Love, Henri

Letters on the Spiritual Life

Henri J. M. Nouwen

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473632110
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Cartas literarias

'This invaluable collection of over 200 letters by the late Nouwen ( The Wounded Healer ), a beloved author, pastor, and priest, provides insight into his personal struggles, insecurities, and faith and offers the heartfelt guidance Nouwen shared so generously with individuals to a wide audience... The courage and kindness with which Nouwen shares his vulnerabilities and honest feelings, combined with his willingness to provide direction, advice, companionship, and affection, ensure that Nouwen's legacy as inspired spiritual guide will continue, enhanced by this testimony to his sincere desire to live with gratitude, faith, and love.'
- Publishers Weekly 'When I write I think deeply about my friends, I pray for them, I tell them my emotions and feelings. I reflect on our relationship and I dwell with them in a very personal way.' - Henri Nouwen Over the course of his life, priest, professor and writer Henri Nouwen wrote thousands of letters to friends, acquaintances, parishioners, students and readers of his work all around the world. He held a deep conviction about the value of reaching out to others through letters, believing that a thoughtful letter written in love could truly change someone's life. As a result, many people looked to Nouwen as a long-distance spiritual advisor. This collection of previously unpublished letters stretches from the earliest years of Henri's career through to his last ten years at L'Arche Daybreak. Rich in spiritual insights as well as touching details of Henri's daily life, the letters are organised around themes that emerge not just in his correspondence but in his writing, too: vocation and calling; solitude and prayer; suffering and perseverence; belovedness; and community. Across all these letters, what emerges most clearly is Henri's belief in the rich value of human relationships. As relevant today as they were forty years ago, and full of insight and encouragement, these letters offer a deeply personal look into the mind of a spiritual giant of the twentieth century, and are an ideal introduction to his life and thought.

Part I

December 1973–1985

The letters begin in late 1973, just weeks before Henri’s forty-second birthday. By that time Henri had been a priest for sixteen years. He was teaching at Yale Divinity School, and beginning to emerge as a widely read writer on spirituality. The chapter concludes more than a decade later, in 1985, when – now at Harvard Divinity School – he experienced his first stirrings of attraction to L’Arche and the path he would follow for the rest of his life.

Henri’s early life had been one of privilege and opportunity. He had grown up in the Netherlands within a loving and cultured family, traveled extensively, and circulated easily within Holland’s important social and intellectual circles. After his ordination in 1957, he was sent to the University of Nijmegen to study psychology. This was followed by a two-year graduate training program in theology and psychiatric theory at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, where he distinguished himself among the leading minds in the emerging disciplines of pastoral psychology and clinical pastoral education.

The time spent at the Menninger Foundation was Henri’s first extensive stay in the United States and, as he describes it, the place where he grew up:

It was here that my life came into focus. For the first time I was dealt with as someone who also had something to say. For the first time I had to think for myself, and people took what I said critically. There I came in touch with myself as a separate human being.¹⁷

He also became aware of wider political events. He learned of the civil rights movement and the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He participated in the march from Selma to 18Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 and was introduced to the voices of conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War and anti-nuclear war protestors in the US peace movement.

His emerging confidence and bold integration of psychology with pastoral care began to draw attention. After completing the certificate program in 1966, he was offered a teaching position in the newly established psychology department at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He accepted and for two years taught courses there including ‘Psychology of Religion,’ ‘The Psychology of Personality,’ and ‘Abnormal Psychology.’

Henri’s ambitions, however, didn’t lie in the United States. He assumed that he would return to Holland and find his place in Dutch society. He left Notre Dame in 1968, returned home and taught first at the Amsterdam Joint Pastoral Institute and then at the Catholic Theological Institute in Utrecht, two new Catholic schools set up to integrate psychology into pastoral education.

Henri became popular with the students, but his ‘American’ teaching style and focus on the methodologies he had learned at the Menninger Foundation put him into conflict with colleagues.¹⁸ It was the first indication that his home was not in fact, to be in Holland.¹⁹ He decided to earn a doctorate in theology at the University of Nijmegen, hoping it might add to h20is credibility, but the tensions only increased.

For his thesis, Henri expanded on research from his time at Menninger. However, his dissertation was found insufficiently theological and he was told to rework it. He tried to submit it for a doctorate in psychology instead, but in that department it was deemed not empirical enough. He became frustrated and restless. An associate from that time describes him as ‘running out of patience’ and feeling like ‘all was going on in a slow way.’²⁰

Meanwhile, American interest in Henri’s academic approach was growing. In 1969, he had published his first book, Intimacy: Pastoral Psychological Essays (Notre Dame, IN: Fides, 1969), based on a series of lectures he gave at Notre Dame on pastoral care. In it, Henri explored a question that would become central to his life: ‘How can I find a creative and fulfilling intimacy with God and my fellow human beings?’ The book resonated with American readers, who saw his question as their own.

As Henri considered his options for the doctorate, he received an invitation from Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut, to teach pastoral theology. Impatient with the Dutch academic system, he accepted and by August 1971 was on his way back to the United States. He would never live in Holland again.

When Henri arrived at the Protestant, nondenominational Yale, he was one of only two Catholics on the faculty. But he quickly became a popular lecturer, teaching a range of courses on the spiritual life including ‘Christian Spirituality,’ ‘Pastoral Care and Counseling,’ ‘Prison Ministry,’ ‘Ministry to the Elderly’ and ‘The Life and Works of Thomas Merton.’ His writing continued apace. By 1974, he had published three more books, including his best- seller The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).

He enjoyed the vibrant community life at Yale but soon became restless about his vocational path. He was drawn to the contemplative tradition of the fourth-century Desert Mothers and Fathers and was inspired by the monk and writer Thomas Merton. Over the next few years he made two extended stays in a Trappist monastery in upstate New York to explore that calling.

He also considered a life of action in service to the poor. At the time, Latin America was exploding in violence. Henri was drawn to the plight of the people there and made regular visits to the region. In 1981, after ten good years at Yale, he left his tenured position to become a missionary with the Maryknoll Fathers in a barrio in Lima, Peru.

But neither missionary work nor the life of contemplation proved a good fit. Though he didn’t have the temperament for missionary work, he was an impassioned speaker about the spirituality of peacemaking, and in 1983 he went on a ten-week tour of the United States to speak about the injustice he had witnessed in Nicaragua. And though he didn’t have the aptitude for the cloistered life, his book Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), was enthusiastically received by many wanting to learn about life in a contemporary monastery.

What was beginning to emerge was that, at his core, Henri was a pastor. Wherever he went, people were drawn to his gifts for ministry and counseling. He began to receive more and more letters asking for help. They came from students, some long graduated, in times of vocational discernment or life-crisis. They came from ministers who had heard him speak and needed support and encouragement. Hundreds of requests for advice came from his rapidly growing reading audience.

In 1983, after being courted by the Harvard Divinity School to rejoin academia, Henri decided to continue with his teaching career on a part-time basis. He would teach one semester a year and continue his work in Latin America for the remaining months. However, Harvard was another bad fit. His personal, pastoral style ran up against the competitive culture of the Divinity School. He wrote of the time: ‘I had a feeling that Harvard was not where God wanted me to be. It’s too much podium, too much publicity, too public. Too many people came to listen . . . It’s not an intimate place. It’s a place of intellectual battle.’²¹ He became increasingly lonely and depressed.

In this time of doubt, Henri received an invitation from Jean Vanier, a Canadian who in 1964 had started a community for people with physical and mental disabilities. Vanier invited Henri to visit L’Arche in Trosly-Breuil, a small village north of Paris. Henri visited L’Arche22 several times between 1982 and 1985, staying for longer intervals each time.

Vanier saw Henri as a deeply spiritual man with many gifts, but also one who needed a home. L’Arche became that home. In July 1985, Henri resigned from Harvard and took up a one-year residency at L’Arche à Trosly beginning in August. He had finally found his vocational path.

*

In this first letter, Henri writes from Holland, where he is visiting his family before beginning a sabbatical. It is four days after Christmas, 1973. He is still unclear about where he will work and live in the coming years. He has received permission from his bishop to remain in the United States, but as he does not have tenure, he is keeping his options open to returning to Holland.

Henri plans to use his sabbatical to explore a monastic vocation in the Abbey of the Genesee in upstate New York. His interest in monasticism began in the 1960s with his discovery of the life and work of Thomas Merton (1915–1968), a Trappist monk and writer.²²

Henri writes to his friends Claude Pomerleau and Don McNeill, two American Holy Cross priests who attended his class on ‘Pastoral Care’ at Notre Dame University in 1967. Pomerleau and McNeill would remain life23long friends.

December 29, 1973

Dear Don and Claude,

Happy times, Blessed Christmas and a very good new year. I hope that all the misery in the country and the world in general will deepen your hope for the kingdom of God, will strengthen your eschatological perspective, will make you more interested in the last book of the Bible, will make you more critical toward psychology and political sciences, will make you simple of mind and heart, make you pray more and love more and make your heart and mind open toward Him who is the Lord of life and who calls us to transcend all human endeavors.

In Holland the mood is sentimental, romantic, nostalgic and full of tears. T.V., books and entertainment make us think back to the happy years gone by and students who were sarcastic and distant do not hesitate to cry in your arms and show their great need for affection. Quite a challenge again for theology! In general, the Church is still in the ‘critical mood’ and therefore does not seem to realize the great need for home, for candles, for statues, for incense and for all the things which helped us in the past to feel close to God and to each other. I do not say that we should go back to the early days but we definitively should respond to this enormous need and show God again as a loving, caring, gentle God under whose wings we can find refuge. I am less and less clear what is good or bad religion, what is regressive or progressive, but I am more and more convinced how important it is to respond to real needs and to prevent ourselves from narrowing God to one or two images. I also feel that there is not too much difference between Holland and the States and that we would do well to think what pastoral care for nostalgic people means. After all, don’t we all desire to retu...