Henri Nouwen - The Essential Henri Nouwen

THE ESSENTIAL

Henri Nouwen

Edited by Robert A. Jonas

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2011

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2009 by Robert A. Jonas

Frontispiece 1996, Kevin F. Dwyer

See section for a continuation of the copyright page.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Nouwen, Henri J. M.

[Selections. 2009]

The essential Henri Nouwen / edited by Robert A. Jonas.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2216-0

ISBN 978-1-59030-664-2

1. Theology. I. Jonas, Robert A. II. Title.

BX4705.N87A25 2009

230.2dc22

2009010583

Thank you, Henri, for living so courageously, faithfully, and passionately. You announced the empathy, compassion, and love of Christ, and you listened deeply to the longings and doubts, the heartbreaks and joys, of many thousands of people around the world. Your words are still bearing fruit.

I want to thank the members of the Henri Nouwen Society Board for their friendship and inspiration, and for continuing, through their publications, retreats, and website (www.henrinouwen.org), to make Henris vision available to us. Warm thanks to Sue Mosteller for her spiritual companionship and for giving me invaluable feedback on key passages in this book.

I am grateful to Dave ONeal, senior editor at Shambhala Publications, for inviting me to share Henris insights with a new audience.

I especially want to thank my wife, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, for her love and companionship over the years, and for highlighting the belovedness of the Earth in her ministry. Her editorial contributions to this book have been timely and skillful.

On Tuesday evening, September 17, 1996, I received a call from Toronto.

I send greetings from Henri, Kathy Christie told me. And I have some bad news. Henri had a heart attack in Amsterdam on Sunday night, just after he arrived at the airport from Toronto. Hes all right, but hes in intensive care.

Kathy was the personal secretary of Fr. Henri Nouwen, a Roman Catholic priest, retreat leader, and writer who was my mentor and friend. I was shocked by her news but not surprised. Henri was a passionate man who was almost bursting with enthusiasm for the Gospel. He had just completed a sabbatical year in which he had intended to relax, pray, and read. But instead he had continued his urgent mission to share the nearness and nowness of God. Since he had recently spent three months living with my family, I knew that he was stressed and not in good shape physically.

Kathy added, Right now, the doctors are saying that this was not a serious attack but that Henri will need plenty of time to recuperate. I asked her to tell Henri that I would make arrangements to visit him in the next few days, and we said good-bye. I immediately called Northwest Airlines to book a ticket to Amsterdam. The next morning when I called Henri, he picked up his bedside phone. I shared my relief that he was recovering and my surprise to discover that the Northwest agent to whom I had just spokenalong with her prayer groupwas reading one of Henris thirty-five books, Life of the Beloved. We shared a chuckle of delight.

I had some painful moments in the past few days, Henri told me, but Im feeling OK. Maybe a little weak. I said that I would be at the hospital by Friday morning, but he told me not to bother.

I dont think you should come, he said. The doctors tell me that I should be able to fly back to Toronto by early next week. Why dont you meet me there? I agreed, and we said good-bye.

During the next few days I reflected on what Henri had meant to me and to the world.

I first met Henri Nouwen in 1983 when I was working on a doctorate in education and psychology at Harvard and receiving supervision in clinical psychotherapy. Many of my spiritually minded friends had been telling me, Youve got to hear this new professor at the divinity school. Hes amazing. Finally, in late spring, I learned that he was scheduled to give a talk at St. Pauls Church in Harvard Square, and I resolved to go.

I remember the night well because I went to the talk with my new woman friend, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, her mother, Sarah Doering, and our Vipassana Buddhist meditation teacher, Larry Rosenberg. Sarah and Larry were in the early stages of founding a new Vipassana meditation center in Cambridge (it would eventually become the thriving Cambridge Insight Meditation Center), and I was getting excited about what I was learning from Larry and other Vipassana teachers. I was attracted to Buddhist meditation because the practice was so simple, direct, and embodied. No dogma, no theory or theology. Just silence, moment-to-moment awareness, and an occasional aha! or glimpse of joy. I was beginning to relinquish my lifelong identity as a Christian.

That night in the basement of St. Pauls Church, our little group sat in the front, and we were soon joined by about three hundred other people. As the crowd streamed in, Henri walked among the rows of chairs, smiling, shaking hands, and introducing people to one another. He was tall, with dark hair and olive skin, and he wore a coat and tie. He looked the part of a professor. As soon as he began to speak, I felt something shift within me: I knew that this person was someone extraordinary. At first Henri planted himself in front of us, speaking quietly about wanting to share his faith, and then he gradually began to move back and forth across the full expanse of the large room. The intensity of his voice gradually increased as well, and soon he was stretching out his large fingers and sweeping them across his body, laying claim to more and more of the electric airspace in the room.

Growing up in the 1950s in the German Lutheran country of northern Wisconsin, I had sat mesmerized in front of snowy black-and-white TV sets as Evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic preachers like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Fulton Sheen gave captivating talks about the power of God. Henris style of fervent proclamation reminded me of these evangelizers. But there was something different about this man. He uttered the name of Jesus with fervor, but he did it with a certain cosmopolitan sophistication and a surprising vulnerability.

Speaking about the possibility of a spiritual journey from the house of fear to the house of love, Henri named and described the dynamics of anxiety, hopelessness, and fear in a way that I immediately recognized from my own experience. His way of naming elements of the inner life revealed my experience to myself in a new way, and as a budding psychologist, I was impressed by his grasp of psychological and theological language and symbols.

I would eventually get to know Henri very well, and now, looking back, I see that he revealed the core of his identity on that night in 1983. I sensed in him no interest in hierarchical structures or religious dogma. He seemed like a fearless spelunker of human existence. He wanted to know what makes human beings tick, and he was acutely aware of the ways we get caught in the undertows of self-rejection and where we long to be dwellingin an inward, prayerful place of safety, beauty, compassion, and truthwherever we are, whatever we are doing. He wanted to explore the whole of the human adventure and to do it with every tool at handtheology and psychology, literature and the arts, and politics. Henris vision was compelling and all-embracing: that each of us can find a deep, secure home in a God of love, and that together humanity can co-create a house of love in which all people, communities, and nations can live in peace.