Finding My Way Home E-Book

Henri J. M. Nouwen

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Seitenzahl: 118

Beschreibung

Henri Nouwen became one of the mostinspiring spiritual guides of the 20thcentury. Culled from a life of intenseseeking, these profound meditations onliving, waiting, power, peace, and dyingoffer important insights that will inspireall who dare to travel a spiritual path.

Leseprobe

Finding My Way Home

HENRI J. M. NOUWEN

Finding My Way Home

Pathways to Life and the Spirit

With Reflection Guide

A Crossroad Book

The Crossroad Publishing Company

New York

To Kathy Christie

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

© 2001 by The Estate of Henri J. M. Nouwen

“A Guide for Reflection” © 2004 by The Crossroad Publishing Company

Illustrations: “Henri’s Hands” © 2000 Steve Hawley

Crossroad, Herder & Herder, and the crossed C logo/colophon are trademarks of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be copied, scanned, reproduced in any way, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company. For permission please write to [email protected].

In continuation of our 200-year tradition of independent publishing, The Crossroad Publishing Company proudly offers a variety of books with strong, original voices and diverse perspectives. The viewpoints expressed in our books are not necessarily those of The Crossroad Publishing Company, any of its imprints, or of its employees. No claims are made or responsibility assumed for any health or other benefits.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8245-2274-2

EPUB: 978-0-8245-2165-3

MOBI: 978-0-8245-2166-0

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Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

The Path of Power

The Path of Peace

The Path of Waiting

The Path of Living and Dying

A Guide for Reflection

Foreword

I recently returned from Toronto after spending six marvelous days with the L’Arche Daybreak community in Richmond Hill, where Henri Nouwen spent the last ten years of his life. It was an inspiring visit!

My journey back to New York, however, was very frustrating; LaGuardia Airport was forbidding planes to depart for New York. As a result, numerous planes were delayed and hundreds of passengers stranded. Fortunately, we were able to get on a flight to Newark, where the air traffic was less congested, but the whole experience was one of frustration. I could have flown to California in the time it took me to “find my way home” that night.

In Finding My Way Home, Henri Nouwen writes about “journey” in a very different way:

Our spiritual journey calls us to seek and find this living God of Love in prayer, worship, spiritual reading, spiritual mentoring, compassionate service to the poor, and good friends. Let us claim the truth that we are loved and open our hearts to receive God’s overflowing love poured out for us.

It sounds so simple! Our journey, then, is a journey to discover the perfect love that only God can give us.

But how do we remain faithful to this journey? The frustrations of making a spiritual journey are similar to the frustrations I felt at the Toronto airport. What do we do when our spiritual journey runs into roadblocks? When waiting makes us anxious and angry? Nouwen writes, “. . . waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be.” We are encouraged to look at waiting from two perspectives: the waiting for God and the waiting of God. Most of us think more about the first perspective, but as we grow in our awareness of God waiting and longing for us, we discover the deepest love there is—God’s love.

Henri Nouwen is a companion on the journey for me and for countless people around the world. But for Henri, and for us, Jesus is our principal guide: “We want to look with God’s eyes at our experience of brokenness, limitedness, woundedness, and frailty. We want to look at them in the way that Jesus taught us to hope that such a vision will offer us a safe way to travel on earth.” If, as Henri says, the Beatitudes are a self-portrait of Jesus, they fail to describe most of us!

Nouwen’s theology of downward mobility is certainly not a popular one in our society, where our value is usually determined by success, popularity, and influence. Try telling an Olympic athlete that those who fail to win any medals are just as good as those who win the gold! In Finding My Way Home we find, “When you win and receive a prize, you know there is somebody who lost. But this is not so in the heart of God. If you are chosen in the heart of God, you have eyes to see the chosenness of others.”

Nouwen reminds us that our time on earth is very brief, but that we were loved by God before we were born and will continue to be loved by God after we die. He writes, “This brief lifetime is my opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.” In Finding My Way Home we discover that God’s “power” is not about worldly success, but about the fruitfulness and the “transforming power of love.” As we deepen our understanding of the power of love, we grow in freedom from fear. Our final journey home becomes an “exodus” in which “we leave this world for full communion with God.”

Henri Nouwen made his final journey home four years ago, leaving a rich legacy behind. He lived his life with his eyes and heart on Jesus, and like Jesus he lived his life faithfully, passionately, and authentically and made his life abundantly fruitful through his death. This remarkable book inspires us to walk the same path in confidence as we, too, seek to find our way home.

WENDY WILSON GREER

President, Henri Nouwen Society

New York City

September 2000

Preface

As I hurried past, Henri invariably stopped when a homeless person accosted us on the street asking for money. Not only did he find some money to share from his pocket, but also he generally took time to speak to the person, ask some questions, and listen to the story. The sight of a brother’s plight didn’t repulse him nor did he seem to be the least bit afraid of some quite wild-looking people who inhabited the streets. But he was touched by the story of each person and in the days following, Henri often remembered the person by name during his celebration of the Eucharist. In looking beyond I had adapted to our society’s reaction and I no longer “saw” the homeless person. Henri stopped. He felt akin to the homeless because Henri was deeply conscious of his longing for “home.”

Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit is a book that allows Henri to speak about our collective sense of homelessness today and the universal thirst for the experience of truly being at home. Three essays, “The Path of Power,” “The Path of Peace,” and “The Path of Waiting,” first published in 1995 by the Crossroad Publishing Company, are combined in this volume along with a new article, “The Path of Living and Dying” from unpublished sources.

I remember how touched I was when I first read “The Path of Power.” In his unique way Henri uses his three-point approach, but this time he chooses the same point twice for two very different descriptions of the same word! Under the heading of “Power,” he outlines the destructive nature of economic and political power and, worse still, the misuse of religious power. It stings. For the second heading, “Powerlessness,” he goes to the opposite extreme and describes how our God, in the form of Jesus, chose downward mobility to invite us to a life of intimacy with God. Then Henri chooses “Power” again for the heading of the third section, where he brilliantly reveals God’s power as the power of love that engenders in us creativity, leadership, and new initiatives for the kingdom. This “second” power, connected with the portrait of Jesus painted in the Beatitudes, is ours to claim and wield. On the spiritual journey home, our very weakness is power.

In “The Path of Peace” Henri shares the lessons in wisdom he learned from Adam, his friend and mentor in the L’Arche Daybreak community. Henri experienced something with Adam that had never happened to him before, and this experience sent Henri searching for the sources of Adam’s peace. Himself touched by Adam’s peace, Henri also saw peace flowing from Adam’s heart into the hearts of those around him. Adam was an unusual teacher who impressed Henri with the startling beauty of just being, of being present to another without the necessity of words, of being rooted in relationships more than in the mind, and of not fearing to be interdependent. Adam, Henri’s quiet guide, leads us to deep wells of peace.

“The Path of Waiting” exposes in our culture a deep fear of the unknown and our need to control it as much as possible. This is in contrast to Zechariah and Elizabeth in the early nativity narratives, who hoped and waited for a child who was given to them only in their old age. Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and Simeon, living many years in the Temple, chose to wait for the full revelation of the Promise of God. Henri sees all our waiting as our waiting for God. But he also enlightens us with the waiting of God for us. Waiting for Henri is not a painful or passive experience but a chance to feel fully alive and active. By being present to the moment, by waiting together and not alone, and by transforming our wishes into hopes, we learn to “wait patiently in expectation.”

“The Path of Living and Dying” is taken from the talk Henri gave to the National Catholic HIV/AIDS Conference in Chicago and an interview that Henri gave to Crosspoint magazine. As I was putting the material together I was surprised by the urgency of Henri’s call to us to believe and accept our true identity as beloved children of God. Over and over again he says that Jesus heard and believed the words spoken at his baptism, “You are my beloved son. My favor rests on you.” Henri is urging us to listen in our hearts for the same words so that we know and accept the truth of our lives, because living in the world as beloved sons and daughters of God is not the same as just living in the world. Henri gently guides the reader to dream not so much for success as for fruitfulness because fruitfulness extends beyond success, beyond weakness or diminishment, and even beyond death itself.

Because the material for The Path of Living and Dying was not Henri’s written word, I confess, as editor, to taking some liberties with it in an effort to make it more coherent. As I did so, I read other texts of Henri’s written word and I drew on them as well. I believe that the text is true to Henri’s thought.

Finding My Way Home is an inspiration for the spiritual journey. It names the powers that seduce us to a life of unfulfilled self-seeking, as well as describing some practical choices to keep us on the path of meaning and faithfulness. To read it is to experience what Henri would call, “finding home on the way home.”

SUE MOSTELLER,

Literary Executrix

Henri Nouwen Literary Centre

L’Arche Daybreak

August 2000

Acknowledgments

This book is the brainchild of Gwendolin Herder at the Crossroad Publishing Company. She thought that instead of just having the individual booklets entitled Path of Power, Path of Peace, and Path of Waiting, we should revise the texts and put them into one volume about pathways to life and the Spirit. Together the essays enhance each other and make a coherent spiritual book. I’m thankful for Gwendolin’s creative initiative.

Tim Jones came to the Literary Centre to do research for his personal project, but when I told him that I needed new and unpublished material for one more Path in the Spirit, he went to work for me! He not only found some good material, but he also gave me some ideas about how it would complement the other Path. I am deeply grateful to him for his work and enthusiasm.

Kathy Christie was Henri’s administrative assistant for the last four years before his death. With remarkable love and skill she managed the many facets of Henri’s life and publishing, and she was deeply shocked by Henri’s sudden death. However, she didn’t skip a beat when he died but continued at her desk, calling people and comforting them and listening to their stories. After Henri’s death she welcomed me to the office and together we launched the Henri Nouwen Literary Centre. As this book goes to press we are concluding four wonderful and fruitful years of working there together. Kathy helped in the preparation of this book, not only by typing and retyping the material, but also by reading my revisions and giving me wise and helpful feedback. Kathy is a living example of someone who walks life’s pathways with intention and compassion. Her love, support, work, and care have been invaluable.

Maureen Wright, who now manages the Henri Nouwen Literary Centre, also typed and retyped material for the book. She gave critical feedback as well about the way I put the material together for “The Path of Living and Dying.” I have deep gratitude for her work and for her support.

Paul McMahon at the Crossroad Publishing Company worked with me on the publication of this work. Our mutual consultations were a support to me. He was also very kind to extend the deadline when I was having trouble meeting it.

I’m deeply grateful to each one and especially to Henri, who wrote the texts that have inspired me.

S. M.

The Path of Power

SITTINGINAPLANE