The candle I would like to offer you at the beginning of a new year – for you to hold aloft and keep gazing at throughout the year – is a priest-friend with whom I love to go for a walk whenever possible. I manage to do this quite often, and every time this happens I feel delightfully energized and refreshed. But this learned friend is no more. He died quite suddenly of a heart attack in 1996.
So what do I mean by ‘going for a walk with him’? Reading one of his nearly forty books and reflecting on his insights. I know I am not the only one who benefits this way. His books have sold over two million copies and been translated into more than 22 languages.
The world-renowned author I am speaking about is Henri J.M. Nouwen—Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen. He was born in Nijkerk in the Netherlands on 24 January 1932. Henri studied at the Jesuit-run Aloysius College in The Hague and then joined the seminary.
After his priestly formation Nouwen was ordained a priest on 21 July 1957 for the archdiocese of Utrecht, Netherlands. He studied clinical psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen in order to understand himself and those he would serve as a priest and to explore the human side of faith from a pastoral point of view. Later he travelled to the U.S. to study as a Fellow in the Religion and Psychiatry Programme at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. While studying there he took an active interest in the Civil Rights Movement that fought for justice and equality for the Blacks in the U.S.
Then began his celebrated teaching career. He started with the University of Notre Dame where he was a visiting professor and then went back to his country where he taught psychology and spirituality at the Catholic Theological University of Utrecht. For 10 years from 1971 till 1981 Henri Nouwen was a professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School. Soon he became a much-loved writer, as he began to write columns in Christian magazines and publish books. He spent several months at the Abbey of the Genesee. He kept a journal while he was there and it was published in 1976 as Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery. After his mother died, he returned to the Abbey and his reflections during those days of grief became another book called A Cry for Mercy: Prayers from the Genesee. Although he decided he was not meant to be a Trappist monk, he felt quite at home at the Abbey and this is where he chose to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of his Ordination in 1982.
He left the Yale University in 1981 and went to South America. He spent six months in Bolivia and Peru and the struggles of the oppressed poor of those countries moved him. On his return to the U.S. he was appointed a Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. But his restlessness and search continued and he resigned after just two years. His friendship with Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche network of homes for the mentally challenged and visits to some of them made him accept the invitation from one such Home called ‘L’Arche Daybreak in Toronto, Canada to be their pastor. The popular professor and speaker who had worked till then with the best and the brightest spent the last ten years of his life cleaning, cooking, washing and caring for the childlike inmates with mental disabilities.
What makes him such a loved and inspiring guide was that he never tried to hide his wounds – like intense loneliness, feeling totally lost and abandoned, depression, and struggles with his sexuality. He showed that wounded as we all are, we can put our wounds at the service of others. As the title of one his most popular books suggests, he assures us that we can be Wounded Healers.
Go for frequent walks with him during the year. Let me assure you, they would improve your spiritual and psychological health.
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