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

by Henri J.M. Nouwen

Since the God “out there” or “up there” is more or less dissolved in the many secular structures, the God within asks attention as never before.

God within can be not only the source of a new creative life but also the cause of a chaotic confusion.

clarify the immense confusion which can arise when people enter this new internal world.

used to thinking in terms of large-scale organization,

become unfamiliar with, and even somewhat afraid of, the deep and significant movements of the spirit.

avoid this danger?

enter ourselves first of all into the center of our existence and become familiar with the complexities of our inner lives.

become capable of creative work.

key word here is articulation.

give names to his varied e...

able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the...

He is able to create space for Him whose heart is greater than his, whose eyes see more than his, and whos...

only he who is able to articulate his own experience can offer himself to others as a source of clarification.

only he who is able to articulate his own experience can offer himself to others as a source of clarification.

a man who is willing to put his own articulated faith at the disposal of those who ask his help.

1) a man who is willing to put his own articulated faith at the disposal of those who ask his help.

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.

pastoral conversation

manipulate people into the Kingdom of God, but a deep human encounter in which a man is willing to put his own faith and doubt, his own hope and despair, his own light and darkness at the disposal of others who want to find a ...

prea...

rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happen...

The young especially do not have to run away from their fears and hopes but can see themselves in the face of the man who leads them; he will make them understand the words of salvation which in the past often sounded to them like words from a strange and unfamiliar world.

Teaching

offering of channels through which people can discover themselves, clarify their own experiences and find the niches in which...

li...

name the space where joy and sorrow touch each other as the place in which it is possible to ce...

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.

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.

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.

Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority.

2) Compassion 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. Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man. 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. This compassion is authority because it does not tolerate the pressures of the in-group, but breaks through the boundaries But the danger is that instead of becoming free to let the spirit grow, the future minister may entangle himself in the complications of his own assumed competence and use his specialism as an excuse to avoid the much more difficult task of being compassionate. More training and structure are just as necessary as more bread for the hungry. But just as bread given without love can bring war instead of peace, professionalism without compassion will turn forgiveness into a gimmick, and the kingdom to come into a blindfold.

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.

Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.

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.

way of dying. This compassion is authority because it does not tolerate the pressures of the in-group, but breaks through the boundaries

But the danger is that instead of becoming free to let the spirit grow, the future minister may entangle himself in the complications of his own assumed competence and use his specialism as an excuse to avoid the much more difficult task of being compassionate.

More training and structure are just as necessary as more bread for the hungry. But just as bread given without love can bring war instead of peace, professionalism without compassion will turn forgiveness into a gimmick, and the kingdom to come into a blindfold.

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.

3) Contemplative critic 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. articulate the movements of the spirit but also to contemplate his world with a critical but compassionate eye, may expect that the convulsive generation will not choose death as the ultimate desperate form for protest, but instead the new life of which he has made visible the first hopeful signs.

articulate the movements of the spirit but also

to contemplate his world with a critical but compassionate eye, may expect that the convulsive generation will not choose death as the ultimate desperate form for protest, but instead the new life of which he has made visible the first hopeful signs.

the man who is able to recognize in others the face of the Messiah and make visible what was hidden, make touchable what was unreachable. The man of prayer is a leader precisely because through his articulation of God’s work within himself he can lead others out of confusion to clarification; through his compassion he can guide them out of the closed circuits of their in-groups to the wide world of humanity; and through his critical contemplation he can convert their convulsive destructiveness into creative work for the new world to come.

precisely this one-to-one encounter we discover some of the principles of Christian leadership, which also have implications for more complex leadership relationships.

Suddenly this tough man who could maintain his own independence through hard manual labor found himself the passive victim of many people and operations which were totally alien to him. He had lost control over himself.

Mr. Harrison feared an impersonal death, a death in which he did not have a part, of which he was not aware, and which was more real in the minds of the many powers around him than in his own mind.

Harrison was not prepared for a faithful act of surrender. He was not prepared to give his life away in faith and hope. His present suffering was small compared with what he expected beyond the boundary of life. Mr. Harrison feared death in the most existential way.

chained. Instead of a man filled with love and hate, desire and anger, hope and doubt, he had become a passive victim unable to give any direction to his own history.

For one man needs another to live, and the deeper he is willing to enter into the painful condition which he and others know, the more likely it is that he can be a leader, leading his people out of the desert into the promised

… unless John were to become a person Mr. Harrison could see, touch, smell, and hear, and whose real presence would in no way be denied. If a man were to appear from out of the cloudiness of Mr. Harrison’s existence who looked at him, spoke to him, and pressed his hands in a gesture of real concern, that would have mattered. The emptiness of the past and the future can never be filled with words but only by the presence of a man.

Nobody can offer leadership to anyone unless he makes his presence known—

reducing it to a paralyzing self-complaint; and by a frontal attack against his false self-concept:

there is nobody waiting for them tomorrow. There is no reason to live if there is nobody to live for.

Let us not diminish the power of waiting by saying that a lifesaving relationship cannot develop in an hour. One eye movement or one handshake can replace years of friendship when man is in agony. Love not only lasts forever, it needs only a second to come about.

recovery, because when two people have become present to each other, the waiting of one must be able to cross the narrow line between the living or dying of the other. Mr. Harrison

It is indeed possible for man to be faithful in death, to express a solidarity based not just on a return to everyday life, but also on a participation in the death experience which belongs in the center of the human heart.