Henri's Wound with a View

Henri & Chris

Today is the 20^th anniversary of Henri Nouwen’s death.

Not long after Henri’s death I received an e-mail from a colleague quoting “the gay theologian Henri Nouwen.”

This is what Henri feared, that his many insights into life and the spiritual life in particular would be seen through a narrow lens, and thus too readily dismissed by Christians suspicious of sexuality and homosexuality.

One who, in one of his earliest books, wrote of the minister—by which he meant every Christian—as “the wounded healer,” later wrote in a journal of self-addressed “spiritual imperatives” that happened to be released on the day of his death:

People will constantly try to hook your wounded self. They will point out your needs, your character defects, your limitations and sins. That is how they attempt to dismiss what God, through you, is saying to them. --The Inner Voice of Love, p 99 

When I began leading workshops and retreats on Henri’s life and writings as a way of handling my grief at his death, I did not readily talk about this side of Henri because he did not do so himself.  But by the time Michael Ford interviewed me for his outstanding “portrait” of Henri, Wounded Prophet, it was clear that he already knew and was dealing sensitively with this hidden aspect.

Yet when I ran an article by Michael about Nouwen’s “hidden legacy” in a quarterly magazine I edited, I received an irate letter from a reader—a pastor—who took me to task for “outing” Henri. I replied pastorally to her, explaining that his homosexuality was already public, and that the article was intended as homage, not exposé.

The L’Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto invited me to write a chapter on Henri’s sexuality for Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen. I wish now I had made their request clear in the chapter, lest readers think I had initiated the theme. Members of his community believed I would handle the issue sensitively rather than sensationally.  And indeed, I suggested in the article that Henri’s emotional upheaval was more about his hunger for “a particular friendship” than simple sexual desire.

I recounted a conversation I had with Henri in a Toronto diner about his Uncle Anton’s death. Also a celibate priest, Henri said those gathered for his burial were sad, but not overly so. “When I die,” Henri confessed, “I would like to have someone at my grave whose life is radically altered by my death.”

Readers and reviewers alike have often puzzled over the great anguish in Henri’s writings, and a few have even suggested that a celibate life as a gay man could not be the only cause of his angst. There must be something deeper, more buried, they say.

Though that may be true, they miss the point that being gay in the Roman Catholic Church (and indeed any church of Henri’s generation) and being gay in a homophobic world, is the larger issue. When your worth is questioned in every relevant church statement and repeatedly by those in pulpits, pews, politics, and polling places, there is a greater, deeper wound to the soul that is hard to bear.

And like other closeted LGBT people, he was probably plagued by “would they still like me if they knew?” regarding his readers—and he had such a need for affection!

Henri’s conviction that a minister (again, every Christian) was to offer one’s life to others also distressed him, in that he could not offer his struggle publicly, while a few—not me—challenged him to come out for the sake of LGBT Christians.  I didn’t because I believe coming out must always be an individual’s choice.

For Henri, I believe, this provided him a “wound with a view” to the wounds of others, one of the reasons he was drawn to the outsiders of our church and of our world, just as Jesus was.

An irony is that three things that drew me to Henri in 1973 readily revealed this. One was an essay, distributed to Henri’s spirituality class, by Ashley Montagu, who attended to the gravely disfigured so-called “elephant man” long before the story was popularized on stage and screen. Another was an essay written by Henri himself, “The Self-Availability of the Homosexual,” about gay peoples’ need to be ourselves in all settings for our spiritual and psychological health. And the third was a tape of his first lecture for the course on loneliness, something he struggled with in most of his writings.

These three things drew me to drop a church patristics course to take Henri’s class, the notes of which became Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, which he considered, of all his books, the closest to his personal Christian experience. And it began a friendship which lasted till his death on September 21, 1996, and bears fruit in my own life and writings to this day.

And earlier version of this post and two others were requested and first appeared on the British publisher Darton, Longman, and Todd’s blog on Henri Nouwen for the 20^th anniversary of his death.

My book on Henri: Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Pleases support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description or by mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

The Scandal of Particularity

"Quick, Chris! Take a picture!" Henri said gleefully.

Former and present seminarians will recognize the phrase “scandal of particularity.” In Christianity, it has to do with the question of incarnation: why was a transcendent God manifest in a first century Palestinian Jewish male named Jesus?

But the phrase came to me as I read again Henri Nouwen’s description of Adam, the core member to whom he was assigned as assistant when he joined L’Arche, an international and ecumenical community for people with disabilities (core members) and their assistants who create a kind of family for one another, enabling all to live up to their potential.

“His heart, so transparent, reflected for me not only his person but also the heart of the universe, and indeed, the heart of God.” Henri wrote this in his posthumously published book, Adam: God’s Beloved. Like Jesus, Adam manifested God, indeed “the heart of the universe” to Henri.

I was reminded of this while reading Michael Ford’s Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri J. M. Nouwen in preparation for a weekend spiritual formation course I will be teaching in September. I had read the British edition when the book was first published a few years after Henri’s death in 1996, but am now reading the U.S. edition. I didn’t read it earlier because I assumed it was primarily the same book, but after nearly two decades, it reads fresh and even more insightfully than the first time around.

Henri continued, “After my many years of studying, reflecting, and teaching theology, Adam came into my life, and by his life and his heart he announced to me and summarized all I had ever learned.”

Any of us who have fallen in love, given birth to a child, cared for a loved one, or even simply taken care of a pet or a garden might similarly testify. Roman Catholic training for the priesthood had denied Henri what is called “a particular friendship,” so, in a way, Adam could be said to be Henri’s first permissible “particular friendship.”

Anyone who met Henri knew, though, that when he was attending to you, you were the only person in the room, just as we would expect of the warmest pastors, politicians, and “client-centered” therapists.

His challenge was seeing himself also reflecting the heart of the universe, the heart of God.

As early as his 1966 book, The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery, Henri’s spiritual director John Eudes Bamberger had advised him to take as his koan, “I am the glory of God,” telling him that if the glory of God were not manifest in him, where then?

Henri was still struggling with that concept in The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom, a journal released thirty years later on the day he died, September 21, 1996. In that journal kept eight years earlier, he had adjured himself, “Claim the God in you.”

Henri wrote of an experience common to many of us. It is hard to bear the responsibility of being a child of God, a child of the universe. Many of us treat it as “above our pay grade.”

A recent New York Times science article sought to correct the misimpression that “the universe started someplace,” saying that “The universe didn’t start at a place, it started at a time, namely 13.8 billion years ago. … When we look out, we look into the past… At the center is the present. … So where is the center of the universe? Right here. Yes, you are the center of the universe.”

Lest this sound like the teaching of EST (for those who remember it) or some other New Age* narcissistic notion, the article goes on to say essentially that we each have our own take on the universe, and that only together can we piece together our knowledge of reality.

The early Christians “got” this when they came to see one another as the Body of Christ. Working together, we can be Christ in the world, claiming the God in us, manifesting the heart of God. God is no longer simply to be found in a first century Palestinian Jewish male, but in every body, every time, every place, every culture, every religion, every race, every nation, every condition.

Try this mantra on for size: “I am the glory of God.” That should humble us, expand our consciousness, and enlarge our compassion.

Give God the opportunity to be particular in you.

*I don't mean to imply all New Age spiritualities are narcissistic. Many are just the opposite!

Consider joining me for a spiritual formation course on Henri Nouwen on the twentieth anniversary of his passing: Be Still! Be Loved! Be Grateful! Three Imperatives of the Spiritual Life, September 22-25, 2016.

The Henri Nouwen Society is hosting an international conference on Nouwen in Toronto June 9-11, 2016. Click here for more information.

Donate $100 to this blog or set up regular monthly giving of $10 and receive a signed gift copy of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy. Limited supply.

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description or by mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.