Henri Nouwen loved the circus, and in particular the artistry of the fliers and catchers on the trapeze.  By observing them, he felt he learned everything he needed to know about taking risks without fear when trust and care are present. Nouwen’s life was a constant balancing act between prayer and service, between contemplation and action, and between his euphoria in connecting with people and his intense need to be alone.  He dared to live fully, believing that the redemptive power of a caring God was his safety net.  His faith and his willingness to share his struggles inspire us to take our own leaps.

-- Margaret Wakeley

“Dear Lord, I will remain restless, tense and dissatisfied until I can be totally at peace in your house….There is no certainty that my life will be any easier in the years ahead, or that my heart will be any calmer.  But there is the certainty that you are waiting for me and will welcome me home when I have persevered in my long journey to your house.”

At the time of his death in 1996, Henri Nouwen was one of the most popular and influential spiritual writers of his time.  Through dozens of books he invited countless persons to enter more deeply into the spiritual life – intimacy with Jesus and solidarity with a wounded world.  Much of his impact came from his frank willingness to confide his own woundedness.  This confessional honesty was a central feature of his message.  The spiritual life, he insisted, was not simply intended for saints or “perfect people.”  Instead, the call of Jesus was addressed to the lame and halt, ordinary people, all of us in our brokenness and humanity:  “We have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited an unconditional love of God.”  It was a call to conversion, to healing, a call to come home.

The search for his true home was a constant motif of Nouwen’s life and writings.  Born in Holland where he was ordained a priest, Nouwen spent the better part of his life in the United States.  He taught at a number of prestigious American universities, including Notre Dame and Yale Divinity School.  It was during these years in the 1970s that he began to emerge as the popular author of books as Reaching Out, Intimacy, and The Wounded Healer.  Though he quickly won a devoted following, Nouwen experienced a constant restlessness and anxiety about his place in the world.  He was afflicted by an inordinate need for affection and affirmation; there was a depth within, it seemed, that God alone could fill.

In 1974 Nouwen took a year off to live in the Trappist Abbey of the Genesee.  It was not enough simply to teach spirituality; he felt he must cultivate some deeper spiritual center of his own.  His subsequent Genesee Diary offered a moving account of this monastic retreat, while at the same time opening a window on his spiritual struggles:  “What was driving me from one book to another, one place to another, one project to another?”  He returned to Yale.  But in 1981 he left for a different kind of retreat, this time among the poor of Latin America.  Living with missioners in the poor barrios of Bolivia and Peru, he wondered whether God was calling him to some kind of ministry in Latin America.  Ultimately he returned to the United States, convinced that his vocation was to help serve as a bridge between the oppressed but faithful people of Latin America and Christians in the North.

In 1982 he accepted an invitation to teach at Harvard Divinity School.  His lectures attracted enormous crowds.  But this only underlined his abiding sense of loneliness and isolation.  Later he wrote with feeling about the temptations that Christ suffered in the desert:  To be “relevant, powerful, and spectacular.”  He was no longer satisfied with the glittering stimulation of university life.  But neither monastic solitude nor Third World mission seemed to answer his heart’s desire.  At this point there came a great turning point in his life.

Over the years Nouwen had visited a number of L’Arche communities in France and Canada.  In these communities mentally handicapped persons lived in community with able helpers.  In 1986 Daybreak the L’Arche community in Toronto, formally invited Nouwen to join them as their pastor.  As he later observed, it was the first time in his life that he had received such a formal call.  Having lived for many years among the “best and brightest,” he wondered whether it might be among the “poor in spirit” that he would finally find what he was seeking.  With trepidation, he accepted the call and Daybreak became his home for the rest of his life.

It was a different life than what he had known before.  Aside from his pastoral duties, Nouwen lived like all other members of the community in a house with handicapped people.  He was assigned to care for the most severely handicapped adult in the community, a young man named Adam, who could not talk or move by himself.  Nouwen spent hours each morning simply bathing, dressing, and feeding Adam.  He found it an occasion of deep inner conversion.  Adam was not impressed by Nouwen’s books or his fame or his genius as a public speaker.  But through this mute and helpless man, Nouwen began to experience a sense of what it means to be “Beloved” of God.

This was not, however, the end of his struggles.  After his first year at Daybreak he underwent a complete emotional breakdown – doubtless the culmination of long suppressed tensions.  For months he could barely talk or leave his room.  Now he was the helpless one, mutely crying out to God for some affirmation of his existence.  With the support and prayers of his friends he was able to break through, to emerge more at peace with himself.  To this trauma there was added a nearly fatal accident that impressed him further with a sense of his own mortality, and a deeper appreciation for the preciousness of life.  These insights were expressed in his subsequent books.  He described a sense of “being sent:  sent to make the all-embracing love of the Father known to people who hunger and thirst for love.”  Increasingly, his writings reflected a sense of urgency, as if he sensed how little time there was to share all he wanted to say.

In a series of books he reflected on the challenge of befriending our death as an event that gives ultimate meaning to our lives.  “The main question is not, How much will we still be able to do during the few years we have left to live? But rather, How can we prepare ourselves for our death in such a way that our dying will be a new way for us to send our own and God’s spirit to those whom we love and who have loved us?”

In the summer of 1996 Nouwen worked hard, completing five books.  To many friends he seemed happier and more at peace than they had ever seen him – talking with great enthusiasm of his coming sixty-fifth birthday.  Thus it came as a great shock when he suddenly died of a heart attack on September 21.  Death came as he was passing through his native Holland, on his way to Russia to work on a film about his favorite painting, Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son.  His body was returned for burial among his Daybreak family and friends.

He left many books in production.  One of them, published on the day he died, concluded with these words:  “Many friends and family members have died during the past eight years and my own death is not so far away.  But I have heard the inner voice of love, deeper and stronger that ever.  I want to keep trusting in that voice, and be led by it beyond the boundaries of my short life, to where Christ is all in all.”

Additional Resources
See:  Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (New York:  Doubleday, 1992); The Road to Daybreak:  A Spiritual Journey (New York:  Doubleday, 1988); Henri Nouwen: Writings selected
With an Introduction by Robert A. Jonas (Modern Spiritual Masters Series)

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