritual ministry, and in the varying advice and pressures from his gay friends, we have chosen rightly or wrongly not to delve into as part of Henri Nouwen’s contribution to our particular journey. For this see Ford, Wounded Prophet, 4, 59-60, 66-67, 73-74, 92, 140-145, 167, 191-194, 211-213.
38 Nouwen, Way of the Heart, 5. The pagination is from the 1983 edition. The saying is from Benedicta Ward, The Saying of the Desert Fathers (London & Oxford: Mowbrays, 1975), 8.
39 Nouwen, Way of the Heart, 5.
40 Nouwen, Way of the Heart, 15, 21-22.
41 Nouwen, Way of the Heart, 35, 42, 40, 41.
42 See above, 67-70, on The Way of the Pilgrim.
43 Nouwen, Way of the Heart, 64, 82, 85.
44 Nouwen, Way of the Heart, 91.
45 The Book of Common Prayer (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), 832. This prayer is inspired by Isaiah 30:15:
For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel:
In returning and rest you shall be saved;
in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.
46 Michael O’Laughlin, God’s Beloved, 64, writes that a major breakthrough in his personal psychological growth came with the writing of this book, one that “is so powerful, and is his finest book.”
47 Nathan Ball, “Afterward,” Nouwen, Sabbatical Journal, 225. In this book written during his final sabbatical, Nouwen frequently described these celebrations with friends and groups that gathered.
48 Nouwen, With Burning Hearts, 12.
49 Nouwen, A Letter of Consolation, 63. Nouwen goes on to say that “the Eucharist is the center of my life and everything else receives its meaning from that center.”
50 Jonas, Henri Nouwen, xliv.
51 Luke 24:13-35.
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First Church of the Nazarene
3901 Lomaland Drive
San Diego, CA 92104
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