BROKEN yet beloved.

What I've learned from Henri Nouwen

Calvin Burge gave up on love many decades ago. Well, he almost did, after growing up in a family in which his mother died giving childbirth and "my dad couldn't take care of us." By the time he was an adult, Burge felt great pangs of loneliness. He read books about love to try to figure out what it meant. "Being loved and accepting love has been a major problem in my life," he says.

A turning point for Burge came in the late 1980s while he was teaching at Michigan's Spring Arbor College, which selected Henri Nouwen's book, The Wounded Healer, as its book of the year. Burge read it and felt personally attracted to the writer. Now retired, Burge has since read most of Nouwen's books and in his own small way has helped Nouwen become one of the most popular spiritual writers of the late 20th century.

Nouwen, born and ordained a priest in the Netherlands and trained as a psychologist in Kansas, wrote more than 40 books. He taught at Notre Dame, Harvard, and Yale universities and spent the last 10 years of his life at L'Arche Daybreak, a community in the Toronto suburbs where disabled and able-bodied people live together. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of 64.

Nouwen has remained a bestselling author even after his death. In North America alone, more than 1 million copies of his books have been sold since 1996, and he has also remained highly popular in Europe.

Nouwen's friend and biographer, Robert Jonas, says the power of Nouwen's writing blossomed partially from the fact that he "courageously stood with one foot in the shadow of self-rejection and one foot in the daylight of God's love."

On the one hand, Nouwen was intensely generous and compassionate. Almost daily he would pray with others and send notes of encouragement, flowers, or other gifts, including signed books, to people throughout the world. And he would travel to give speeches and provide comfort to friends in need, sometimes at a moment's notice.

But Nouwen suffered deeply. He admitted he usually did not feel the affection from others that he deeply craved--suffering from what Jonas calls Nouwen's "habitual, almost neurotic need to be needed." Accepting that he was loved remained a lifelong struggle, Nouwen spent some time in a treatment center, suffering from deep depression and wallowing in the depths of despair over a broken relationship. He felt such anguish that he wrote on many occasions about how desperately draining it can be to feel broken.

Nouwen's readers identify with those struggles--one reason he is so popular. "He can share his own fragility with people, and I can identify with that," says Barb Fuhrwerk of Springfield, Illinois. She was taught at a young age to focus on her strengths and offer to God her talents. Now she finds herself, like Nouwen, relating to God primarily through her brokenness.

She gave a friend going through some struggles Nouwen's book Letters to Marc About Jesus. Nouwen's letters became a life-saver to him and the perfect method for reflecting on his own struggles, Fuhrwerk says.

Nouwen's spirituality also resonates with so many because he had a knack for avoiding theological and psychological babble and explaining the spiritual life with powerful stories in simple language.

"The hardest thing for us is to love well the people we really love, the people closest to us," says Tannis Arnett of Toronto.

Reading The Return of the Prodigal Son, which Nouwen considered his best book, had a major impact on Arnett. Nouwen zeroes in on every character in the biblical parable: the younger son who goes away and comes back, the elder son who becomes so resentful and jealous, and the father who throws a huge party when the prodigal son returns.

Nouwen eventually focuses on the father and concludes that he and other Christians face the ultimate challenge in responding to others with the great compassion the father demonstrated. Nonetheless, Nouwen writes, "It does not surprise me at all that few claim fatherhood for themselves. The pains are too obvious, the joys too hidden. And still, by not claiming it, I shirk my responsibility as a spiritually adult person."

Until she read Nouwen's book, Arnett says she had always focused on the younger son. "The further development for me is learning to be the father," she says. "The ultimate role is to be that loving and forgiving person so that others can live to the fullest. If you want to be loved, then love. If you want to be forgiven, then forgive."

Wendy Greer of New York, who, like Nouwen, suffered from depression, says she had read some of his work and eventually wrote him a 15-page letter. He responded by sending her a copy of The Return of the Prodigal Son. "I felt so special and thought, `What kind of person is this?'" Greer says. She then attended a conference in North Carolina at which Nouwen spoke and became, along with her husband, Jay, great friends of the author.

Greer draws the same conclusion that Arnett does about how difficult it is to live as the "father" in the prodigal son story.

"We have to forgive each other for not loving perfectly," she says. "Only God loves perfectly."

But Arnett, Greet, and other Nouwen admirers struggle with a concept that became central to Nouwen as he developed a framework for the spiritual life. That concept, repeated often by Nouwen in his later years, is that people must accept that they are loved--and worthy of love--by God and others. Nouwen talked and wrote frequently about "the life of the beloved."

He started with the premise that most people feel wounded, hurt, or broken in some way. Even worse, many secretly feel they are not good enough, smart enough, productive enough, or successful enough and they believe it when others express such lies about them.

Nouwen emphasized the fundamental truth that people are both loved and lovable. He calls this being "chosen" to be loved.

"The truth," he wrote in The Life of the Beloved, "even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity and held safe in an everlasting embrace ... We must dare to opt consciously for our chosenness and not allow our emotions, feelings, or passions to seduce us into self-rejection."

Deirdre LaNoue, an assistant professor at Dallas Baptist University who studied Nouwen's work for a dissertation, says the way Nouwen emphasized being the beloved had a "lightbulb effect on me."

Nouwen lamented that society teaches people that they have value because of what they do, how much power they have, or what other people think of them.

For LaNoue, Nouwen articulated well what Jesus says--that she is God's beloved daughter, God's chosen person, and that is enough. Working to internalize that concept is liberating because it dissipates competition and comparisons with others.

But it is also difficult.

Perhaps the great irony that makes Nouwen's work resonate around the world is that although this concept of belovedness is so basic, it's not easy for most people to truly accept. As LaNoue puts it, "Do I really believe that God loves me, and do I trust that love?

"I am realizing that I may cognitively assent to that, but do I live like that? And I've found the answer to be no. So I have to think through it and pray about it. To live that way consistently is one of the basic challenges of the Christian life."

Similarly, Burge says that in his head he is capable of believing he is God's beloved child, "but I have a long way to go to get it in my heart."

Arnett says the concept of being beloved goes hand in hand with the issue of suffering. "We are called to be in a place where we feel beloved," she says. "There are so many times when I forget it, I don't really believe it. But when I do, when we feel that, we really know God's heart."

Last year, she says, she was able to mend relationships with family members, including a twin sister, by approaching them from a spirit of belovedness. That allowed her to listen more compassionately, react less quickly, and see the suffering in others rather than dwell on her own disappointment.

In short, LaNoue concludes, feeling beloved is liberating. "You lose your need to compete. If you can believe your own belovedness, you believe that about others."

Nouwen had some practical advice for those struggling with feeling beloved. He advised them to keep looking for people and places where they feel chosen and beloved, instead of worrying about feeling valued for what they can do, what they have, or what others say about them. But he had trouble following his own advice and wrote honestly about his struggles--it is this complexity and struggle that causes millions of people to feel as if they are on a spiritual journey with Nouwen.

It is not difficult to summarize Nouwen's overall approach to spirituality, according to Robert Jonas. This spirituality consists of three movements as described in the gospel story in Luke 6:12-19. The newly formed Henri Nouwen Society summarizes these movements as solitude, community, and compassion.

Solitude. In the gospel story, Jesus spent a night in prayer. Nouwen taught that in one's solitude and prayer, a person discovers that he or she is loved by God. LaNoue's Southern Baptist tradition did not emphasize silence and solitude, but Nouwen's statement that we live in a wordy, noisy world has changed her prayer life. Her behavior is changing as well. Although she loves music, she now tries to keep the stereo off as she's driving around Dallas. "The music disturbs the quiet," she says, adding, "It is new territory to practice the discipline of silence."

Community. Jesus came down from the mountain and formed a community around him. And so for Nouwen, being a Christian meant sharing hearts and finding others who believe in God's truth. Nouwen once commented that people do not have to create community but simply be obedient to its presence that is already there for those who search for it.

Greer, president of the Henri Nouwen Society, says Nouwen has left a rich legacy to be shared. So a major function of the society will be to bring people together to pray, reflect, discuss, and share. Greer says Nouwen formed community wherever he went and preached the paramount importance of hospitality. "He gathered people and challenged us to proclaim the truth of our belovedness," Greer relates.

Compassion (or ministry). In the third movement in Luke's gospel, the community went into the marketplace and served other people. For Nouwen, being Christian meant doing ministry by showing compassion to others. While best known for his spiritual writings, Nouwen also preached social justice and downward mobility. He found it important to identify with the poor. That is one reason why, after teaching for years at universities, he found a home at L'Arche Daybreak, the community for disabled people in the Toronto suburbs.

The Rev. Steve Berry of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles says Nouwen built an extraordinary bridge--many bridges, in fact--that connect Christians of many traditions. "No longer can it be Protestant and Catholic," Berry says. "Christ calls all people to himself. I wouldn't have gotten that from most Protestant or Catholic Churches, but I got it from Nouwen."

"Most of his inner attention went to this question of belovedness and feeling loved," Jonas says. He knew that Nouwen could feel exhilarated speaking to a crowd of a thousand people, only to return to his room feeling empty, drained, self-attacking, and longing for affection.

"He was complicated," Jonas says. Nouwen wrote with articulate simplicity and care about the spiritual life, yet he never felt completely rooted in God's love. Jonas explains: "He'd glimpse it but get uprooted."

Just like his friends, lust like his admirers. Just like his readers who continue to buy and discuss his books, simultaneously struggling and chuckling that one's personal spirituality involves a lifelong journey on which you never get to the place you think you ought to be.

"I stand with awe the place where Rembrandt brought me," Nouwen wrote in The Return of the Prodigal Son, the' book that he considered his most important The Rembrandt painting of the same title shows the prodigal son kneeling in front of his compassionate and aged father, with the father's hands (one masculine, one feminine, Nouwen says) resting gently on the young man's back The elder son observes resentfully from the side.

Nouwen wrote that he has been the younger son who ran away, as well as the embittered older son, but he found himself challenged to become the compassionate father: Rembrandt "led me from the kneeling, disheveled young son to the standing, bent-over father, from the place of being blessed to the place of blessing. As I look at my own aging hands, I know that they have been given to me to stretch out toward all who suffer ..."

Nouwen was on his way to Russia to film a documentary on the painting in September 1996 when he died of a heart attack.

For more information: The Henri Nouwen Literary Centre in Canada maintains a Web site (www.hnlc.org) that offers information about Nouwen, his books, and his life. Also, friends of Nouwen launched the Henri Nouwen Society in 1998 to share his spirituality and preserve his legacy. Write: Henri Nouwen Society, Box 230523, Ansonia Station, New York, NY 10023.

RELATED ARTICLE: BEST OF NOUWEN

Among Henri Nouwen's 40 books are a few that regularly show up on admirers' lists of favorites:

The Return of the Prodigal Son (Doubleday, 1992). Powerful reflections on the characters in Rembrandt's painting of the same title--what it means to live as the younger son, the older resentful son, and the father. Nouwen thought this was his best and most important book

The Life of the Beloved (Crossroad, 1993). In some ways the culmination of Nouwen's writing, this book emphasizes in new ways the power and liberation individuals feel when they accept that they are "beloved" by God.

The Wounded Healer (Doubleday, 1972). An explanation of how people bring hope to others through their own pain and suffering. A book widely read and well known by ministers, Protestant and Catholic alike.

The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life (Crossroad, 1999). An interesting compilation of Nouwen's reflections on the power of prayer, along with a selection of his own written prayers, some of them never published before.

With Open Hands (Ave Maria Press, 1972, revised 1994). An early look at how powerfully Nouwen felt early on about the important concepts of solitude, prayer, and compassion.

For an insightful, concise biography of Nouwen and his spirituality, along with well-organized selected passages from his books, see a book called Henri Nouwen: Writings Selected with an Introduction by Robert A. Jonas (Orbis, 1998).

--E.W.

RELATED ARTICLE:

I never met Henri Nouwen, but we had a 10-year friendship by correspondence.

It began when I was editor of a diocesan Catholic newspaper in the 1980s. On a whim one week, I published an "Open letter to Henri Nouwen" in which I reflected on my own life in light of his candid writings. I identified not only with his struggles with the spiritual life but also with his hope. I sent him a clipping, and he surprised me with a handwritten, grateful reply that ended, "Stay in touch." So I did.

And I started publishing an open letter to him every year. Each year he would respond. As the open letters continued for six years, our correspondence became more frequent. Only after his death in 1996 did I find out that Henri corresponded with many people and set aside a part of most days to correspond. He also sent Rembrandt prints of The Return of the Prodigal Son or flowers, and he wrote forewords for many books. He had trouble saying no.

A friend of mine received a Rembrandt print and chuckled that Henri must have wrapped it himself. She could tell by the crumpled, uneven wrapping job and the way it was taped. Alas, Henri was legendary for being a bit clumsy.

But more important, he was generous almost beyond description, especially with his time. Many people benefited from his generosity, and many who never met him olden felt surprised and uplifted that such a famous man would take time for them personally.

--E.W.

ED WOJCICKI is publisher of Illinois Issues in Springfield, Illinois. He is a member of the Henri Nouwen Society board and a contributor to Nouwen Then: Personal Reflections on Henri (Zondervan, 1999).