Category Archives: Reading

I read the short text of Julian’s Showings as part of my study for the spiritual direction course I am enrolled in.  Now I have returned to this book to read the long text and am enjoying it much more.

In her book Interior Castle, Teresa of Avila describes various stages in the prayer life of a person who is seeking God.  As her life of prayer develops; as she comes closer to the state of union with God, nothing becomes more important than doing God’s will.  It becomes the chief desire.  She describes the state of such a person as similar to the state of sealing wax. 

“In reality, the soul in that state does no more than the wax when a seal is impressed upon it – the wax does not impress itself; it is only prepared for the impress; that is, it is soft – and it does not even soften itself so as to be prepared; it merely remains quiet and consenting.” 

I like that analogy.  Being soft.  Being pliable.  Being ready for God to put his imprint on us.  Nothing we do or have to do except be available; “remaining quiet and consenting.”

“Oh, goodness of God, that all this should be done at Thy cost!  Thou dost require only our wills and dost ask that Thy wax may offer no impediment.” (Interior Castle p. 96)

I came home from work today to find a package from Amazon.  Ahhh – an early Christmas present.  My copy of  The Real Mary by Scot McKnight had arrived.  That and then finding a poem on Maggi Dawn’s site has begun to put me in a mood for celebrating this season. 

          mary’s song        by Luci Shaw

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest …
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.

The idea of living in simplicity, letting go of the things that come with success in this culture, is not new to Henri Nouwen.  Henri chose to live out this calling at L’Arche Daybreak in Toronto.  The choice for him to live at Daybreak was not the only such occasion he chose to follow the “downward” path.

Michael O’Laughlin states,

“Generally, Christians have learned to live with this ambiguity and regard the call to move downward as a saintly option that does not apply to middle-class people struggling to make ends meet.

Therefore it took a special ability or insight and a real desire to be faithful to the gospel for Henri Nouwen to not only present the descending way to those around him but actually begin to live it out.  In fact, I would be less interested in Henri Nouwen’s teaching about downward ability and how it relates to Jesus if I had not observed Nouwen practicing what he preached.  With Henri Nouwen, it was not merely an idea.  Henri’s willingness to throw aside concerns about money or his own prestige and his embrace of persons of humbler status was something that I witnessed over and over again.

…Henri’s remarkable personal generosity was one of his greatest gifts to the world, not only because of the joy he brought into many lives, but because it was such a rare and inspiring expression of freedom. (p 139, 140)

I guess the choice of this great man to spend his later days at L’Arche attending to the needs of the handicapped was always a source of puzzlement to me.  I would think that I understood his desire to serve others, but did not really get the extent of his desire to do this as an expression of his choice to follow Jesus.  The author has helped me understand how fundamental this was to Henri Nouwen’s deepening faith.  I think I am beginning to understand this call towards the “downward” way.  Understanding this call of Jesus to each of us that claim to follow him, and actually following would transform us and the world. 

Henri learned that the secret at the center of the downward, descending way was to identify with Jesus.  I think, in fact, that he was not so much interested in simplicity or poverty for their own sake, but as part of the mystery of Christ.  For Nouwen, the gospel was becoming not just a message explaining how God long ago brought into being a new spiritual reality through Jesus; he was coming to see it as a blueprint for how we might live our lives and find God today.  Downward mobility was becoming a new way for him to enter into the gospel story. (p.143)

Now, to learn from Henri’s example, to attend to the Holy Spirit as to what that means in my life, since each of us lives our own set of unique circumstances, mine including a husband, children and family.  

There are some outstanding things about Henri Nouwen I learned from Michael O’Laughlin’s book. 

One was the decision made by Nouwen to identify himself with Jesus even if that meant being humiliated and scorned by those active in the academic world.  Henri came out strongly advocating that Jesus was “the Son of God come down from heaven” and the central point in Christian spirituality.  Tolerance of religious belief was something Harvard was proud of.  Celebrating Christ’s divinity was not politically correct and Nouwen began to experience rejection.  He was criticised for “spiritual imperialism” by the students. 

Needless to say, this stimulated doubt and depression but at the same time prompted new insights into the “downward” nature of Christian belief.  The road that he was taking did not lead to the “upward mobility” espoused by a generation seeking to become successful and prosperous in the eyes of the world.  It led downward towards humility and simplicity.  Nouwen wrote:

“In the gospel it’s quite obvious that Jesus chose the descending way.  He chose it not once but over and over again.  At each critical moment he deliberately sought the way downwards.  Even though at twelve years of age he was already listening to the teachers in the Temple and questioning them, he stayed up to his thirtieth year with his parents in the little-respected town of Nazareth and was submissive to them.  Even though Jesus was without sin, he began his public life by joining the ranks of sinners who were being baptized by John in the Jordan.  Even though he was full of divine power, he believed that changing stones into bread, seeking popularity, and being counted among the great ones of the earth were temptations. 

Again and again you see how Jesus opts for what is small, hidden, and poor, and accordingly declines to wield influence.  His many miracles always serve to express his profound compassion with suffering humanity; never are they attempts to call attention to himself….”

Henri Houwen began to experience more and more of what it meant to follow Christ on this descending path, finding more solidarity with the poor, oppressed and handicapped.

God’s Beloved, A Spiritual Biography of Henri Nouwen

By Michael O’Laughlin

One of the reviewers has said of this book, “A biography of a soul – it shows us not how we can be more like Henri Nouwen but how, like him, we can become our own true selves: beloved of God.”  That was my experience as I read this book. 

I think some of the psychological tools used by the author to enhance the understanding of Henri Nouwen will be foreign to the general reader.  As I was reading through the chapter where he goes on at length about the personality type that described Henri, I wondered where he was going and why he spent so much time with this.  Later he does explain himself saying that he wanted to show how Henri was no exception to the traits of personality that shape us.  

“I have relied heavily on the MBTI in writing this chapter because it sheds so much light on Henri’s surprising combination of greatness and weakness, vision and vulnerability.  I believe that a good number of the more puzzling aspects of his personality can be explained as aspects of the ENFP personality type.  By this I am saying that Nouwen was probably much more psychologically healthy than even he himself suspected.” (p 76)

The author then goes on to encourage each of us to be true to the personalities we have been given, not to simply follow in the footsteps of Henri Nouwen.  I like that.  Each of us has been given gifts of personality.  We need to come to an acceptance of this and let God transform us in the ways he wants, use us in  the ways he has for us, rather than trying to live to a standard of another person who may be fundamentally quite different than us.  We will always learn from the experiences of another person but we are not expected by God to be like them.  We are loved by God for who we are.

I recently finished reading Holy Listening by Margaret Guenther.  I found this through a reference to it in another book I read recently Sacred Companions by David Benner.    I guess I was drawn to read more about the way God changes us through our relationships; specifically the kind of friendships where we work at growing deeper in faith in Christ together.  I have found this kind of friendship, a spiritual companionship, to be one of the greatest stimuli for spiritual growth in my own life.  It is a blessing to be involved in helping others grow spiritually and to be nurtured in kind by my friends. 

Margaret Guenther taught me many things as I read her book.  The book talks about the art of spiritual direction and I wonder if perhaps God is leading me in this direction.  We will see where he takes me.  I think there are aspects of spiritual direction of which I have been privileged to be a part.  Listening is something I am comfortable with although I believe that anyone who gives spiritual direction has to be fairly healthy in the spiritual sense.  I know God has things to work on in me.

One of the things that I found refreshing was the way Guenther was so comfortable with her femininity.  In one section she encourages women to read the gospels “with a woman’s eye” and to be comfortable “with feminine imagery for God in prayer.”

I found myself realizing that even though my own father has always been loving and approachable, it is still the memories of my mother’s unfailing love that probably portray best the unfailing and utterly dependable love of God.  In my mother’s example of love, there is that sense that no matter what I did, she would still love me.  It was to my mother that I went for comfort when hurt.  It was to her that I turned first for her motherly wisdom.