Henri J.M. Nouwen - Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life

When Henri Nouwen died in 1996, he left us thirty-nine books and hundreds of articles on the spiritual life and what he called his adventures with God. He also bequeathed a treasury of personal papers. The largest part of the cache was correspondence. Over his lifetime Henri received more than 16,000 letters. He kept every postcard, piece of paper, fax and greeting card that arrived in his mail. And he responded to each of them. Managing his correspondence was an integral part of his working day. The sheer volume of mail made it necessary to employ an administrative assistant to sort, preread, and highlight what needed an immediate response. Henri would then read them himself and reply into a Dictaphone for transcription. Letters to close friends were usually handwritten, often on postcards from his large collection of art cards. His penmanship was neat and flowing. He never wrote drafts and rarely made corrections.

Shortly after I started as Henris archivist in the summer of 2000, I was taken to the attic of a house at LArche Daybreak, the community near Toronto where Henri had made his last home. After climbing a steep staircase into an overheated attic, I confronted a dozen or more filing cabinetstall, short, in a variety of colorslined up in the middle of the room. Along the walls and in every corner were stacks of boxes. All were filled with letters.

For the next fifteen years, I identified, numbered and catalogued each page in this remarkable collection. It was a daunting task, but one that evolved into a labor of love. The letters now form part of the Henri J. M. Nouwen Archives and Research Collection at the University of St. Michaels College, University of Toronto. Housed in their new acid-free folders and boxes, they extend to sixty-five linear feet!

It has been slow work, but the time has come to share them. This first volume is being released to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Henris death in 1996. It celebrates his lasting legacy both to original readers and to a new generation of spiritual seekers. It is a testament to his deep need to connect with others, knowing that in any genuine encounter we are reaching out to the Divine.

Though some of the letters are drawn from his personal archive, most come from the original recipients. In the twenty years since his death, over three thousand letters have been collected from the homes, offices, basements and attics of his correspondents. Although the letters began as an intimate exchange between two people, their power today speaks to Henris belief that what is most personalour brokenness, our insecurities, our jagged edgesis most universal.

For Henri, letter writing was an integral part of friendship. In 1996, just months before his death, he recorded in his journal:

This afternoon I wrote many postcards. While writing I experienced a deep love for all the friends I was writing to. My heart was full of gratitude and affection, and I wish I could embrace each of my friends and let them know how much they mean to me and how much I miss them.

He attached great importance to words to reach out across solitudes of experience. I cant tell you how healing and consoling your gentle and loving words are to me, he wrote to his friend Jim.

Henri wrote generous and intimate letters. In response to people seeking his advice he never condemned or judged but instead used stories from his own experience to inspire or teach. At the same time, he could be challenging, even demanding. He called his readers to be faithful to choices they had made and to practice the spiritual disciplines of prayer, community and solidarity with the poor. He cautioned against the temptations that pulled people off the narrow path and emphasized the importance of making choices that took the needs of others into account.

He had a gift for deep listening. After reading a pain-filled letter, he identified the struggle with precision and responded with compassion. You have been heard. You are loved. You are not alone was the implicit message.

After receiving a letter from Henri on how to care for her dying mother, a woman wrote back:

I am so grateful to you for helping me to find and make meaning of my journey on earth.My heart is bursting with gratitude for the comfort you have provided me during my mothers illness and death last month.You gave me insight and courage to stay with the pain and wait with her for God. I feel transformed by my experience and I want to thank you for helping me to endure her suffering, and therefore be with her, really be with her.So you see why I feel such community with you? You have helped me to hope in and not wish for, and I feel I have really learned to be present in the lives of my mother and father, from who I first learned about God.

Henri created a safe place for vulnerabilities because he was honest with his own. You probably realize, he wrote to a woman struggling with a chronic illness, that I have no answers for all your questions, but I receive your questions more as an invitation for a relationship between two searching Christians than as a request to be taught.

As I considered what letters to include in this volume, my guiding question was: What do people need to hear right now? The times we live in have changedthere are now email and text messagesfleeting forms of communication; few people put pen to paper anymorebut our human challenges remain the same: loss, sickness, injustice, finding and losing love, discerning a career path, handling conflict, managing our emotions and coping with self-doubt. Yet Henri believed that it is precisely in those struggles that we ultimately find God. It is in the big questionswho is God, and what is the meaning of our life?that we are drawn to know ourselves better.

Henris responses to readers are powerful because he drew from his own lived experience. He wrote to a friend:

Jesus invitation to lay down my life for others has always meant more to me than physical martyrdom. I have always heard these words as an invitation to make my own life struggles, my doubt, my hopes, my fear and my joys, my pains and my moments of ecstasy available to others as source of consolation and healing. To witness for Christ means to me to witness for Him what I have seen with my own eyes, heard with my own ears and touched with my own hands.

Whereas others hid their vulnerabilities and weakness, Henri drew on them to form a community of solidarity with his friends and readers.