In the second sermon in a series on Christian thinkers who can help point us toward God during the season of Lent, Pastor Brooks considered the famous Christian writer Henri Nouwen. Listen to this sermon now or read it below.
Scripture Reading—Two Translations of Hebrews 11:1
From the New Revised Standard Version: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
From the Message: The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see.
In September of 1996, one of the most prolific and beloved Christian writers of recent times died. Henri Nouwen wrote more than 40 books that have been translated into over 30 languages. After being born and raised in Holland, Nouwen studied psychology in the United States before teaching at Notre Dame, Harvard, and Yale. For the last ten years of his life, however, he left the academy so that he could live and minister in a community for the developmentally disabled in Canada. Nouwen died at the age of 64 from a heart attack. On the day of his funeral in Canada, bookstores received copies of a book that would join the ranks of bestsellers by Nouwen. The book was entitled The Inner Voice of Love, and it was derived from a journal he had written during an emotional crises he had suffered nine years earlier.
In the introduction, Nouwen describes the book as the “secret journal” that he kept over the course of a year and a half. He confides that it was written during “the most difficult period” of his life. He wrote, “Everything came crashing down—my self-esteem, my energy to live and work, my sense of being loved, my hope for healing, my trust in God…everything.” During this bleak time, Nouwen confronted a sense of his own “nothingness.” Despite finally living in a community in which he felt appreciated, loved, and admired, he had paradoxically come to think of himself as “useless, unloved, and despicable.” He became paralyzed by anguish. He couldn’t sleep. He would cry “uncontrollably for hours.”
What precipitated this downward spiral? The story told in his book is that a close friend of his had begun to pull back from their relationship. This friend had made him feel loved and cared for more than ever before. Nouwen developed a feeling of dependency upon this friend that took the form of an overbearing neediness. When the friend then retreated, it triggered for Nouwen a deep sense of anguish and a nervous breakdown. For six months, he had to leave the community of his ministry to receive professional help. Those who knew him intimately later reasoned that Nouwen had become a highly developed person as a professional in his public life while at the same time, he had never developed as a person who could have secure, trusting, and loving relationships in his personal life.
For some, this picture may seem incomplete. While the dependent relationship in which Nouwen had found himself was platonic, it is now well documented that Nouwen wrestled with his being gay and closeted. As a priest, his struggle took place within the context of his vow of celibacy, a vow to which by all accounts he was faithful. Yet, he clearly contended with a need for intimacy. Part of the clinical recovery process that Nouwen sought after his breakdown was to be physically held by a therapist in regular scheduled appointments. In terms of Nouwen’s view of his sexuality, he privately evolved to the point where he no longer viewed it as a form of disability as he once did. Frequently, Nouwen escaped for refuge to the home of a gay couple whose relationship he viewed as one of solemn and holy commitment. One of Nouwen’s biographers claims that if Nouwen had lived longer his next major book may have been an affirming study of homosexuality. Nouwen had even alerted his publishers of this intention. Ultimately, however, one of the sad ironies of Nouwen’s life is that he became famous for his highly personal and self-revealing writings while never disclosing to the public his true sexual identity.
In the end, Nouwen left us a trove of writings that offer an intimate language of faith for contending with the psychological and spiritual hardships of life. Indeed, one biography of Nouwen is entitled Genius Born of Anguish. This morning I want to offer for you two images from Nouwen that I believe can be helpful to us on our Lenten journeys. One of the images for which Nouwen became famous was that of the “wounded healer.” In a book with this title, Nouwen argued that our own wounded-ness can be our empathetic starting point for serving others who are also wounded. The image of being wounded, however, becomes especially powerful in a passage from the journal Nouwen kept during his breakdown. Nouwen confessed to himself that he was “wounded in many ways,” and what he realized was that his healing was not going to come through intellectually thinking about his wounds. Instead, he believed it was better to hold his wounds in a sacred silence, to feel them deeply, and to cry. He wrote:
“The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your wounds to your head or your heart. In your head, you can analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down to your heart. Then you can live through them and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.”
Have any of ever gotten into a mental rut by over-thinking your afflictions? In seeking to let his wounds move from his head to his heart, it seems to me that Nouwen was moving toward a path of tender and gentle self-compassion. Nouwen viewed the heart as the dwelling place of God’s love, so one could argue that his reflections in this passage go beyond self-compassion to visualizing the healing balm of God’s love. Lent can be a time of soul-searching, but maybe we should also make it a time in which we immerse ourselves in the soothing warmth of divine compassion.
Another image from Nouwen comes from a documentary film he did as well as from his writings. A few months before his death the 64-year old Nouwen was filmed flying on a trapeze with the help of safety lines and a harness. His biographer notes that in the film it is evident that Nouwen took an “unashamed, childlike delight” in his attempt at aerial acrobatics. The title of the documentary is Angels over the Net. It arose from Nouwen’s deep fascination with the trapeze. A few years earlier Nouwen had eagerly befriended a trapeze troupe from South Africa. He even managed to tour with the troupe and interview them for a book that was never completed. For Nouwen, the trapeze inspired in him a whole new theology. In a letter to the leaders of the troupe, Nouwen wrote about how he saw in the troupe precisely the kind of spiritual life he wanted to explore and understand. He wrote, “Flying, catching, trusting and daring, discipline and cooperation, care for one another and listening to one another, all are part not only of your life, but also of the life of the Spirit that I am writing about.”
At the same time, Nouwen saw in the trapeze a couple different metaphors for faith. First, he noted that “the human heart searches for something larger” than its immediate existence, “and everyone who enters the circus or the church is looking for something that reaches out to the stars, or beyond!” Nouwen believed that for this reason there is a trapeze artist in every priest. We might expand that to say there is a trapeze artist in every person of faith. There is something in all of us that wishes to fly higher and reach farther.
A second metaphorical aspect of the trapeze is this: Nouwen contended that the star of the trapeze act is not the one flying through the air. The star is the catcher who is always there to receive and welcome us. By extension, we can only experience the joys and freedoms of life when we know that we can count on the catcher to be there for us. In the documentary, Nouwen declares, “We have to know that when we come down from it all, we’re going to be caught, we’re going to be safe.” Nouwen used a variation of this image in articulating his ministry to the dying. He wrote, “To care for the dying is to say, ‘Don’t be afraid. Remember that you are the beloved child of God. [God] will be there when you make your long jump…. Just stretch out your arms and hands and trust, trust, trust.’”
In reflecting on this image, I think of our scripture: faith “is our handle on what we can’t see.” When it comes to faith, metaphors are what point us in the direction of God, even when we feel surrounded by mystery, even when we can’t see what lies ahead. In life, all of us are flying through air, and we never know for certain where that flight is going to take us. Some may choose to believe that our flight is meaningless and without purpose, but I prefer to believe that there is meaning and there is purpose. We can feel that meaning and purpose whenever the hands of love wrap their fingers around ours, whenever those hands hold us aloft, whenever we can feel the reach of care and compassion carrying us home. As we approach the cross this season of Lent, know that it can be a time of anguish, know that it can be a time of mystery, but know as well that in midst of it all there are hands to catch us. Amen.