Tag / Henri Nouwen

by Michael

Moving from a Center of Solitude

There are authors I read in rotations. I will re-read a short list of writers because their work helps me remember myself, helps me fall into who I am, enable me to in their work see my own because reading them is a way of listening to the sacred in them – and, therefore, listening to the sacred in me.

I’ve done less reading rotations but I am reaching back for the reading plan that soothes my soul. When I’m at my best, I’m reading bell hooks annually, for instance. I’m thumbing slowly through the words of Howard Thurman. I’m probably sitting with something from Na’Im Akbar, Eugene Peterson, Joyce Rupp, and Gerald May.

Right now, I’m slowly re-reading Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. I met the book when I was reading for my supervisory education training in CPE. I struggled with whether this particular work of Nouwen would make it into my theory of supervision and because I met it pretty late, I decided to have him as a quiet partner in my soul care, even though not a featured one in the papers that I wrote and discussed at committee.

In the book, he’s writing about how loneliness transitions into solitude. He says that allowing loneliness to move into solitude changes anxiousness into love. His work in the book is, in part, to critique culture that engenders compulsive reactions, anxious choices, and unconsidered alertness to things that aren’t core to us. He writes:

“But in solitude of heart we can listen to the events of the hour, the day and the year and slowly ‘formulate,’ give form to, a response that is really our own. In solitude we can pay careful attention to the world and search for an honest response.

(Reaching Out, p. 50)

He says that loneliness births anxiety and that anxiety disables our self-recognition. It removes our ability to see our own core. Without being able to recognize our core, we move from one anxious reaction to another, stepping farther from who we are and from the solitude of the heart.

The solitude of the heart is where the honest response is. It’s where, when we step away from fear provoked by anxiousness, we hear something that sounds like peace even if complicated for the sense it doesn’t make in a chaotic, dynamic world. In that world, we are moved to react. In that world, we are moved by noise.

In the solitude of heart, we move to a core slowness that isn’t about timing but choosing. We pace ourselves by peace not fear. Nouwen gives ways to move toward peace in the book. One way, if you’re interested, is in weeping, learning to weep, and learning to keep vigil.

Already, you may think, with Nouwen, “No one wants to do that.” Precisely. Weeping, he writes, is a way to “listen carefully to our restless hearts.” Rather than medicate them with psychic numbing and anesthetics, he says, being in the middle of sadness helps us locate joy, peace, and the beginnings of solitude.

May we keep moving toward the core, the truth, the slower and stronger revealed reality of who we are.

by Michael

Your Sabbatical

I was thinking about your sabbatical and this came to mind. It from Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out:

We often are very, very busy, and usually very tired as a result, but we should ask ourselves how much of our reading and talking, visiting and lobbying, lecturing and writing, is more part of an impulsive reaction to the changing demands of our surroundings than an action that was born out of our own center. We probably shall never reach the moment of a “pure action,” and it even can be questioned how realistic or healthy it is to make that our goal. But it seems of great importance to know with an experiential knowledge the difference between an action that is triggered by a change in the surrounding scene and an action that has ripened in our hearts through careful listening to the world in which we live…a response that is really our own. In solitude we can pay careful attention to the world and search for an honest response.

 

by Michael

Henri Nouwen on Prayer as Surrender

Prayer is often considered a weakness, a support system, which is used when we can no longer help ourselves. But this is only true when the God of our prayers is created in our own image and adapted to our own needs and concerns. When, however, prayer makes us reach out to God, not on our own but on his terms, then prayer pulls us away from self-preoccupations, encourages us to leave familiar ground, and challenges us to enter into a new world which cannot be contained within the narrow boundaries of our mind or heart. Prayer, therefore, is a great adventure because the God with whom we enter into a new relationship is greater than we are and defies all our calculations and predictions. The movement from illusion to prayer is hard to make since it leads us from false certainties to true uncertainties, from an easy support system to a risky surrender, and from the many “safe” gods to the God whose love has no limits.

From Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, 126

by Michael

My Blog: Offer a Blessing

Henri Nouwen said that a blessing is a word that is good for you to hear. As I chaplain, I offer blessings to people, and I facilitate people offering blessings to people. Another word for blessing is benediction.

Usually I do this in critical situations, in situations where death is coming soon. Sometimes I get to do this for newly born children, for couples, and for families.

I often tell people that blessing is a word you want to say to someone you care about. It is a word, phrase, sentence, or image that you want to share with a person and with God.

A blessing can be a prayer and vice versa, but a blessing doesn’t have to be directed to God. You can bless others.

Think of a person you’d like to bless. What’s something you want them to hear and an impact upon you that they’ve made? Put it all together, and risk offering it.

by Michael

A Prayer From The Chapel

This prayer was adapted from Nouwen’s Open Hands and was in the chapel a few weeks ago:

Dear God:

Speak gently in our silence.

When the loud noises of the outside world,

And the loud inner noises of our fears

Make You seem so far away;

Help us to know that You are still there–

Even when we can barely hear you.

Help us cling to that still, small voice

That says, “Come to me, all you who are

Weak and overburdened,

And I will give you rest–

For I am gentle and humble of heart.”

God, let that loving voice be our guide this day.

May we find rest in Your love,

And bring that love to others.

We ask now for healing

Of body, mind, and spirit,

In Your holy name.

Amen.

by Michael

Advent Post #16

Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her! (Luke 1:45)

It takes guts to believe in God. It takes more guts to believe that God, who exists, makes promises, and then, even more courage to believe that God makes promises to you.

After all that, to think that God would make and fulfill them! Eventually your beliefs are tested. Eventually what you’ve held close to your heart about God’s words and God’s ways are tested.

Sometimes when life tests our beliefs, those beliefs fall apart. They are too weak for real life. We find that they lack truth, that they cannot stand under the test of reality. We conclude, in a manner of speaking, that we were disillusioned to have believed what we did, that we were off, or that God, simply, was not trustworthy.

When we say that we were disillusioned to have believed, we check ourselves and attempt to modify our beliefs, try to speculate faithfully by studying in order to come up with something else.

If we say after that test that we were at fault, we try to change ourselves to fit what has to be the real God reality. I was wrong, not God, so in order to keep an intact faith, I change.

In the third option, where we conclude that God was untrustworthy, we decide and, sometimes painfully, to walk away from God. We tell ourselves and others that the God we thought was ‘in charge’ was a portion of our imaginations and that there really can’t be a God.

In all three instances, we relate to God because of some thing, some test, some examination of our deeply held beliefs. We aren’t always in touch with our beliefs. Usually we learn what we believe when those beliefs are challenged or up-heaved or undone.

Whatever category or line of thinking you may be in relation to God (and I don’t put you in these as much as I offer them as possible categories for this post), I wonder if you can consider that you are, right in that category, blessed. Whether you love or hate God. Whether you even believe in God. Whether you sympathize with people you see as religious because you pity us.

Can you stretch into the word blessed? Henry Nouwen talks about the meaning of “blessed” in his book Life of the Beloved, and he says that it’s essentially about good speech. To say that we are blessed is to say that somebody says good things about us. Can you hear that, that someone speaks well of you? I’d suggest that the person saying good things about you and me is God.

We are blessed and some of us because we believed. We did believe, even if we’ve diminished some of those beliefs. We did believe, even if we walked away. Indeed, one of the most remarkable claims about our blessedness is that we are blessed. Without regard for right beliefs and even right acts. Sure, this verse seems to run counter since Mary is heralded for believing in the promise. But the verse doesn’t spread across the entirety of her life.

It doesn’t spread into those nights of doubt when she thought Jesus was just an ordinary kid or those mornings when she was pissed because he said something about having a new mother and a new family, kicking her to the curb. This particular verse is about her pregnancy and her willingness to bear a son. The blessing, though, is a comment about what God always thought of her and what God would, in the future, think of her. Her and you. Her and me.