Aging in Grace - The Spiritual Journey of Henri Nowen

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C 2001) Journal of Aging and Identity, Vol. 6, No. 4, December 2001 (°

Aging in Grace: The Spiritual Journey of Henri Nouwen1 W. Andrew Achenbaum2,3

Henri Nouwen (1932–1996), author of The Wounded Healer and dozens of other books, is best known for his religious meditations and his guides to spiritual development. The Dutch-born priest was also a pioneering religious gerontologist. Early on, Nouwen recognized that the joys and vicissitudes of aging were a relatively unexplored pathway to maturity. This article explores Nouwen’s increasing sophistication and candor as he probed the dimensions of aging—his own inner torments and hopes, his relationships with others (particularly his father), and his acceptance of life’s finitude. The author, who considers Nouwen a mentor, insinuates his own voice into the conversation to highlight the paradoxical extent to which the particular markers of one’s journey define a life ultimately give way to an identity grounded in the commonalities of human existence. KEY WORDS: Nouwen; spirituality; aging; mentorship.

“I have read many studies about spirituality and the spiritual life; I have listened to many lectures, spoken with many spiritual guides and visited many religious communities,” noted one of the most influential late-twentieth-century authorities on spirituality, Henri J.M. Nouwen (1975, p. 9). While listening and watching others heightened Nouwen’s powers of discernment, he discovered along the way that becoming an astute observer was not enough. I have learned much, but the time has come to realize that neither parents nor teachers nor counselors can do much more than offer a free and friendly place where one has to discover his own lonely way. Maybe my own deep-rooted fear to be on my own and alone kept me going from person to person, book to book and school to school, anxiously avoiding the pain of accepting the responsibility for my own life. (1975, p. 9) 1 This

article is part of a larger project conjoining the author’s interest in aging, history, and wisdom. of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, University of Houston, Houston, TX. 3 Correspondence should be directed to W. Andrew Achenbaum, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, University of Houston, 4800 Calhoun, Houston, TX 77204-3784. 2 College

183 C 2001 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 1087-3732/01/1200-0183$19.50/0 °

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As he aged, Nouwen wrote more frequently about his fears and loneliness while endeavoring to take responsibility for his thoughts, feelings, and actions. He did not dwell narcissistically on his vicissitudes and shortcomings to appeal for sympathy. Nouwen bore testimony to the brokenness he suffered so that readers might apprehend, perhaps even take consolation from, vicariously the sorrows that are as integral to spiritual maturity as are the joys. Thanks to his prolific outpouring, it is possible to reconstruct continuities and changes in Nouwen’s identity over time. The cleric diminished his ego as he emptied his Self, thereby magnifying the value of his insights. Henri Nouwen’s spiritual journey attests to the human capacity to (re)affirm the core values of one’s identity over the course of life. A man tortured by doubts about his lovability, Nouwen invariably managed to return to issues that animated his calling. “My main vocation is to be a priest, to proclaim the Word and be a teacher, someone who brings God’s word to people” (Kendrick, 1933, p. 318). Serving God gave him the strength to age with grace. Gathering with friends for the Eucharist helped Nouwen to focus on his daily activities. The priest traveled far and wide to perform weddings and funerals for friends. He assisted the faithful by preparing daily meditations, including special tracts for Advent and Lent. While the liturgies remained the same, his message changed. Nouwen’s early sermons and books said little about the author. Over time the priest revealed more of his dark side, more of his private torment. Nouwen believed that such self-disclosure, linked to Gospel stories, would enable readers to come to terms with their lot. The strategy helped many (including me), who got the strength and courage to laugh at ourselves as we went about the business of living in a responsible, purposive yet increasingly lighter manner. As we shall see, Nouwen did not always follow his own advice. Throughout his life Nouwen reworked his goals, oftimes in a slightly unconventional manner. The eldest son raised in a comfortable home in a Catholic region of Holland, Henri aspired to the priesthood as a child. His uncle, an archbishop, shepherded his initial theological training. Ordained to the priesthood at the age of 25 (Anderson, 1981, p. 38), Nouwen soon broke out of his parochial environment. Eschewing full-time parish work or a career-enhancing tour of duty in the Vatican, he got permission to go to the Menninger Clinic to train for educating people for pastoral ministries. To equip himself, Nouwen earned doctorates in theology and psychology, an unusual combination in the 1960s. Thereafter he quickly rose through the academic ranks: Appointments at Harvard and Yale followed a stint at Notre Dame. Nouwen wrote more than 30 books, at least 5 of them selling more than 100,000 hardcover copies. Few academics achieve great recognition over the course of decades, much less receive such acclaim in the first 15 years of their careers. Yet Nouwen felt empty in his prime. Not even this extraordinary skein of accomplishments was enough to provide the “home” he so desperately wanted.

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Nouwen, yearning for a community in which he would be unconditionally loved, found his haven in an odd place: Henri left the academy to become a chaplain in L’Arche, a congregate center for those suffering various disabilities. There, in suburban Toronto, the priest often interrupted writing and international phone calls so that he could bathe and feed handicapped residents. Accustomed on the road to being feted by people who hung on his every word, Nouwen chose to live among those unable live independently, companions incapable of engaging him intellectually. The residents of L’Arche afforded Nouwen fresh insights into human relationships. They altered how he marked the passage of time, how he navigated his course of life. As he ministered to the suffering in L’Arche, Nouwen sought (with uneven results) to look within, to gaze candidly at his vulnerabilities. He probed the spiritual wellspring of his identity. Nouwen’s daily meditations in the L’Arche community revealed new ways to teach people how to pray, to participate more fully in God’s creation. That said, living at L’Arche was physically demanding; it did not assuage his mental anguish. Nouwen wrestled with bouts of depression as he opened himself to his own palpable pains and to others’ sorrows and sadness. This article examines Henri Nouwen’s views on growing older. I retrace that spiritual journey as documented in a few of Nouwen’s more important books. The analysis starts with Aging (1974), which remains a classic text in the literature on religious gerontology. I then turn to The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons (1992), essays on fathers, brothers and sons based on Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son. Finally, I examine Sabbatical Journey (1998), a diary that he completed a month before he died from a series of heart attacks. Nouwen did not know that his life would be cut short when he wrote entries dealing with the completion of being—about the complementary ways in which he and his father were aging, about the power of death. He brought to fruition thoughts about several issues—such as intimacy and compassion—that he discussed in earlier books. Nouwen’s manner of reworking materials attests to his ripeness (blemishes and all) in observing the human condition. “Ripeness” bestowed upon the priest a certain inner security that in turn empowered him to share his identity with others. Each section ends with letters that I wrote and wish that I had sent to Henri. We met only once, but Nouwen has had a profound impact on how I map out my own spiritual direction in the second half of life. I did not like Aging: then and now, I found it too “neat.” I was deeply impressed, in contrast, by the originality of poetics, politics, and hermeneutics animating The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons. Like the priest, I put a copy of Rembrandt’s print in my study. After reading The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons, I set out to read virtually everything else that Nouwen wrote. Some of his writing was repetitious, mixing ideas and phrases

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from one text into another. I do not fault him for this: Henri’s self-imposed writing schedule would have exhausted less disciplined souls. The regimen permitted Nouwen to recast motifs substantially, to rephrase ideas so that they joined the sacred and the ordinary in terms accessible to readers. Spiritual journeys are highly personal, animated by interior forces and propelled through a particular set of temporal and spatial contexts. No wonder, then, that Henri Nouwen’s curriculum vitae diverges from mine in important ways. He was born 15 years before me, which means that we experienced key events (say, in the 1960s) differently. I have enjoyed a satisfying career, but my resume hardly compares to this international superstar’s. Yet we share things in common. Like Nouwen, I have long sought a safe place to call home. I crave an intimacy with others that I have never quite managed to achieve—or to sustain for long. I, too, fear rejection by strangers no less than by friends. I dread shame more mightily than I feel guilt. I have learned important lessons from Henri Nouwen. He showed me that spiritual growth involves an ever-deepening inward grounding that shapes relationships with others. Henri knew that spiritual journeys were arduous, but it took decades before he assumed responsibility for his actions, to heed that inner voice that summoned him to Love. Nouwen’s stories made me think more reflexively about my own ripening. I realized long ago, as friendships develop(ed) or as ties end(ed) abruptly, that only I can decide what I say and do. Re-presentations of self—and how I observe others—require fine tuning in each and every relationship. Nouwen’s discerning mentorship helped me to figure out for myself various clearings and obstacles along the way. His words nurture me as I blaze my own pathway to maturity. Classical literature, of course, abounds in prototypical models of spiritual directors—think of St. Augustine or Dante. But only in the contemporary era does the gift of extra years afford mature men and women the chance to reconstitute themselves in the second half of life. Age-prescribed conventions about work and love no longer have to apply. Elders can choose that which gives their lives meaning while dealing with the vicissitudes of their particular lot. Nouwen’s ministry extended beyond the Roman Catholic Church because the priest could share the stuff of his own life and traditions in terms that touched his readers. NOUWEN’S FIRST PUBLISHED SNAPSHOT VIEW OF AGING Henri Nouwen was 42 when he published Aging: The Fulfillment of Life. He acknowledged the vastness of his subject: “It is a book for all of us, since we all age and so fulfill the cycle of our lives” (1974, p. 13). There were many books and articles written about aging, Nouwen realized, that stressed the fear, pain, suffering, and loneliness associated with growing older. Wishing to depict a more balanced picture of old age, Nouwen enlisted the support of friends in the

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United States and Holland. Aging is the only book that Nouwen coauthored; his collaborator was Walter J. Gaffney, a colleague in New Haven. Photographs by Ron P. Van Den Bosch, who spent four months with the pair at Yale Divinity School, illustrate the images of Aging in the text. Vignettes and insights from Scripture and contemporary authors (such as Chaim Potok, Florida Scott-Maxwell, and Bernice Neugarten) amplify the themes that Nouwen and Gaffney construct. Aging, Nouwen’s seventh book, extended the five-stage model of human development set forth in the priest’s first book, Intimacy: Essays in Pastoral Psychology (1969). Nouwen, consistent with prevailing behavioral paradigms that stressed the early years of life, concentrated on youth and paid scant addition to the sense of disconnectedness, boredom, and fragmentation that according to the priest plagued adult men. Such sweeping generalizations, Nouwen came to realize, did not sufficiently capture elders’ hopes and complaints. Hence in Aging he sought to fill a hole in the literature. Nouwen wanted to address the creative potentialities and the inclination to despair that he had observed in his own parents and their contemporaries. Nouwen offered a second reason for focusing on the elderly: Questions from students and teachers in religious communities impelled him to teach pastoral psychologists how to empathize with those suffering from the mental, physical, and psychological maladies of old age. In working with older men and women, Nouwen contended, members of the clergy and others perforce would confront their own wounds. “The minister is called to recognize the sufferings of his time in his own heart and make that recognition the starting point of his service,” Nouwen declared in The Wounded Healer (1972), arguably his most famous book. Whether he tries to enter into a dislocated world, relate to a convulsive generation, or speak to a dying man, his service will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which he speaks. (p. xvi)

At a time in which cultural pundits accentuated a generational gap in the arts and politics, Nouwen spoke about generational dislocations caused by suffering and alienation. Young people who had not experienced much loss and those who denied their pain, the priest inferred from his counseling, had trouble relating to older people. Mature ministers had to bare their debilities to people of all ages. In Aging Nouwen thus presented himself as a “wounded healer,” who embraced (rhetorically at least) a segment of the population that he had slighted in his writing. Nouwen and Gaffney divided their book into two parts: (1) aging, and (2) caring. Other sets of dualisms framed the discourse in each section. Part One discussed “aging as a way to the Darkness” (as experienced by elders who were vexed with isolation, despondency, and anomie) and “aging as a way to the Light” (as embodied by older people who were buoyed by hope, humor, and vision). Aging did not claim that senescence invariably transforms humans into Children of Light. Nouwen and Gaffney recognized that late-life journeys are neither preordained nor either/or propositions.

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Achenbaum Ultimately, [aging] can only be discovered and affirmed in the freedom of the heart. There we are able to decide between segregation and unity, between desolation and hope, between loss of self and a new, recreating vision. Everyone will age and die, but this knowledge has no inherent direction. It can be destructive as well as creative, oppressive as well as liberating. (1974, p. 86)

The authors likened human life to wagon wheels. We never know when we will make our last movement, yet we understand that every turn represents a gradual movement toward a fulfillment that we have some power to determine. In the second part of Aging, Nouwen and Gaffney stressed the need to attend to the quality of our hearts in caring for ourselves as we succor others. Once again, the pair invoked dualisms to convey their point of view: As long as we continue to divide the world into the strong and the weak, the helpers and the helped, the givers and the receivers, the independent and the dependent, real care will not be possible, because then we keep broadening the dividing lines that caused the suffering of the elderly in the first place. (1974, p. 153)

Opening ourselves to strangers young and old, Nouwen and Gaffney recommended, helps us to confront our fears of vulnerability and mortality. We can choose to relate compassionately to divergent ways of aging. We can begin to accept sorrows and suffering as marks of experience, appropriate signs of how people respond to what Life has bestowed upon them. In so doing, contended Nouwen and Gaffney, we will prepare ourselves to accept the gifts and hazards of becoming older ourselves. Aging did not deal with all the issues considered essential to gerontology. The authors ignored policy issues. They had little to say about the problems of income security, housing or health care that preoccupied researchers on aging in the early 1970s. Nor did Nouwen and Gaffney recommend ways for aged men and women to engage in meaningful activities. Instead, the pair tried to demonstrate that certain experiences and attitudes transcended generational lines. “Without the presence of old people we might forget that we are aging” (1974, p. 16). They saw the elderly as creative mentors who can teach the young how to get in touch with the fullness of life. Nouwen and Gaffney drew analogies between the old and the blind, the poor, and the handicapped—all of whom challenge us to break down stereotypes and relational barriers in order to embrace mutual interdependence. “Every man and woman who has discovered or rediscovered his or her own aging has a unique opportunity to enrich the quality of his or her own life and that of every fellow human being” (1974, p. 154). June 15, 1984 Dear Father Nouwen: I have probably read your book on aging a dozen times during the past decade. I like it no better now than when it was first published. Envy, I admit, colored my opinion in 1974. I was just finishing research for a dissertation that traced images of old age in America since the Revolution, and reconstructed the historical experiences of older men and women in the U.S. I felt that I had worked harder than you in trying to understand the realities of aging. I discovered far more ambivalence and ambiguity in Aging than you reported—too much to encapsulate in your economical, felicitous manner. The historical

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record was too messy: attitudes and conditions varied by period, sex, race, ethnicity, region, religion, and even age. But you and Gaffney made it all seem so neat. Anybody could grasp your argument since your narrative was so easy to follow. I feared that a subtle, complex presentation (like mine) would suffer in competition with yours, rhetorically and commercially. As it happened, the book that emerged out of my dissertation, Old Age in the New Land (1978), was good enough to get me tenure. Aging appealed to different types of readers, mainly religious commentators and middlebrow soothsayers, not professional historians. Not only did you and I appeal to different audiences but also we wrote for different purposes—or so it seemed. I write at the interstices of history and gerontology; only in recent years have I begun to publish my thoughts about the religious dimensions of aging. You, on the other hand, have built your reputation as a teacher by talking and writing about spirituality. Yet, if I dared in retrospect to be frank and honest, I would have to admit that Nouwen and Achenbaum in the 1970s shared one mode of expression that ill-served all our readers. Both of us were too quick to reduce the complexities of aging to either/or and both/and categories. As an undergraduate, I had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key by decomposing issues into statements that lent themselves to my formulaic rendition of “on the one hand. . . on the other hand” reasoning. I then would opt for an answer somewhere around the fifty-first percentile of the continuum I had constructed. In so doing, I showed little penchant for intellectual risks, even less desire to offend readers with a provocative statement. You and I used dualisms cunningly, Father Nouwen. Images that encapsulated dialectical clusters of ideas. But our dualistic frame of mind also permitted us to objectify the old, to distance ourselves from the very subjects of our empathy and scholarly gaze. “We” liked “them” all right, but at ages 42 and 27 respectively neither of us was ready to enter their world. Reading books and looking at photographs enabled us to conjure wrinkles that we had not yet beheld in a mirror. We constructed perceptions of old age through our imagination, not because we saw ourselves as aging. Perhaps it was safer for us to look upon the aged as prophets or as strangers than to view them as images of our future selves. We used the old as a medium through which to exhort younger men and women to (re)discover for themselves a more hopeful attitude toward the blessings and disadvantages of growing older. How fortuitous that we could express such sentiments without having to join the company of old men! Let me admit that I may have been more myopic than you. Scholarly detachment in the pursuit of historical Truth did not permit me to get beyond the books into the lives of people I studied. Like you, I conveniently hid my fears by speaking in the third-person singular. Sincerely, W.A. Achenbaum

NOUWEN COMES TO TERMS AS A MAN WITH AGING At fifty, Nouwen admitted that accolades no longer sustained him through hard times. His defense mechanisms no longer were working. Nouwen was still not keen on displaying the depths of his malaise to his readers, but he alluded to several sources of dissatisfaction. Nouwen had been very happy teaching at Yale, but he did not enjoy his tenure at Harvard. To escape the politics and rituals of academic life, the priest started taking long trips to sites where he might find the communal support that he had craved all along. These options, alas, did not hold great appeal. Writing about his sevenmonth stay in a Trappist monastery in upstate New York in The Genesee Diary (1976), he recounted the extent to which he wrestled with feelings of rejection. A monastery might be “a good training place for aging” (1976, p. 69), but Henri did

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not want to mature in such isolation. Similarly, the priest had enjoyed his travels to Bolivia and Peru; he was fascinated by the impact that liberation theologians, reading the Gospels through a Marxist lens, had in mobilizing peasants to demand a better lot for themselves in South America. But in Gracias, he claimed that neither God nor God’s people were asking me to make [Latin America] my permanent home. My experiences there, exciting and rewarding as they were, never led me to that deep inner “imperative” that forms the center of a true call. (1983, p. vi)

Nouwen knew that he had to get in touch with his deep inner voice. But digging deeper into himself exacerbated his depression. Listening bravely to the cacophony within fuelled his sense of homelessness. “I was dead tired, so much so that I could barely walk,” Nouwen recalled in The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons (1992, p. 4). “I was anxious, lonely, restless, and very needy.” It was not just a fatiguing travel schedule and daunting set of writing commitments that drained the priest. Other events forced Henri to reevaluate his life, notably the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of his ordination. I gradually entered into very dark interior places and began to experience immense inner anguish. I came to a point where I could no longer feel safe in my own community and had to leave to seek help in my struggle and to work directly on my own inner healing. (1992, p. 19)

The author of The Wounded Healer had to devise different ways to mend his own spiritual and psychological wounds. A midlife crisis forced the priest to mature in ways he had not anticipated. Despite his ready smile and extroverted manner, Nouwen experienced the pains of aging as signs of his own failure, limitations, and lack of fulfillment. Books that Nouwen drafted in the 1980s hint at the paradoxical nature of the turmoil with which he wrestled. “Just when all those around me were assuring me they loved me, cared for me, appreciated me, yes, even admired me, I experienced myself as a useless, unloved, despicable person,” Henri revealed a decade later in The Inner Voice of Love (1996). I felt absolutely homeless. Just when I was being praised for my spiritual insights, I felt devoid of faith. Just when people were thanking me for bringing them closer to God, I felt God had abandoned me. It was as if the house I finally found had no floors. (p. xiv)

Nouwen gave countless strangers advice and counsel just when he felt estranged from all that mattered. A void consumed his being, intensifying his loneliness. Amidst the existential self-doubts Nouwen brushed with death. One wintry morning a van knocked the priest down while he was walking down a road. Unable to fix his burst spleen, the doctors’ prognosis was not good. The trauma briefly centered Henri’s existence. “What most prevented me from dying was the sense of unfinished business, unresolved conflicts with people with whom I live or had lived. The pain of forgiveness withheld, by me and from me, kept me clinging to

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my existences,” Nouwen reflected in Beyond the Mirror (1992, p. 38). The priest at last faced demons that had shadowed him. Pious, felicitous words could not mask his thoughts and deeds: “In the face of death, I realized that it was not love that kept me clinging to life but unresolved anger” (1992, p. 39). That van driver might have killed Nouwen. Instead, the priest came to his senses and then chose to hew to old habits. Henri could not actualize what he had learned. As the priest resumed his feverish schedule, others noticed that he seemed restless and angry again (1992, p. 69). But a subtle change was occurring. While on a sabbatical in 1983, Henri noticed a poster of The Return of the Prodigal Son in a friend’s study at a L’Arche community near Paris. Nouwen’s encounter with Rembrandt’s masterpiece set into motion a long spiritual adventure that brought me to a new understanding of my vocation and offered me new strength to live it. At the heart of this adventure is a seventeenthcentury painting and its artist, a first-century parable and its author, and a twentieth-century person in search of life’s meaning. (1992, p. 3)

The priest took inspiration from Rembrandt’s perception of his aging self, which revealed a venerable patriarch embracing his flawed sons—“a perception in which physical blindness and a deep inner seeing are intimately connected” (1992, p. 25). Nouwen returned with fresh eyes to an issue that he had enunciated in the preface to his first book, Intimacy: “People’s seldom articulated and often unrecognized desire for a real home in this world” (1969, p. 2). Now in midlife Henri Nouwen bravely sought the home where he would sustain himself. The wheel of aging had gone full circle, bringing the priest to a new place. Henri’s sense of himself as a detached observer changed as he spent hours in front of Rembrandt’s masterpiece in the Hermitage, then reading books by art critics, and later looking at the poster of The Return of the Prodigal Son. Even though there has been in me a lifelong desire to be an insider looking out, I nevertheless kept choosing over and over again the position of the outsider looking in. I so much wanted to keep some control over my spiritual journey, to remain able to predict at least a part of the outcome, that relinquishing the security of the observer for the vulnerability of the returning son seemed close to impossible. (1992, p. 11)

Leaving Harvard for L’Arche made Nouwen the trailblazer of his own spiritual journey. The move was one little step . . . a demand requiring me to let go one more time from wanting to be in control, to give up one more time the desire to predict life, to die one more time to the fear of not knowing where it all will lead, and to surrendering one more time to a love that knows no limits. (1992, pp. 13–14)

Absorbing the gazes of Rembrandt’s three men at distinctive stages of human development, Nouwen gained new insights into where he had come and to whence he was heading. Nouwen saw multifaceted sides of himself by studying the way Rembrandt positioned the two brothers in The Return of the Prodigal Son. Seeing how the father

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embraced the young son allayed some of Henri’s own anguish over abandonment. Nouwen especially identified with the elder son. Not only did they share the same birth order, but also both men confronted similar dilemmas in their prime—to “choose for or against the love that is offered to him.” The portrait invited Henri to look anew at late-life challenges that had been festering throughout his adulthood. “Rembrandt presents me with the ‘inner drama of the soul’—his as well as my own” (1992, p. 13). The older son’s spiritual struggle resembled the priest’s insofar as it demanded that conventional wisdom and well-honed defenses be given up. Nouwen no longer could remain a judgmental outsider. He needed to accept the worthiness of all aspects of humankind (even his own) in the face of a divine love that emanates from within. Nouwen had the most difficulty accepting that he was old enough, much less mature enough to become a father. To him, patriarchs were beyond reach, men (like his own remote father) to please. Because he presumed it his duty to be deferential in order to be accepted and acceptable, Nouwen disliked father figures, perhaps even feared them. But Rembrandt’s representation of the prodigal son and his father awakened in the priest a deeper understanding of human relationships. Henri observed that the son’s feet and the father’s hands were distinctly masculine and feminine. These androgynous forms bore witness to the commensurability of male and female, strength and weakness, in the same human body. The father, like his sons, was broken by the estrangement. Rather than submit to grief, become stiff-necked, or yield in anguish to feeling utterly abandoned, the father embodied forgiveness. Having experienced so much joy and sorrow over his life, the father was free to take his place in the human condition guided by his own compassionate inner voice. Nouwen grasped the lesson and, in the process, to go to his spiritual home, where he had to be. “Grief, forgiveness, and generosity are, then, the three ways by which the image of the Father can grow in me,” the priest declared, now willing to embrace all three prototypes in him. “As the father, I am no longer called to come home as the younger or elder son, but to be there as the one to whom the wayward children can return and be welcomed with joy” (1992, p. 123). March 7, 1993 Dear Henri (if I may): The 1987–88 academic year was the low point of my professional career, as (I gather) it was for you. My return to the University of Michigan, my alma mater, was not going well. Everyone in the family had a rough time adjusting. I became very anxious, sleepless, withdrawn. I had worked so hard to return to Ann Arbor—to take my place in a gerontology center that I loved, with tenure in the history department! How I wished that my father had lived to see this achievement, but he died fifteen years ago today. Everything I thought that I had wanted no longer seemed to matter. Despondent and feeling worthless, I sought help. I was referred to a Freudian analyst, a grim man who stared at me silently. The transference to Dad was genuine but hardly restorative. Eventually another specialist helped. So like you, Henri, Life forced me to understand my own brokenness and limitations. Depression stigmatizes, and I felt that I had become “the other.” Yet for all the shame that it engendered, the crisis was also liberating. Accustomed to success, I had to come to terms with vulnerability. I faced my own mortality for the first time. I fought hard to take stock

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of my life. It was almost like being born again, for I saw that I had been given a chance to start anew. Choices now seemed very real and time-limited. Reading The Return of the Prodigal Son: Meditations on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons, I readily identified with your suffering. I, too, see my spiritual journey in terms of an amalgam of the younger and elder sons. Like you, I have trouble identifying with the Father (though unlike you I had young children of my own). “Grief, forgiveness and generosity” are the gifts of patriarchy, you claim, but the sturdy triad continues to elude me. Grief—yes, it has been my companion for years. Generosity—all the easier now that I have experienced other’s compassion. Forgiveness . . . that is hard for me to accept and give. I hold onto slights. I look for signs of disappointment in people’s eyes. I anticipate criticisms before I get them. Thus like you, I revert to childish ways: so eager to please, I give little space to my own needs. My own reflections rarely find ground to call their own. Affectionately, Andy

HENRI NOUWEN’S MESSAGE RIPENS In what turned out to be his final set of publications, Nouwen displayed his mastery of rhetorical styles he had developed. He eschewed the dualisms that framed earlier modes of presentation, opting instead for icons that lent themselves to tripartite imagery. Hence in Can You Drink the Cup (1996), the Eucharistic chalice serves as a metaphor for people’s immersion into the fruits and sorrows of human experience. “Drinking the cup is an act of selfless love, an act of immense trust, an act of surrender to a God who will give what we need when we need it” (p. 106). Drinking from the cup, according to Nouwen, requires a conscious, selfeffacing decision by an individual to participate in the liturgy of Love. Second, it presupposes a communal response, to join others in giving witness to the business of living. Finally, the act takes on symbolic power in a theocentric milieu, for the children of God must surrender to an Ultimate Reality. The word “surrender” is revealingly inclusive: Nouwen picks a word that resonates with Jewish tradition and Christian thought, but which is far more central to Islamic conceptions of the relationship of humankind to the Maker. Besides conjoining the secular and the sacred in his metaphors, Nouwen continues to write candidly about his fears and doubts, thus emptying the stuff of his private sphere into printed words. “My need for friendship is great, greater than seems normal” (1998, p. 7), he acknowledged in a posthumous work, Sabbatical Journey. Henri could not overcome his overwhelming need to be accepted by friends and strangers. “I don’t think this wound—this immense need for affection, and this immense fear of rejection—will ever go away” (p. 25). Interestingly, he redoubles his efforts to relieve his pain through private prayer and through nurturing a community of kindred spirits—a discipline he had recommended in Making All Things New (1981), written before his midlife crisis: “Through the discipline of solitude we discover space for God in our innermost being. Through the discipline of community we discover a place, for God in our life together” (1981, p. 90). Elaborating the discipline of solitude and community is a theme that animates many passages in this final book.

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Similarly, Nouwen’s notions about growing older ripened over the two decades that had elapsed since he published Aging. Plucking from daily situations motifs that tied together strands in his own life, the priest could illuminate the emotional and intellectual environment in which he operated. In Sabbatical Journey (subtitled The Diary of His Final Year), Nouwen speaks in the first-person singular about his need for mentors, even now in his seventh decade. He recounts a trip he took to Santa Fe, to discuss his writing with Jim, a man interested in becoming his editor. Setting business aside, Nouwen had the chance to engage in conversation with a peer who was exploring the possibilities that modernity afforded for a ripe life: Jim is 62 years old. I am 64. We both are asking the questions about how we live between 60 and 80. The difference is that Jim is bound neither by his reputation nor to any institution, so he is very free, and he loves his freedom. It’s quite an experience for me to meet such a man. (1998, p. 168)

For Jim, aging was not an amorphous stage of existence that extended from middle age until death. And as Henri entered late maturity, he saw that his life was richer in nuances than at earlier phases of his development. To be sure, some of the issues that had preoccupied the priest for decades—autonomy, sense of identity, institutional loyalties—remained salient. Now he discovered that he was not alone in these struggles. Nouwen found that the editor’s journey was similar enough to his to make honest discussions about their respective pathways worthwhile. Not only did Nouwen find it instructive to compare notes with peers, but also he at last was able to come to terms with his father, with whom he was distant. Henri had an affectionate relationship with his mother; after she died, the priest made a concerted effort to interact with his father. Over time, the 29-year age gap gradually disappeared. Sometimes the austere lawyer acted as if he were his son’s age. Nouwen in turn looked at his father and then gazed at his own reflection in the mirror. As the priest got to know his father better, he took stock of his own repertoire of images of aging: As we both grew older and a little less defensive, I came to see how similar we are. As I look in the mirror today, I see my father when he was sixty-four, and I reflect on my own idiosyncrasies—my impatience, my inclination to control things, and my style of talking— I quickly see the main difference between us is age, not character! Few adult sons have the opportunity to come to know their fathers and spend time with them. It is a special grace that is given to me during this sabbatical year. We like to be together. My father likes his place as the patriarch, he likes good hotels, good restaurants, and good art. He likes interesting conversation, good manners, preferential treatment, and excellent service. And he likes me to pay the bills! Not because he has no money or is stingy but because he likes to have a son who can pay for the father. My father is interested in me, but more in my health than my work, more in my clothes than my books, more in my German friends than in my American friends. He is a real European from the old school. A long time ago when we had a conflict, he said, “As a psychologist you know everything about authoritarian fathers! Try to be happy that you have one, but don’t try to change him!” Today I enjoy being with my father. The less I want to change him the more he enjoys being with me and sharing his vulnerability. . . . When I was thirty-two and my father was

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sixty-one, we belonged to different generations and we were far apart. Today it seems that we have become part of the same generation and grown very close, close to death and close to each other. (1998, pp. 81–83)

I have quoted at length this passage from Sabbatical Journey because it offers at least five perceptive insights into how modernity affects one’s late-life identity. First, Nouwen appreciates the gift of extra years that his father has been granted. Only in recent decades have increasing percentages of men in late life come to expect to have their fathers around. And some sons, like Henri, are doubly fortunate insofar as their fathers stay physically able, intellectually acute, and socially engaged. The extra years associated with healthful longevity provide new opportunities for interactions, new experiences for growth. Second, the mere passage of years sometimes softens misperceptions across generational lines. The age gap between father and son obviously did not lessen, yet the generational gap became less problematic. Age differences could not wholly be discounted—the elder Nouwen, after all, was frail—but they neither preclude nor impede the possibility for people to change. Third, both strong willed men let go of their defensiveness. Each has had enough bruising experiences in their careers to give up trying to win every battle with each other. In yielding control, barriers break down. Patterns honed earlier in life persist, however. Henri was tempted to dominate situations—as was his father—but each came to appreciate a paradox that inheres in many social relations. The less one tries to manipulate situations, the more fully one can grab life with both hands. Fourth, Nouwen perceived a certain blurring of roles in later years, which conformed to motifs that he visualized in Rembrandt’s portrait. The father remains a patriarch, but he loves his son to pay the bills. Henri figures that his father judges him by his accomplishments, whereas the elder actually is concerned about his son’s clothes, his health, and his acquaintances. Finally at home with one another the two men enjoy savoring shared interests, not obsessing about things that distance them. Fifth, it is striking that both Nouwens are able to seize the present moment. Father and son enjoy each other’s company over a meal; they like to talk to one another. Such intimacy proved difficult decades before. But the pair discovers that it is never too late for good relationships to be formed, as long as both of the principals are capable of encountering one another in conversation, in exchanging ideas, and in sharing meaningful activities. While Nouwen celebrates the new possibilities that accompany vital aging with modern times, he also acknowledges the ties lost in a fragmented society. He reveres the Real Presence in commonplace exchanges while lamenting the diminution of his Church. The episcopacy in his opinion no longer enjoys widespread power and acclaim. Henri is struck by the empty pews in abbeys once filled with believers; he bemoans the tedium vitae at a Mass once redolent in pomp. More

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than he articulated heretofore, the priest worried about legacies—individual and institutional—in the context of death and dying. For what will we be remembered? For our many acts of kindness, generosity, courage, and love, or for the one mistake we made toward the end? . . . Sometimes I think about dying before the great mistake. . . . I realize that finally human beings are very fickle in their judgments. God and only God knows us in our essence, loves us well, forgives us fully, and remembers us for who we truly are. (1998, p. 189)

This passage from Sabbatical Journey may well serve as Nouwen’s epitaph. Henri was never liberated from his anxieties, but he was freer theologically and emotionally than when he was younger. As he aged, Henri more fully understood that the power of God’s love and forgiveness surpassed the fragility of human relationships. Nouwen believed that unconditional love was grace-filled. He could give and receive love despite the mistakes that he made, which he was sure others would judge badly. March 2, 1997 Dear Brother, I cannot believe that you are gone. But you have left a legacy for me as I celebrate my fiftieth birthday. On my shelf are several dozen of your books and copies of interviews. I check the website maintained by your friends at L’Arche. As a gerontologist fascinated with how aging shapes identity, I want to know what made you tick. As a fellow traveler, I also hope that learning more about your depression and inadequacies would help me to make peace (or at least to effect a truce) with my own turmoil. I thought I knew you pretty well, Henri. But until I read Michael Ford’s biography, Wounded Prophet, I missed how you wrestled with your sexual orientation. “[Nouwen] became troubled, not so much by being outed, but by the possibility that people would reject him and his writings if the truth about his sexuality were disclosed. This took an enormous emotional, spiritual, and physical toll on his life and may have contributed to his early death. Privately he had been in touch with his publishers about writing a book on homosexuality but had told them that he was not ‘emotionally free’ to do it” (1999, p. 67). Did your sexuality cause you to be depressed, to feel marginal? Did your inner struggle empower you to share your compassion as a wounded healer? Ford’s disclosure compelled me to re-read Sabbatical Journey. I was struck by the number of allusions to people with AIDS, by the number of times that you raised homosexuality as an issue. Surprisingly, given my voyeuristic desires to behold my friends in the raw, it did not matter to me whether you came to terms with your real or imagined homosexuality. I realize that sexual orientation is fundamental to anyone’s identity in the age of AIDS. But like your depression, the details are important only as they reveal the contours of how a wise, sentient human crafts an identity in late life. Could you trust any one’s expression of love? Could you savor hugs? Could you let go of your need to control situations? What caused you to despair when friendships fell apart? Do you think you are usually responsible for the break up? Is it fear that renders you incapable of forging intimate relationships? What to do with this inner wound that is so easily touched and starts bleeding again? It is such a familiar wound. It has been with me for many years. I don’t think this wound—this immense need for affection, and this immense fear of rejection—will ever go away. It is there to stay, but maybe for a good reason. Perhaps it is a gateway to my salvation, a door to glory, and a passage to freedom! (Sabbatical Journey, p. 25). Fear of rejection—was that the emotion that demonized you all of your life? Could you ever accept the fact that people esteemed you for whom you were, not what you did? Despite years of introspection, all your good deeds, is it possible that that damned wound still oozed?

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I have learned much from reading you, my Brother. I see so many parallels, as I become comfortable focussing more and more on less and less. I have struggled with my own unwillingness to let go, to trust. I know that the intimacy I want is there for the taking, yet I frustrate family, friends, and myself as I grope blindly for something I cannot control. I hope that I am less narcissistic than I was in my thirties, but I remain ever watchful lest someone reopen old wounds. I hope that you have found your home. Meanwhile, I go on my own way, stumbling to a place I do not know but which I am sure that I will recognize when I happen upon it. Goodbye my dear friend. May your hope for salvation be realized!

Henri Nouwen’s spiritual journey epitomizes the paradoxes entailed in aging in grace. Millions of readers and listeners pondered his words which seemed so grounded in joy. Yet I suspect that none of us will fully understand how much wisdom was forged in painful isolation, by a mentor listening patiently to the suffering of his own spirit. Nouwen grew wiser because he took risks. He understood that he had to defy his own set of norms if he were to respond to what he called “the inner voice of love.” True Wisdom broke through, I believe, in moments of solitary silence, which Henri fearfully associated with estrangement. He was a priest forever, as Scripture puts it, a man destined for the purple (with his uncle paving the way). Yet Nouwen wore his cloth of humanity with humility, with extraordinary openness to the possibility of transformation. To him, the real liturgy of the Church was transacted around a dining room table wherever he happened to be, sharing bread and sipping dregs from a cup with friends. For all of the honors, Nouwen’s is a sobering tale of the cost of recreating oneself in modern times: The Dutchman mastered the tools of theology and psychology to heal others, but he never quite designed a therapy to treat his own vulnerabilities. It is not for me to know whether Henri Nouwen reached the home that he sought, but I believe that he did find a haven at L’Arche. Leaving Harvard was the turning point in his journey. In so doing, he signaled his ability to forsake fame and the accomplishments of his past. And while he was always anxious about what the future would hold, he increasingly managed to live in the present. Henri’s heart finally broke when he died, but I bet that his eyes were piercingly and freely fixed on the Divine presence that embraces human bonds.

REFERENCES Anderson, Judd. (1981, October 2). Henri J. M. Nouwen. Publisher’s Weekly, 220, 38–39. Ford, Michael. (1999). Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri J.M. Nouwen. New York: Doubleday. Kendrick, Stephen. (1993, March 24–31). In touch with the blessing. Christian Century, 110, 318–20. Nouwen, Henri J.M., & Gaffney, Walter J. (1974). Aging: The Fulfillment of Life. New York: A Doubleday Image book. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1969). Intimacy: Essays in Pastoral Psychology. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1972). The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society. New York: Image. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1975). Reaching Out. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1976). The Genesee Diary. New York: Image. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1981). Making All Things New. New York: Walker & Co.

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Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1983). Gracias. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1992). Beyond the Mirror. New York: Crossroad Press. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1992). The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons. New York: Doubleday. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1996). Can You Drink the Cup? Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1996). The Inner Voice of Love. New York: Doubleday & Co. Nouwen, Henri J.M. (1998). Sabbatical Journey. New York: Crossroad Press.