Mere Spirituality: The Spiritual Life According to Henri Nouwen

By Wil Hernandez, PhD, Obl. OSB and Ronald Rolheiser

Discover Henri Nouwen's authentic, spacious spirituality of being deeply beloved.

"When we are at one with our self, it becomes effortless for us to welcome and embrace the same self where God resides, the self that God loves with the fi rst love, preceding all human love. With Nouwen, we are able to carry our own beautiful, deeply loved self in our heart."
―from the Introduction

Henri Nouwen’s compelling spirituality of the heart is at once simple and complex, accessible but deeply profound. For this beloved Catholic theologian, whose ecumenical writings continue to inspire Christians of all denominations and levels of involvement, spirituality is, at its most basic, simply “attention to the life of the spirit in us.”

This insightful distillation of Nouwen’s vast literary legacy invites our tender hearts to take courage and be still, creating space for God and our true selves. It is in this place of trust and solitude that we discover our belovedness and our capacity to love God and others.

A scholar and spiritual director intimately acquainted with Nouwen’s understanding of the spiritual life, Wil Hernandez, PhD, Obl. OSB, offers an elegant synthesis of Nouwen’s main themes, inspiring us to embrace the power and vulnerability of mere spirituality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Oct 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781594736131

Wil Hernandez, PhD, Obl. OSB

Wil Hernandez, PhD, Obl. OSB, is a passionate advocate for the work of spiritual formation in individuals and congregations, and he finds great joy in sharing Henri Nouwen's spiritual legacy. He teaches courses on the spirituality of Henri Nouwen at seminaries and universities throughout the U.S. and abroad as a spiritual director and international workshop and retreat leader. He is also author of a Henri Nouwen trilogy, which includes Henri Nouwen and Spiritual Polarities: A Life of Tension, and is founder and executive director of CenterQuest: An Ecumenical Hub for the Study and Practice of Christian Spirituality (www.CQCenterQuest.org). For more information about Wil Hernandez’s courses, retreats, seminars and workshops on Henri Nouwen, please visit www.nouwenlegacy.com or email Wil at [e-mail].

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Mere Spirituality: The Spiritual Life According to Henri NouwenMere Spirituality: The Spiritual Life According to Henri Nouwen

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CenterQuest

An Ecumenical Hub for the Study and Practice

of Christian Spirituality

was birthed out of the lasting influence of Henri Nouwen

and his spirituality.

This work is especially dedicated

to my colleague and friend, my partner in crime

in bringing CenterQuest to life,

Lisa Myers

and to the

CenterQuest School of Spiritual Direction

Inaugural Cohort, 2015.

Contents

Foreword by Ronald Rolheiser

Preface

Introduction: A Heart-Filled Life

By Way of the Heart: An Overview of Henri Nouwen’s Life

Part I

Communion—A Life Apart

ONE         Solitude—An Intimate Heart

TWO        Identity—A Centered Heart

THREE   Presence—An Attentive Heart

Part II

Community—A Life Shared

FOUR      Togetherness—A Bonded Heart

FIVE        Mutuality—A Common Heart

SIX           Solidarity—A Connected Heart

Part III

Commission—A Life Given

SEVEN     Service—A Selfless Heart

EIGHT     Compassion—A Caring Heart

NINE        Hospitality—A Spacious Heart

Conclusion: Mere Spirituality

Acknowledgments

A Chronology of Henri Nouwen’s Life and Works

Source Abbreviations

Key Works of Henri Nouwen

Credits

List of Searchable Terms

About the Author

Copyright

Also Available

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Foreword

RONALD ROLHEISER

Henri Nouwen was perhaps the most popular spiritual writer of recent times, and his popularity endures today. More than seven million of his books have been sold worldwide and they have been translated into thirty languages.

Many things account for Nouwen’s popularity, beyond the depth and learning he brought to his writings. He was very instrumental in helping dispel the suspicion that had long existed in Protestant and Evangelical circles toward spirituality, which was identified in the popular mind as something more exclusively Roman Catholic and on the fringes of ordinary life. Both his teaching and his writing have helped make spirituality something that is mainstream within all Christian churches and within secular society itself. For example, Hilary Clinton stated in Oprah Magazine that Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son has had a profound impact on her life.¹

Nouwen’s writings flowed from who he was as a man. And he was a complex man, torn always between the saint inside of him who had given his life to God and the man inside of him who, chronically obsessed with human love and its earthy yearnings, wanted to take his life back. He was fond of quoting Søren Kierkegaard, who said that a saint is someone who can will the one thing, even as he admitted how much he struggled to do that. He did will to be a saint, but he willed other things as well: I want to be a saint, he wrote in The Genesee Diary, but I also want to experience all the sensations that sinners experience. He confessed in his writings how much restlessness this brought into his life and how sometimes he was incapable of being fully in control of his own life.

In the end, Nouwen was a saint, but always one in progress. He never fit the pious profile of a saint, even as he was always recognized as a deeply spiritual man. And the fact that he never hid his weaknesses from his readers helped account for his stunning popularity. His readers identified with him because he shared his struggles so honestly. He related his weaknesses to his struggles in prayer and, in that, many readers found themselves looking into a mirror. Like many others, when I first read Henri Nouwen, I had a sense of being introduced to myself.

And he worked at his craft, with diligence and deliberation. Nouwen would write and rewrite his books, sometimes five times over, in an effort to make them simpler. What he sought was a language of the heart. Originally trained as a psychologist, his early writings exhibit some of the language of the classroom. However, as he developed as a writer and a mentor of the soul, he began more and more to purge his writings of technical and academic terms and strove to become radically simple without being simplistic; to carry deep sentiment without being sentimental; to be self-revealing without being exhibitionist; to be deeply personal yet profoundly universal; and to be sensitive to human weakness, even as he strove to challenge us to seek what’s more sublime.

He sought to find a language of the heart (a language that each generation has to create anew) that bypasses the divide between the academy and the street and that has the power to speak directly to everyone, regardless of background and training. Jesus managed it. Nouwen sought to speak and write with that kind of directness. He didn’t do it perfectly—nobody does—but he did do it more effectively than most. He recognized too that this is a craft that must be worked at, akin to learning language.

Nouwen is our generation’s Kierkegaard. He helps us to pray while not knowing how to pray, to rest while feeling restless, to be at peace while being tempted, to feel safe while still anxious, to be surrounded by light while still in darkness, and to love while still in doubt. If you are occasionally tortured by your own complexity, even as your deepest desire is to will the one thing, perhaps you can find a mentor and patron saint in Henri Nouwen. He calls us beyond ourselves, even as he respects how complex and difficult that journey is. He shows us how to move toward God, even as we are still torn by our own earthly attachments.

Nouwen’s writings have influenced millions and he has many admirers. Wil Hernandez is more than an admirer. He’s a passionate disciple and exponent of Nouwen. For more than a dozen years he has researched, written, and taught on Nouwen’s spirituality. This book is both his most synthesized and his most mature work on Nouwen. Nouwen himself wrote over sixty books, lectured widely, and inspired many books about him and his spirituality. Given the sheer volume of what he has written and what’s been written about him, coupled with the fact that he didn’t strive to be a systematic thinker, it can be a daunting task to attempt to pull together Nouwen’s rich but scattered insights into one synthetic whole. This is what Wil Hernandez does in Mere Spirituality. This is a needed book, and we are grateful to Wil Hernandez for giving it to us.

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1. Hilary Clinton, "Hilary Clinton on The Return of the Prodigal Son," Oprah Magazine, August 15, 2000 (http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/ Hillary-Clinton-on-The-Return-of-the-Prodigal-Son).

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Preface

Every time I conduct a retreat or a class on Henri Nouwen’s spirituality—and I have done countless of them over the past ten years—I get asked by participants who are new to Nouwen’s written works what to focus on in his voluminous materials and where to begin. Likewise, I run into others with some basic familiarity with Nouwen’s writings—having read portions or excerpts from a number of his books—who, after getting reacquainted with Nouwen through my presentations, wish to go back to his writings or explore them further but feel somewhat at a loss as to how to get started in the process. Nouwen published more than forty books on a variety of topics in his lifetime (plus many more that have been published posthumously), and both types of participants ask questions such as Which book should I read first? or What top three books on the subject of ______ would you recommend for me? or Which one is a good summary of his main thoughts?

Many of these folks are looking for guidance on how they can approach Nouwen’s work without feeling overwhelmed by the massive amount of material before them (including the whole array of good Nouwen compilations, anthologies, and readers currently available). It is for these people that I have written this particular book, one thematically assembled to direct readers to the corresponding primary Nouwen sources should they wish to explore further.

I also have in mind avid readers of Henri Nouwen’s work who simply wish to get their hands on a single book aimed at distilling and summarizing his key insights into the spiritual life, the theme to which Nouwen devoted much of his writing energy. True, he addressed a wide range of topics, from prayer to social justice to icons to clowns, but only insofar as they bore directly on his main focal thrust: our life in the Spirit. I dare to say, in fact, that Henri Nouwen is all about spirituality, mere spirituality.¹

Letting Nouwen Speak for Himself

Henri Nouwen is primarily known as a writer on the broad subject of Christian spirituality. Not one to wrangle over divisive doctrinal issues or theological disputes, Nouwen refused to be embroiled in peripheral matters that could potentially distract him from this focus. His work appeals to a broad audience—from the ultraconservative to the more progressive, from the centrist to the staunch liberal. To this day, I marvel at his ability to create space for such a diversity of views. Only someone of Henri Nouwen’s caliber could have successfully convened people of various opposing camps and persuasions to sit at the same table, wrestling together with the common topic of our spiritual life—even if they could not see eye to eye on a lot of other things.

That we have far more in common with one another than we care to openly admit—despite our real differences—becomes more apparent through Nouwen’s efforts at uniting us around our common spiritual longing. His work capitalizes on this intrinsic shared desire: to know and experience what it means to live out our life in God in a way that deeply transforms us inside and out.

Nouwen did not delve into the subject of our spiritual life in a strictly systematized way. He expounded creatively on various facets of it from every conceivable angle. In most of his writings, he repeated himself without apology, if only to underline his key constructs. But he did so almost always from a new perspective and context. Like Nouwen’s writings, this book may seem repetitive in places, but such repetition only reflects the pervasive nature of Nouwen’s spirituality. His works often yield what postmodern philosophers call a surplus of meaning through each encounter with them.

While his particular treatment of spirituality can be considered multi­faceted, Nouwen’s major theses are hardly complex. There are clear primary themes—and my goal for this book is to present an overview of them. Yet, despite my best efforts to outline Nouwen’s all-encompassing approach to our life in the Spirit in neat and tidy categories, the thematic borders seem porous.

This book is markedly different from my previous works. Drawing from my doctoral dissertation work, I wrote a trilogy on Nouwen published by Paulist Press in 2006, 2008, and 2012, in which I addressed his integrated, albeit imperfect, journey; his ministry of integration; and the spiritual polarities he embodied and held in tension. I approached my earlier works from a decidedly interpretive, academic framework, using descriptive analysis along with my own interpretation and synthesis of all the data available.

Here, however, I am not self-consciously endeavoring to interpret Henri Nouwen’s writings. Instead, I am letting him freely speak for himself on the specific subject of the spiritual life and its essential features. All I am doing is arranging his choice insights and integrating them into a coherent whole. I rely solely on Nouwen’s own voice, without necessarily appealing to other voices—my own included—in order to address the matter purely. Thus, this work is in no way dependent on extra materials outside of Nouwen’s to guide its overall direction. Everything is based on primary sources—straight from what Henri Nouwen has either written or spoken about on the all-important topic of our spiritual life. As you might well imagine, this type of synthesis entails patiently combing through the huge amount of material Nouwen produced around the theme of our spiritual life as I attempt to structure it into a cohesive summary.

Henri Nouwen was noticeably fond of organizing his material into three main points that readers could easily remember. I adopt the same basic structure here by dividing the book into three major sections: Communion, Community, and Commission. These sections correspond to Nouwen’s commentary on Luke 6:12–19, in which he underscored the threefold movement from solitude