Henri Nouwen: The other morning, one of the Catholic Workers here was using her morning personal time to make a bunch of phone calls on behalf of a very troubled woman who showed up at the door.
As a show of support, and in case I suddenly became useful, I hung around, drinking coffee and skimming Michael O’Laughlin’s biography of Henri Nouwen. This passage jumped out at me:
The contours of Nouwen’s life were indeed interesting. Although he became a well-known spiritual writer, Nouwen did not embrace the lifestyle of a media-savvy author or pundit. In fact, he declined most of the many speaking invitations he received, and he abandoned his academic appointments, first at Yale, then at Harvard, in order to seek a more clearly spiritual way of life. His first radical step in this direction was to immerse himself in the meditative silence of a Cistercian monastery. Later, he went to the Third World to live as a missionary and worked in a shantytown near Lima, Peru.
While both of these experiences broadened his outlook and added new dimensions to his writing and teaching, Henri Nouwen did not find what he was seeking in either of these settings. He longed for some more satisfying form of life and ministry that would ground him spiritually and give him the feeling of having “arrived home.” Nouwen was searching for some place or situation that might offer him intimacy, continuity, and acceptance.
I know how he felt.
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