Henri J. M. Nouwen - Our Second Birth: Christian Reflections on Death and New Life

Oakville, Ontario, Saturday, September 2, 1995

This is the first day of my sabbatical. I am excited and anxious, hopeful and fearful, tired, and full of desire to do a thousand things. The coming year stretches out in front of me as a long, open field full of flowers and full of weeds. How will I cross that field? What will I have learned when I finally reach the other end?

During this weekend nine years ago, I arrived at Daybreak. I had just finished the journal in which I wrote down the many thoughts, emotions, passions, and feelings that led me to leave Harvard Divinity School and join the Ark. It had taken me a year to make that transition. It was in fact my first sabbatical, during which my heart was gradually opened to a new life, a life with people with mental handicaps. The Road to Daybreak was the record of that sabbatical.

Now, exactly nine years later, I am sitting in my little apartment in the house of Hans and Margaret in Oakville, near Toronto. Hans and Margaret invited me to spend the first two weeks of my empty year with them, just to relax. Hans said, Just sleep, eat, and do what you want to do.

I feel strange! Very happy and very scared at the same time. I have always dreamt about a whole year without appointments, meetings, lectures, travels, letters, and phone calls, a year completely open to let something radically new happen. But can I do it? Can I let go of all the things that make me feel useful and significant? I realize that I am quite addicted to being busy and experience a bit of withdrawal anxiety. I have to nail myself to my chair and control these wild impulses to get up again and become busy with whatever draws my attention.

But underneath all these anxieties, there is an immense joy. Free at last! Free to think critically, to feel deeply, and to pray as never before. Free to write about the many experiences that I have stored up in my heart and mind during the last nine years. Free to deepen friendships and explore new ways of loving. Free most of all to fight with the Angel of God and ask for a new blessing. The past three months seemed like a steeplechase full of complex hurdles. I often thought, How will I ever make it to September? But now I am here. I have made it, and I rejoice.

One thing that helps me immensely is that the Daybreak community has sent me on this sabbatical. It is a mission! I am not allowed to feel guilty for taking a whole year off. To the contrary, I am supported to feel guilty when I am getting busy again. Although many of my Daybreak friends said, We will miss you, they also said, It is good for you and for us that you go. They affirm my vocation to be alone, read, write, and pray, and thus to live something new that can bear fruit not only in my own life but also in the life of our community. It is such a support for me that I can live my time away not only as a way of doing my will but also as a way of doing the will of the community. I can even think of it as an act of obedience!

Last night, Hans and his daughter Maja came to Daybreak to participate in the Friday night Eucharist and to pick me up. As we drove to Oakville, Hans said, I came to be sure that you had no excuse to stay another day.

Right now I have no excuses for anything but to embark on a new journey and to trust that all will be well. It is clear to me that I have to keep a journal again, just as I did during the year before coming to Daybreak. I have promised myself not to let a day pass without writing down, as honestly and directly as possible, what is happening within and around me. It wont be easy, since I dont know the field I am entering. But I am ready to take a few risks.