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

by Henri J.M. Nouwen

I will therefore divide this chapter into two parts: the predicament of nuclear man, and nuclear man’s way to liberation.

I. THE PREDICAMENT OF NUCLEAR MAN

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 sty...

He drives in cars, listens to the radio and watches TV, but has lost his ability to understand the workings of the instruments he uses.

The psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton has given us some excellent concepts to determine the nature of the quandaries of nuclear man. In Lifton’s terms, nuclear man can be characterized by (1) a historical dislocation, (2) a fragmented ideology, and (3) a search for immortality.

1. Historical dislocation

they both suppose that Peter’s expectations for the future are essentially the same as theirs. But Peter thinks of himself more as one of the “last ones in the experiment of living” than as a pioneer working for a new future. Therefore, symbols used by his parents cannot possibly have the unifying and integrating power for him which they have for people with a prenuclear mentality. This experience of Peter’s we call “historical dislocation.”

Why should a man marry and have children, study and build a career; why should he invent new techniques, build new institutions, and develop new ideas—when he doubts if there will be a tomorrow which can guarantee the value of human effort?

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.

When we wonder why the language of traditional Christianity has lost its liberating power for nuclear man, we have to realize that most Christian preaching is still based on the presupposition that man sees himself as meaningfully integrated with a history in which God came to us in the past, is living under us in the present, and will come to liberate us in the future. But when man’s historical consciousness is broken, the whole Christian message seems like a lecture about the great pioneers to a boy on an acid trip.

2. Fragmented ...

One of the most surprising aspects of Peter’s life is his fast-shifting value system. For many years he was a ver...

But when he decided to leave the seminary and study at a secular university, it took him only a few months to shake off his old way of life. He quietly stopped going to Mass even on Sundays, spent long nights drinking and playing with other students, lived with a girl friend, took up a field of study far removed from his theological interests, and seldom spoke about God or religion.

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).

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.

When nuclear man feels himself unable to relate to the Christian message, we may wonder whether this is not due to the fact that, for many people, Christianity has become an ideology.

Jesus, a Jew executed by the leaders of his time, is quite often transformed into a cultural hero reinforcing the most divergent and often destructive ideological points of view. 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.

3. A search for new i...

No form of immortality—neither the immortality through children nor the immortality through works, neither the immortality through nature nor the immortality in heaven—is able to help nuclear man project himself beyond the limitations of his human existence. It is therefore certainly not surprising that nuclear man cannot find an adequate expression of his experience in symbols such as Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, Hereafter, Resurrection, Paradise, and the Kingdom of God.

A preaching and teaching still based on the assumption that man is on his way to a new land filled with promises, and that his creative activities in this world are the first signs of what he will see in the hereafter, cannot find a sounding board in a man whose mind is brooding on the suicidal potentials of his own world.

This brings us to the end of our description ...

II. NUCLEAR MAN’S WAY TO LIBERATION

there are two main ways by which he tries to break out of his cocoon and fly: the mystical way and the revolutionary way.

Let me therefore try to describe these two ways, and then show how they are interrelated.

1. The mystical way

The increasing number of houses for meditation, concentration, and contemplation, and the many new Zen and Yoga centers show that nuclear man is trying to reach a moment, a point or a center, in which the distinction between life and death can be transcended and in which a deep connection with all of nature, as well as with all of history, can be experienced.

In whatever way we try to define this mode of “experiential transcendence,” it seems that in all its forms man tries to transcend his own worldly environment and move one, two, three or more levels away from the unrealities of his daily existence to a more encompassing view which enables him to experience what is real.

There he feels that he belongs to a story of which he knows neither the beginning nor the end, but in which he has a unique place. By this creative distance from the unrealities of his own ambitions and urges, nuclear man breaks through the vicious circle of the self-fulfilling prophecy that makes him suffer from his own morbid predictions.

There he touches the place where all people are revealed to him as equal and where compassion becomes a human possibility. 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.

2. The revolutionary way

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.

For him no adaptation, restoration or addition can help any longer. For him the liberals and progressives are fooling themselves by trying to make an intolerable situation a little more tolerable. He is tired of pruning trees and clipping branches; he wants to pull out the roots of a sick society.

But while aiming at a revolution, he is not just motivated by a desire to liberate the oppressed, alleviate the poor, and end war. While in the past scarcity led man to revolt, the present-day revolutionary sees the urgent and immediate needs of his suffering fellow man as part of a much greater apocalyptic scene in which the survival of humanity itself is at stake.

Still, the revolutionary believes that the situation is not irreversible and that a total reorientation of mankind is just as possible as is a total self-destruction. 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.

3. The Christian way

It is my growing conviction that in Jesus the mystical and the revolutionary ways are not opposites, but two sides of the same human mode of experiential transcendence. 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.

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.

Wow! He did not offer an ideology, but himself.

One day a young fugitive, trying to hide himself from the enemy, entered a small village. The people were kind to him and offered him a place to stay. But when the soldiers who sought the fugitive asked where he was hiding, everyone became very fearful. The soldiers threatened to burn the village and kill every man in it unless the young man were handed over to them before dawn. The people went to the minister and asked him what to do. The minister, torn between handing over the boy to the enemy or having his people killed, withdrew to his room and read his Bible, hoping to find an answer before dawn. After many hours, in the early morning his eyes fell on these words: “It is better that one man dies than that the whole people be lost.” Then the minister closed the Bible, called the soldiers and told them where the boy was hidden. And after the soldiers led the fugitive away to be killed, there was a feast in the village because the minister had saved the lives of the people. But the minister did not celebrate. Overcome with a deep sadness, he remained in his room. That night an angel came to him, and asked, “What have you done?” He said: “I handed over the fugitive to the enemy.” Then the angel said: “But don’t you know that you have handed over the Messiah?” “How could I know?” the minister replied anxiously. Then the angel said: “If, instead of reading your Bible, you had visited this young man just once and looked into his eyes, you would have known.”

It would seem, then, that we are faced with two questions. First, how do the men and women of tomorrow look today? And second, how can we lead them to where they can redeem their people?

I. THE MEN AND WOMEN OF TOMORROW

Christian leadership will be shaped by at least three of the characteristics which the men and women of tomorrow share: inwardness, fatherlessness, and convulsiveness.

1. The inward generation

Jeffrey K. Hadden is the last one to suggest that the inward generation is on the brink of revitalizing the contemplative life, about to initiate new forms of monasticism. His data show, first of all, that inwardness can lead to a form of privatism, which is not only antiauthoritarian and anti-institutional, but is also very self-centered, highly interested in material comfort and the immediate gratification of existing needs and desires. But inwardness need not lead to such privatism. 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.

2. Generation without fathers

But this fearful generation which rejects its fathers and quite often rejects the legitimacy of every person or institution that claims authority, is facing a new danger: becoming captive to itself.

Instead of the father, the peer becomes the standard. Many young people who are completely unimpressed by the demands, expectations and complaints of the big bosses of the adult world, show a scrupulous sensitivity to what their peers feel, think and say about them.

In this respect there is an obvious shift from a guilt culture to a shame culture.