The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (Doubleday Image Book. an Image Book)

by Henri J.M. Nouwen

For the minister is called to recognize the sufferings of his time in his own heart and make that

recognition the starting point of his service. Whether he tries to enter into a dislocated world, relate to a convulsive generation, or speak to a dying man, his service will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which he speaks. Thus nothing can be written about ministry without a deeper understanding of the ways in which the minister can make his own wounds available as a source of healing.

In the absence of clear boundaries between himself and his milieu,

between fantasy and reality, between what to do and what to avoid, it seems that Peter has become a prisoner of the now, caught in the present without meaningful connections with his past or future.

Peter is not working hard to reach a goal, he does not look forward to the fulfillment of a great desire, nor does he expect that something great or important is going to happen.

Nuclear man is a man who has lost naïve faith in the possibilities of technology and is painfully aware that the same powers that enable man to create new life styles carry the potential for self-destruction.

Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction.

Only when man feels himself responsible for the future can he have hope or despair, but when he thinks of himself as the passive victim of an extremely complex technological bureaucracy, his motivation falters and he starts drifting from one moment to the next, making life a long row of randomly chained incidents and accidents.

Nuclear man, like Peter, does not live with an ideology. He has shifted from the fixed and total forms of an ideology to more fluid ideological fragments (Lifton, Boundaries, New York: Random House, 1970, p. 98). One of the most visible phenomena of our time is the tremendous exposure of man to divergent and often contrasting ideas, traditions, religious convictions, and life styles. Through mass media he is confronted with the most paradoxical human experiences. He is confronted not only with the most elaborate and expensive attempts to save the life of one man by heart transplantation, but also with the powerlessness of the world to help when thousands of people die from lack of food. He is confronted not only with man’s ability to travel rapidly to another planet, but also with his hopeless impotence to end a senseless war on this planet. He is confronted not only with high-level discussions about human rights and Christian morality, but also with torture chambers in Brazil, Greece, and Vietnam. He is confronted not only with incredible

ingenuity that can build dams, change riverbeds and create fertile new lands, but also with earthquakes, floods and tornadoes that can ruin in one hour more than man can build in a generation. A man confronted with all this and trying to make sense of it cannot possibly deceive himself with one idea, concept, or thought system which could bring these contrasting images together into one consistent outlook on life.

Nuclear man no longer believes in anything that is always and everywhere true and valid. He lives by the hour and creates his life on the spot. His art is a collage art, an art which, though a combination of divergent pieces, is a short impression of how man feels at the moment. His music is an improvisation which combines themes from various composers into something fresh as well as momentary. His life often looks like a playful expression of feelings and ideas that need to be communicated and reponded to, but which do not attempt to oblige anyone else.

When Christianity is reduced to an all-encompassing ideology, nuclear man is all too prone to be skeptical about its relevance to his life experience.

When man is no longer able to look beyond his own death and relate himself to what extends beyond the time and space of his life, he loses his desire to create and the excitement of being human.

There he comes to the shocking, but at the same time self-evident, insight that prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.

Here man becomes aware that the choice is no

longer between his world or a better world, but between no world or a new world.

He does not think his goal will be reached in a few years or even in a few generations, but he bases his commitment on the conviction that it is better to give your life than to take it, and that the value of your actions does not depend on their immediate results. He lives by the vision of a new world and refuses to be sidetracked by trivial ambitions of the moment. Thus he transcends his present condition and moves from a passive fatalism to a radical activism.

I am increasingly convinced that conversion is the individual equivalent of revolution. Therefore every real revolutionary is challenged to be a mystic at heart, and he who walks the mystical way is called to unmask the illusory quality of human society. Mysticism and revolution are two aspects of the same attempt to bring about radical change. No mystic can prevent himself from becoming a social critic, since in self-reflection he will discover the roots of a sick society. Similarly, no revolutionary can avoid facing his own human condition, since in the midst of his struggle for a new world he will find that he is also fighting his own reactionary fears and false ambitions.

For a Christian, Jesus is the man in whom it has indeed become manifest that revolution and conversion cannot be separated in man’s search for experiential transcendence. His appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.

Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but Himself. He was also a mystic, who did not use his intimate relationship with God to avoid the social evils of his time, but shocked his milieu to the point of being executed as a rebel. In this sense he also remains for nuclear man the way to liberation and freedom.

I suppose you will hesitate to consider yourself a mystic or a revolutionary, but when you have eyes to see and ears to hear you will recognize him in your midst. He is sometimes undeniably evident to the point of irritation, sometimes only partially visible. You will find him in the eyes of the guerrilla, the young radical or the boy with the picket sign. You will notice him in the quiet dreamer playing his guitar in the corner of a coffeehouse, in the soft voice of a friendly monk, in the melancholic smile of a student concentrating on his reading. You will see him in the mother who allows her son to go his own difficult way, in the father who reads to his child from a strange book, in the loud laughter of a young girl, in the indignation of a Young Lord, and in the determination of a Black Panther. You will find him in your own town, in your own family, and even in the strivings of your own heart, because he is in every man who draws his strength from the vision that dawns on the skyline of his life and leads him to a new world. It is this new world that fills our dreams, guides our actions and makes us go on, at great risk, with the increasing conviction that one day man will finally be free—free to love!

It is the generation which gives absolute priority to the personal and which tends in a remarkable way to withdraw into the self.

It is the behavior of people who are convinced that there is nothing “out there” or “up there” on which they can get a solid grasp, which can pull them out of their uncertainty and confusion. No authority, no institution, no outer concrete reality has the power to relieve them of their anxiety and loneliness and make them free. Therefore the only way is the inward way.

It is possible that the new reality discovered in the deepest self can be “molded into a commitment to transform society.”

The inwardness of the coming generation can lead either to a higher level of hypocrisy or to the discovery of the reality of the unseen which can make for a new world. The path it takes will depend to a great extent on the kind of ministry given to this inward generation.

The Christian leader, minister or priest, is not one who reveals God to his people—who gives

something he has to those who have nothing—but one who helps those who are searching to discover reality as the source of their existence. In this sense we can say that the Christian leader leads man to confession, in the classic sense of the word: to the basic affirmation that man is man and God is God, and that without God, man cannot be called man.

In this context preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community so that those who listen can say: “You say what I suspected, you express what I vaguely felt, you bring to the fore what I fearfully kept in the back of my mind. Yes, yes—you say who we are, you recognize our condition …”

So the first and most basic task of the Christian leader in the future will be to lead his people out of the land of confusion into the land of hope. Therefore, he must first have the courage to be an explorer of the new territory in himself and to articulate his discoveries as a service to the inward generation.

By speaking about articulation as a form of leadership we have already suggested the place where the future leader will stand. Not “up there,” far away or secretly hidden, but in the midst of his people, with the utmost visibility.

Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority. When the Christian leader is a man of God for the future generation, he can be so only insofar as he is able to make the compassion of God with man—which is visible in Jesus Christ—credible in his own world.

Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that men feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty that the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through

compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends’ eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate man nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.

A fatherless generation looks for brothers who are able to take away their fear and anxiety, who can open the doors of their narrow-mindedness and show them that forgiveness is a possibility which dawns on the horizon of humanity.

We have said that the inward, fatherless generation desperately wants to change the world in which they live but tends to act spastically and convulsively in the face of a lack of a credible alternative. How can the Christian leader direct their explosive energy into creative channels and really be an agent of change? It might sound surprising and perhaps even contradictory, but I think that what is asked of the Christian leader of the future is that he be a contemplative critic.

The man who does not know where he is going or what kind of world he is heading toward, who wonders if bringing forth children in this chaotic world is not an act of cruelty rather than love, will often be tempted to become sarcastic or even cynical. He laughs at his busy friends, but offers nothing in place of their activity. He protests against many things, but does not know what to witness for.

The Christian leader is called to help others affirm this great news, and to make visible in daily events the fact that behind the dirty curtain of our painful symptoms there is something great to be seen: the face of Him in whose image we are shaped.

Because by testing all he sees, hears and touches for its evangelical authenticity, he is able to change the course of history and lead his people away from their panic-stricken convulsions to the creative action that will make a better world.

The contemplative is not needy or greedy for human contacts, but is guided by a vision of what he has seen beyond the trivial concerns of a possessive world. He does not bounce up and down with the fashions of the moment, because he is in contact with what is basic, central and ultimate. He does not allow anybody to worship idols, and he constantly invites his fellow man to ask real, often painful and upsetting questions, to look behind the surface of smooth behavior, and to take away all the obstacles that prevent him from getting to the heart of the matter. The contemplative critic takes away the illusory mask of the manipulative world and has the courage to show what the true situation is. He knows that he is considered by many as a fool, a madman, a danger to society and a threat to mankind. But he is not afraid to die, since his vision makes him transcend the difference between life and death and makes him free to do what has to be done here and now, notwithstanding the risks involved.

More than anything else, he will look for signs of hope and promise in the situation in which he finds himself. The contemplative critic has the sensibility to notice the small mustard seed and the trust to believe that “when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so

that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches.” (Mt. 13.31–32) He knows that if there is hope for a better world in the future the signs must be visible in the present, and he will never curse the now in favor of the later. He is not a naïve optimist who expects his frustrated desires to be satisfied in the future, nor a bitter pessimist who keeps repeating that the past has taught him that there is nothing new under the sun; he is rather a man of hope who lives with the ...

No man can stay alive when nobody is waiting for him. Everyone who returns from a long and difficult trip is looking for someone waiting for him at the station or the airport. Everyone wants to tell his story and share his moments of pain and exhilaration with someone who stayed home, waiting for him to come back.

A man can keep his sanity and stay alive as long as there is at least one person who is waiting for him. The mind of man can indeed rule his body even when there is little health left. A dying mother can stay alive to see her son before she gives up the stuggle, a soldier can prevent his mental and physical disintegration when he knows that his wife and children are waiting for him.

There is no reason to live if there is nobody to live for.

“I will wait for you” goes beyond death and is the deepest expression of the fact that faith and hope may pass but that love will remain forever. “I will wait for you” is an expression of solidarity which breaks through the chains of death. At that moment John is no longer a chaplain trying to do a good piece of counseling, and Mr. Harrison is no longer a farm worker doubting if he will make it through the operation; rather they are two men who reawaken in each other the deepest human intuition, that life is eternal and cannot be made futile by a biological process.

Man protests against death, for he is not content with a postponement of the execution.

After so much stress on the necessity of a leader to prevent his own personal feelings and attitudes from interfering in a helping relationship (see the excellent study by Seward Hiltner: Counselor on Counseling. Nashville, Tennessee, Abingdon, 1950) it seems necessary to re-establish the basic principle that no one can help anyone without becoming involved, without entering with his whole person into the painful situation, without taking the risk of becoming hurt, wounded or even destroyed in the process.

The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.

Thinking about martyrdom can be an escape unless we realize that real martyrdom means a witness that starts with the willingness to cry with those who cry, laugh with those who laugh, and to make one’s own painful and joyful experi...

In short: “Who can take away suffering without entering it?” The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.