Henri J. M. Nouwen - Following Jesus: Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety

I first heard of Henri Nouwen while still in seminary in Ohio in the late 1960s. My mother wrote me from Kansas that there was a new Dutch priest serving at our parish, and she loved to attend his Masses. His accent makes him hard to understand, but he says the Mass with such reverence and devotion, she told me. Of course, at the time, I had no idea who she was talking about. He was then a doctoral student of psychology at the Menninger institute, near our family home in Topeka. But it was not long before he entered my life.

Starting in the mid-1970s, we were often speakers at the same conferences. Soon he visited me several times at the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, where he told me how he longed for community and intimate relationships. I could tell it was a passionate need. We would go for walks from time to time in the working-class neighborhood where the community had settled. He would invariably entertain me (I do not know what other word to use) with his endless spiritual curiosity, his extreme vulnerability, and his humble concern for people.

Henri longed for in-depth relationship, and I think relationship was, in fact, his real genius. He could spot the authentic from the inauthentic, and longed to be a healer of the inauthentic. Which is exactly how he served us all so well!

When I moved to New Mexico in 1986 to found the Center for Action and Contemplation, Henri wrote me a very supportive letter encouraging me to teach nothing but contemplation! And he even recommended to my study the writings of Eknath Easwaran. This showed me the depth of his Christian faith that was not threatened by a Hindu-based teacher from India. It also showed me that as Catholic as he was, he recognized authentic contemplative teaching wherever it came from.

Because I looked up to him as a wise and holy elder, I would often try to get some free spiritual direction out of him. Only a few minutes into it, Id realize that he never really answered my questions, but had somehow turned it around to make me into his spiritual director! I was never sure if it was humility on his part or some kind of unconscious need for reciprocity, but I finally concluded that it was a totally sincere spiritual search and he valued my insights as much as his own. As much as I knew that he was a spiritual writer, in real life he was a spiritual seeker and believeralways filled with desire for more wisdom and for more capacity to love.

When he heard that I was beginning to teach a spirituality for men, he wrote me and strongly encouraged me in this regard. He also told a number of artists that they needed to paint images that could be healing for the so often broken father-son relationship. He knew that it often took visual images to begin the healing process. At least one iconographer, the Franciscan Robert Lentz, took his advice and painted John the Beloved with his head on the breast of Jesus. Henri loved it, and was very honest with me and others about his complex relationship with his own father.

All in all, and from my simple perspective, these were Henri Nouwens primary gifts: humanvulnerability and the healing power that he gained from such rugged honesty. For most of us, he created the very phrase the wounded healer and fully exemplified it in his life. He loved being well known and yet fully saw the irony. I remember when he said to me with sincere hurt, My own family in the Netherlands does not read my books, or even know about them! But then he would also laugh at himself for saying such a thing.

Maybe we could say that Henri invited the human shadow into the entire conversation of spirituality, similar to Francis of Assisi and Thrse of Lisieux, but with more psychological savvy. This led him to so much practical insight into the nature of love and all relationship, especially Gods love. We Christians had grown used to calling the shadow self sin and perhaps quickly confessing it as such, but then were incapable of learning from it. Henri surely confessed his sins and failures to those close to himbut only after he had first felt their sting, their texture, their truth, and their always available wisdom. These honest acknowledgments seemed to lead him to compassion for others.

With all of this, and because of all of this, Henri emerged as a superb Christian teacher who will surely stand the test of time. And you are now about to enjoy some of his hard-won wisdom in this book.

He will soon be your friend, if he is not already.

Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

Center for Action and Contemplation

Albuquerque, New Mexico