The Life Journey of a Joyful Man of God

The Autobiographical Memoirs of Adrian van Kaam

van Kaam, Muto

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498276641
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

To have known Adrian van Kaam in person is to have loved him for reasons human and spiritual. His kindness to everyone is as legendary as his fidelity to the mystery in all the peaks and valleys of daily life. His humility is the fire that enkindles his original vision of formative spirituality. His gentle, joyful spirit radiates on every page of this retelling of his life story. In it he takes us to the heart of his thinking in the fields of psychology and spiritual formation. He welcomes us wholeheartedly into the intimate corners of his family, his friendships, and his pastoral and professional life. He brings us into a little known arena of world history, the infamous Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944--1945. We travel with him from that bleak period through the renewal of his life's work in the United States to its crowning phase in the Epiphany Association, co-founded with his colleague and editor of this unforgettable work of love, Dr. Susan Muto.

Part One

Winter of My Soul

Foreword

Each of us is on a voyage into the unknown. Countless events invite us to give form to our lives. Not everything that happens has the same effect. Remembering our past, some episodes stand out more than others. Striking for Father Adrian van Kaam was the Hunger Winter (De Hongerwinter) that afflicted his life and all of occupied Holland from 1944 to 1945.

Few know what happened to Western and Northern Holland after the defeat of the Allies in spite of their heroic combat in the famed battle of Arnhem. The Allied troops and their commanders felt compelled to press eastward from Holland into Germany. They had to leave behind this part of the Netherlands whose population became cut off from the rest of liberated Europe, only to be left at the mercy of their vengeful oppressors. Surviving in a kind of limbo, harassed by a foreign regime and its small quota of Dutch collaborators, short of food, clothing, shoes, fuel, and medicine, many starved to death, succumbed to illness or tottered on the verge of despair.

Born twenty-four years earlier, on April 19, 1920, in The Hague to Charles and Anna van Kaam, neither Adrian nor his three sisters, Bep, Lia, and Leonie (now deceased), could have imagined how this event would change the course of their lives. As this remarkable memoir will reveal, these years found Father van Kaam alternating between two emotional polarities—extreme gladness and equally extreme sadness. Gladness about the divine invitations this horrific time of loss allowed into his life and sadness because of how easy it might have been to miss the meaning of what God intended for his destiny and that of countless others. Happily for us, Father van Kaam opted for searing honesty in tracing the origins of his formational concepts not to abstract reasoning or idle curiosity but to deeply felt experiences that cut a trail through the dense underbrush of humanity’s need to grasp life’s meaning at the marrow of the bone. He traces his thoughts about the vicissitudes of life to their roots in the harshness of the reality of the Hunger Winter when failed expectations gave way to the brilliant light of building a new science, anthropology, and theology of human and Christian formation.

In Part One, Winter of My Soul, he traces the origins of his ideas concerning formative spirituality from his youth to the time shortly after World War II when he knew what his life’s mission would be and how he would work under obedience to his religious superiors to fulfill it. Part Two, Springtime of My Heart, presents the main story of how his life’s mission continued in the United States, together with an account of our shared mission in the Epiphany Association. His war experience taught him that if we are to enjoy any peace on this small planet of ours, we must begin by overcoming our self-centeredness and begging for the grace of true conversion of heart. In an era of worldwide struggle, where terrors threatened him and his peers wherever they turned, we find this young candidate for the priesthood living through harassed days with only one thought: how to understand humanity’s meaning and purpose for today and tomorrow. He felt drawn to ponder not only the meaning of the war to which he was exposed in his disheartened city of birth but all wars from the beginning of time, of the killing and maiming of millions by their own people, of the scourge of infidelity that has deformed our destiny as the children of God.

His main discovery during the Hunger Winter was that he had to find better ways to prepare humankind for peace, for healing the rifts within us and between us. What kind of approach would it take to teach us how to give form to what is most noble in our nature? What discipline might help us to highlight in our different traditions anything that could bridge our divisions, heal the hates that tear us apart and in the end destroy us? Were these the utopian dreams of a young student lost in a ransacked city or was there a way to give form to life and world in the light of a mystery that is without beginning or end? As he said to me on October 26, 1966, the day we first met on the campus of the university where for the next twenty years we would teach and work together, first in the Institute of Man and then in the Institute of Formative Spirituality:

I could not shake the feeling, indeed the certitude, that there had to be a new science of meaning aimed at disclosing the causes that create the dissonance that leads to war, a science that helps us to transcend our differences before they destroy us. Otherwise these divisions may immobilize the last remnants of faith, hope, and love. Then anger, resentment, and frustration may lead anew to desperate outlets in war-like strife for the dominance of one race or nation over another.

His prophetic vision prompted my personal “Yes, Lord,” to this mission, but it would take many more years of work in our co-founded Epiphany Association and several authored and co-authored books for the dream of this science, anthropology, and theology of formation to become a reality. Thanks be to God, Father van Kaam lived long enough to see our combined one hundred years of work bear fruit throughout the world. Instead of pointing only to the divisions between women and men, parents and children, neighbors and strangers, employers and employees; instead of only emphasizing what sets culture against culture, race against race, country against country, tradition against tradition, our goal has been to seek, find, and teach foundational directives that bind us together in full respect for our differences. We believe that our common aim must be to build with others an edifice for justice, peace, and mercy in the light of our distinctively human transcendence dynamic. The set of constructs designed by Father van Kaam and initiated during the Hunger Winter would eventually become the ingredients of the science of human and Christian formation.

As this first part of his life journey will show, the insights he gained in the seminal years from 1944 to his ordination to the priesthood on July 21, 1946, would never be lost. In the end, they empowered him to sacrifice whatever God asked of him to be faithful to his formative mission in full fidelity to his commitments as a religious priest and an always inspiring educator. As I witnessed personally when I came to teach with him, he gave up a brilliant career as a professor of psychology for the chance to keep alive his love for the new fields of formation science, anthropology, and theology he initiated during this winter of his soul. No matter the misunderstanding to which such a decision might lead, it was the one God called him to make. All those who knew and loved him see that he gladly gave his all to fulfill what he came to discern and what was consequently confirmed as his unique-communal life call in Christ. The enlightenment that flooded his mind during these seminal years would stay with him for a lifetime. Hints and guesses grew into convictions and these blossomed in turn into unshakeable pledges to open hearts to a new way of being, thinking, and acting.

My service to Father van Kaam as the editor of this book is one small way of thanking God for our partnership in the mystery of redemption for over forty years. My gratitude to this priest, friend, and mentor goes beyond words. He guided with grace my own call, vocation, and avocation in the field of formative spirituality. He taught me never to refuse the kind of service God asks of us, to always say yes. What mattered to Father was to tell this story not as a strict autobiographical account of his life, with what he humbly admitted were its countless failings, but to reveal in these episodes as honestly as possible the origins of his teachings and, by the grace of God, their significance for the lives of others. This work is not only a chronology of major events but a formational theology of his providential response to them. The episodes that comprise his life’s journey during the period of time, presented in Part One, from his early upbringing in The Hague to his ordination, reveal the soil into which the seeds of his contributions to humankind in general and Christianity in particular have been planted. All of us owe this saintly man a profound debt of gratitude for being, like Christ, a beaming blade that allows us to see trails of light in the wilderness of fading hope. With his help, the divine beam in all our lives may continue to grow brighter. I know it has done so time and again in mine.

[Editor’s Note: In respect for the first person style of these memoirs, I have left them in the autobiographical mode in which, for the most part, they were written in various unpublished notes and journals as well as in some previously published materials in our former journal, Envoy, which first appeared in press when we directed the Institute of Formative Spirituality at Duquesne University.]

Susan Muto, PhD

Preface

Origins

The origins of the van Kaam family lie in the Southwest of the Netherlands, in the village of Halsteren, a few miles north of the town of Bergen op Zoom. From perusing Father van Kaam’s archives, it appears as if there may still be a cousin of his in that neighborhood, living on the Belgian border. Others in his ancestry came to live in the village of Uitgeest, about fifteen miles north of Haarlem, where Adriaan’s father, Charles Louis was born on February 9, 1896. About the origins of his mother, Elisabeth Johanna Franke, I have no information; I only know she was born in The Hague on January 18, 1892. Both of Adriaan’s parents became orphans at a young age, and they lived at an orphanage for some years. The orphanage was called RK Wees-en Oudeliedenhuis and the address was War noezierstraat 89–91, The Hague. There they got to know one another and married in The Hague on January 8, 1919. They remained in that city for the rest of their lives.

Early Years

Adriaan (the Dutch spelling of his name) van Kaam was born on April 19, 1920. It was and is still customary with most children, certainly with Catholics, to receive two or three official Latin names of saints, one of which, usually the first, was shortened for daily use. In this case, Adriaan Leo was the first-born of four siblings. After him came his three sisters. Elisabeth Julia, or Bep in daily use, was born on July 17, 1925; Julia Elisabeth, or Lia, on April 7, 1930; and Leonarda Jacoba, or Leonie, on July 17, 1935.

Adriaan’s address at birth was Alberdingk Thijmplein 20, a square in the Southeastern most outskirt of the town. This neighborhood was at the time very small and just being developed. At a certain moment the family moved to the nearby Alberdingk Thijmstraat 8, where Adriaan’s parents remained for most of their lives; his father was only in a nursing home for six weeks before his death.

This neighborhood was called Spoorwijk. In fact, it was more like a village than part of a town. At the time it was isolated from the rest of the city by a railway. It was and remained a respectable but poor section and

in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash (which not only hit America heavily but also Western Europe) it became extremely poor. His father drove a streetcar—and he was lucky insofar as buses and streetcars were an official service of the local government, so he was not fired during the Depression years. It meant a permanent job, however poorly paid.

In this new neighborhood a parish, too, was founded, named Saint Jeroen—a regional martyr and a parish priest, who was killed around the year 850 by the invading Vikings, who ravaged most of Western Europe for two centuries.

This is the neighborhood (which I, too, have known, having grown up there myself) where Adriaan spent his youth. His parents, though not rich at all due to these depressed economic circumstances, did the best for their children and in some ways it was a good time to be alive. Spoorwijk was adjacent to an agricultural district with ample vegetable and fruit growing. The food we ate was more wholesome than it is now with artificial means of preservation and the effect of acid rain. Dutch food is quite plain, but it is and was at least wholesome; its only specialty resides in the great variety of vegetables we produce, more than in any other European country.

The neighborhood had another advantage: it was at the edge of the town. When we walked down the streets, we were in the fields; there was also a park and some woods, so we had plenty of fresh air. The primary school was called Sint Jozefschool. The reports of Adriaan’s gr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Winter of My Soul
• Part Two: Springtime of My Heart
• Afterword
• Appendix 1: Poetry of the Winter of My Soul
• Appendix 2: Christmas Night in Ravaged Holland
• Appendix 3: Editorials by Adrian van Kaam in Cor Unum et Anima Una
• Appendix 4: Poetry of My Crucifying Epiphany
• Appendix 5: Biographical and Bibliographical Review