• Am I What I Say?: Henri Nouwen's
  Selected Writings

-April Renee Lynch

Priest and spiritual writer (and, to me, symbol of the tortured, yet ever-self-renewing intellectual) Henri Nouwen is a writer to whose work I return because it is so full of the word. And the Word. What I mean to say is that, in a world in which people routinely dismiss each other with “Oh, s/he’s just saying that; it’s just a bunch of words,” Nouwen’s passionately simple style “means it,” wraps itself around you, pulling you in. And the style is simple, the prose understated in order to let the reader know just how accessible, how near, our God is.

I choose my own words advisedly this time out. When I read the author’s Life of the Beloved, my response in this space was decidedly cool. I agreed with what Nouwen was saying, but felt that he was fishing in shallow waters, not truly entering the deep waters of non-belief. I felt that the author wasn’t actually increasing anyone’s understanding. He was, I thought, directing his essential message to those who already grasped what he was saying. This collection of selected writings, part of the Modern Spiritual Masters Series, has shown me that Nouwen was, indeed, a deep-sea fisherman. It has also renewed my resolve not to make snap judgements.

The book is organized into six sections: Each begins with an explanatory essay written by Robert Jonas, Ph. D., a long-time friend of Nouwen’s. The book’s brief autobiographical introduction is aptly entitled The Fire of the Beloved: Jonas’s love for the man comes through in the skill and care with which this was crafted. The book is filled with the many words that describe Nouwen, though ostensibly these same words were descriptive of things and people other than himself. It is a work that pulls together Nouwen’s various personae, different but complimentary of one another. Nouwen was a tenured theology professor at (different times) both Yale and Harvard, traveled the world teaching and preaching, lived among the marginalized of North and South America. But he was chiefly, as aforementioned, a living exemplar of the strength of the word and the presence of the Word: “The Word of God is always sacramental. . . .When we say that God’s word is sacred, we mean that God’s word is full of God’s presence. . . .[T]he full power of the word lies, not in how we apply it to our lives after we have heard it, but in its transforming power that does its divine work as we listen.”
--With Burning Hearts, 44-47

This book had an effect on me unlike any other spiritual or “non-spiritual” book (“But, aren’t they all spiritual, in some form or fashion?”) I’ve read. Perhaps it was the amount of information contained within it: Henri Nouwen wrote about forty books and so many of them were excerpted. Perhaps it was the fact that the “prime cuts” of each were on display: Rich fare often inundates the senses. Or perhaps it was the fact that the author expressed God’s and his own love of humankind again and again, in so many ways. (The loving joke about Nouwen during his lifetime, according to Dr. Jonas, was that all his books were basically about the same thing.)

The effect was similar to the feeling one gets after having had too much rich food. I felt awash in the medium—words—in which I was steeped, so aware of the author’s and my own emotions, and in awe of the care with which the words were delivered to me, as if in a live birth. This is such a wonderful image for us to think about as Advent approaches. “Words, words, between the lines of age” Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young sings. If Henri Nouwen is what he “sings,” then he, his words are timeless. I trust that they are so as I feel my faith strengthened by this posthumous rendering of his fine work.

Back to the current book review.

April Lynch recently received her M.A. in Art History from U.C. Irvine: she hopes soon to enjoy a career as an art historian. She has been a member of St. Agnes since 1990.