Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri J.M. Nouwen

by Michael Ford

It is also difficult to explain the author without acknowledging a certain disconnection between his writing and his living, not because of any scandalous gap between the two, but because he always managed to write way beyond what he himself could actually live. This was especially true in terms of what he said about solitude and community. Nouwen's spirit, mind, and body all ran ahead of him; his books were often reminders to himself of how he ought to be.

This incident introduced Parker Palmer to a person of paradox who indeed had a profoundly contemplative heart but who needed to be constantly on the move, a man filled with immense energies that were difficult to harness. But did such tensions collaborate to form a certain kind of genius? As a spiritual author himself, Palmer believes that Nouwen's books were deeply engrossing and engaging precisely because they came out of this ongoing wrestling match between the paradoxes in his own life. He practiced what he preached—and he preached the struggles, sometimes the anguish, sometimes the joy, that he himself was living.

While he drew on rich spiritual resources, his own contemplation was born of much inner conflict. Colleagues and friends did not regard him as a mystic in the modern sense of being gifted with extraordinary graces: He wasn't mystical in the sense of ‘ecstasies’; he was, however, a mystic in the traditional sense of being deeply spiritual.

In a 1994 survey of 3,400 U.S. Protestant church leaders, he was named as their second greatest influence, ahead of Billy Graham. He appealed to Evangelicals because he honored the historic essence of the Christian faith and was never into revisionism. He was able to combine this successfully with contemporary allegories from the world of psychology and anthropology. Nouwen himself had always felt that Evangelicals, while fervent, committed, and word-centered, lacked the mystical dimension to spiritual living—a balance he attempted to redress.

Nouwen knew the search for intimacy was difficult for celibate Roman Catholic priests whose seminary training had underlined the dangers of special relationships and of getting too close to people. But he was not a person to keep up his clerical guard all the time, and friends talk about his readiness to admit to his needs: ‘You may think I'm the famous one and that you need me to help you understand your spiritual life,’ he would say. ‘But actually I need you more.’

Nouwen, then, was not alone in the world of great preachers and ministers as a person who was highly effective and compassionate but who was also psychologically scarred.

The call to priesthood seems to have been complemented by a remarkably early awareness of his own sexuality. He later said that he was just six years old when he first realized that he had a homosexual orientation. It is not without significance that his deep feelings of being set apart by God for a life of service in the church appear to have emerged at the same time as he was discovering something about the nature of his self-identity. But it was only toward the end of his life that he accepted the extent to which spirituality and sexuality were interconnected.

Nouwen did not believe that intellectual formation could be separated from spiritual formation. No methods, skills, techniques, films, or field trips could replace the influence of the teacher, because the essence of all religious teaching was witness, proclaiming ‘something which has existed from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have watched and touched with our own hands, the Word of life—this is our theme’ (1 John 1:1–2). It was hardly a philosophy to endear him to traditional academic approaches in theology, but Nouwen did not waver in his conviction.

We are not asked to teach a discipline like mathematics, physics, history or languages, but we are called to make our own faith available to others as the source of learning. To be a teacher means indeed to lay down your life for your friends, to become a ‘martyr’ in the original sense of witness. To be a teacher means to offer your own faith experience, your loneliness and intimacy, your doubts and hopes, your failures and successes to your students as a context in which they can struggle with their own quest for meaning. To be a teacher means to have the same boldness as Paul, who said to the Corinthians: ‘Take me as a model as I take Christ’ (1 Corinthians 11:1). To be a teacher means to say as those who want to learn what Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Come and see’ (John 1:39).

A theological question is not an attempt to disqualify what is present but a prayerful request to be more deeply led into the truth. Nouwen argued that the final words of Mary at the Annunciation— ‘You see before you the Lord's servant; let it happen to me as you have said’—show clearly the aim of all theology. They create the inner space in which God's word can happen to us: ‘The purpose of theological understanding is not to grasp, control, or even use God's word, but to become increasingly willing to let the word of God speak to us, guide us, move us, and lead us to places far beyond our own comprehension.’

The Genesee Diary was a turning point for Nouwen in that for the first time he opened up parts of his soul to his readers and revealed his petty-mindedness as well as his deeper struggles. There was something real about his writing, yet these self-disclosures came only after spells of concentrated prayer and labor.

Just as Nouwen started to paint, he woke up. His interpretation of the dream was that the spiritual life consisted not of any special thoughts, ideas or feelings but was contained in the most simple experiences of everyday living.

On his first visit to Trosly, Nouwen had concelebrated Mass with Père Thomas:

He had many spiritual directors and did not know which one to turn to;

Sue Mosteller. ‘The wonderful thing is that he learned to talk about community in a very brilliant way but he didn't live it very well. He could never get a hold on it.’

It was Sister Sue Mosteller who told him, ‘Whether you are the younger son or the elder son, you have to realize that you are called to become the father.’ Now was the time for him to claim his true vocation: to be a father who could welcome his children home without asking them any questions and without wanting anything from them in return. If he looked at the father in the painting, she told him, he would know who he was called to be. Daybreak needed him, not just as a good friend or as a kind brother, but as a father who could claim for himself the authority of true compassion.

this first meeting stayed in my mind as a paradigm of everything I would grow to know and love about Henri. He had an extraordinary pastoral gift to speak God's Word to others. Even when he was wrapped up in such internal anguish, his generous spirit and his gift remained intact.

With characteristic skill for bringing out the gifts of others, he invited Joe Child at the Daybreak Woodery to design and build the table—though he grew impatient because the Woodery made it slowly, fitting it in between their more pressing business contracts. When the beautiful cherrywood altar was finally completed, it exceeded the pastor's wildest hopes and he asked Joe to talk about the process of creating it from damaged wood that had been rejected and dumped in the corner of a timber yard.

At times Nouwen wondered if some of his gay friends were trying to force him out into the open to justify their own decisions. There were private—and occasionally more open—heated exchanges with gay people who wanted him to take more of a public stance on gay issues. But, as he told a close friend, ‘If I came out, I would be labeled as just another gay priest writing from sexuality and not my spirituality.’

He was acutely aware of the dangers that labels could bring and that some people were so frightened by homosexuality that they would dismiss the most talented of gay people out of hand, possibly as a way of protecting themselves from realities they would rather not face. Chris Glaser, a former student of Nouwen's and a prominent gay activist, asked to dedicate to him a book of prayers, Coming Out to God, but Henri declined. ‘He was driven by his passion for communion and he felt called by his vocation not to express that sexually but to direct it spiritually,’ said Glaser. ‘If you read his writings about Jesus, they are a lover's conversation with Jesus, which is typical of a lot of Christian mysticism.’

As a friend I felt angry, and then helpless, until I realized that really, this was his choice. If he worked himself to death doing eighteen-hour days, we had to accept that this was how he wanted to live his life. And perhaps how he wanted to die.

Henri Nouwen was always torn between the meaning of his spiritual calling and his own psychological needs and longings. He could not integrate them except in his books—and then not with complete openness. He knew that he taught best those things that he needed to learn most— which is one reason so many people thought he was accompanying them on their spiritual journeys. He had an extraordinary skill, both in literary and pastoral terms, of making people feel he was connecting with them personally.

He was a man with a multitude of friendships, some of which became for him experiments of trust as he tried to get close and test the waters of reciprocation. His demands proved too overwhelming for a number of people, yet at the same time he seems to have kept hidden from some of his closest friends episodes of his life that he would share with strangers. This might have been another reason his writings seemed so personal: He preferred to be intimate at a distance.