Life of the Beloved E-Book

Henri J. M. Nouwen

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2002

Seitenzahl: 134

Beschreibung

Initially written for a Jewish friend, Life of the Beloved has become Henri Nouwen’s greatest legacy to Christians around the world. This sincere testimony of the power and invitation of Christ is indeed a great guide to a truly uplifting spiritual life in today’s world.

Leseprobe

Praise for Life of the Beloved

“Gentle and searching. This Crossroad book is a spiritual primer for anyone seeking God.” —The Other Side

“Nouwen’s prose is refreshingly straightforward and jargon-free. . . . For those unfamiliar with his work, this volume is a wonderful place to begin. For others who have benefited from Nouwen’s insights, Life of the Beloved will be welcomed as yet another significant achievement.”

—Circuit Rider

“A beautiful and sensitive book that reaches out to the believer.” —Church and Synagogue Library Association

“Brings affirmation and renewal to the reader. Anyone who is searching for the Spirit of God in the world today will benefit from reading it.” —Horizons

“Nouwen writes with a disarming simplicity and honesty. He shows a vulnerability that bonds him with the reader from the beginning.” —The Catholic World

“Profound.” —Christian Living

“An engaging, highly practical book about the spiritual life. Powerful.” —Whisperings

LIFE of the BELOVED

LIFE of the BELOVED

SPIRITUAL LIVING IN A SECULAR WORLD

Henri J.M. Nouwen

A Crossroad Book

The Crossroad Publishing Company

New York

CROSSROAD • NEW YORK

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

© 2002 by Henri Nouwen

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.

e-ISBN: 978-0-8245-2063-2

Cover design by: Stefan Killen Design

Cover art: Vincent van Gogh, Cafe Terrace at night, 1888.

Rijksmuseum. © Erich Lessing/Art

Books published by The Crossroad Publishing Company may be purchased at special quantity discount rates for classes and institutional use. For information, please email [email protected].

Printed in the United States of America

To Connie Ellis in gratitude

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue: A Friendship Begins

BEING THE BELOVED

BECOMING THE BELOVED

I. TAKEN

II. BLESSED

III. BROKEN

IV. GIVEN

LIVING AS THE BELOVED

Epilogue: A Friendship Deepens

Guide for Reflection

About the Author

About the Publisher

Acknowledgments

This book was written and made ready for publication with the support of many friends. I first of all want to thank Connie Ellis for her secretarial assistance and for the many ways in which she encouraged me to keep writing during busy times. I dedicate Life of the Beloved to her in deep gratitude for her faithful friendship and generous support. I am also grateful to Conrad Wieczorek for the many ways in which he offered his editorial assistance to Connie and myself in the final stages of the manuscript.

A special word of thanks goes to Patricia Beall, Diana Chambers, Gordon Cosby, Bart Gavigan, Steve Jenkinson, Sue Mosteller, Dolly Reisman, Susan Zimmerman, and my editor at Crossroad, Bob Heller, for their many encouraging words and concrete suggestions to bring this text to completion.

Finally I want to express my thanks to Peggy McDonnell, her family and friends, for their friendship and their generous financial support and to the Franciscan Community in Freiburg, Germany, who offered me a safe and prayerful place to write.

Prologue

A Friendship Begins

This book is the fruit of a longstanding friendship, and you will read it with more profit, I believe, if I begin by telling you the story of this friendship. A little more than ten years ago, while I was teaching at Yale Divinity School, a young man arrived in my office to interview me for the Connecticut section of the Sunday edition of the New York Times. He introduced himself as Fred Bratman. As we sat down to talk, I quickly found myself taken hold of by a mixture of irritation and fascination. I was irritated because it was clear that this journalist was not terribly interested in doing what he was doing. Someone had suggested to him that I might be a good subject for a profile. He had followed up on the suggestion, but I couldn’t detect any great eagerness to know me or any ardent desire to write about me. It was a journalist’s job that had to be done, but could easily be done without. Nevertheless, there was also an element of fascination because I sensed, behind the mask of indifference, a spirit fully alive—eager to learn and to create. I somehow knew that I was face to face with a man full of great personal gifts, anxiously searching for a way to use them.

After a half-hour of questions that seemed of little interest to either of us, it became obvious that the interview had come to an end. An article would be written; a few people might read it, and there would be little, if any, outcome. The two of us knew this, and we both sensed that we could have put our time to better use.

Just as Fred was about to put his notebook back into his briefcase and say his customary “Thank you,” I looked at him squarely and said, “Tell me, do you like your job?” Quite to my surprise, he replied, without much thought, “No, not really, but it’s a job.” Somewhat naively I responded, “If you don’t like it, why do you do it?” “For the money, of course,” he said, and then, without further questioning from me, added, “Although I really love to write, doing these little newspaper profiles frustrates me because the limitations of length and form prevent me from doing justice to my subject. How, for example, can I say something in depth about you and your ideas when I can only use 750 words to express it? . . . but what choice do I have? . . . You have to make a living. I should be happy to have at least this to do!” In his voice I heard both anger and resignation.

Suddenly it hit me that Fred was close to surrendering his dreams. He looked to me like a prisoner locked behind the bars of a society forcing him to work at something in which he didn’t believe. Looking at him, I experienced a deep sympathy—more than that I dare say—a deep love for this man. Beneath the sarcasm and the cynicism I sensed a beautiful heart, a heart that wanted to give, to create, to live a fruitful life. His sharp mind, his openness about himself and the simple trust he put in me made me feel that our meeting could not just be something accidental. What was happening between us seemed to me quite similar to what happened when Jesus looked steadily at the rich young man and “was filled with love for him” (Mark 10:21).

Quite spontaneously I felt a strong desire rise up in me to liberate him from his imprisonment and to help him to discover how to fulfill his own deepest desires.

“What do you really want?” I asked.

“I want to write a novel . . . but I’ll never be able to do it.”

“Is this something you really want?” I asked. He looked at me with surprise on his face and said with a smile, Yes, it is, . . . but I’m also afraid because I’ve never written a novel, and maybe I don’t have what it takes to be a novelist.” “How will you find out?” I asked. “Well, I probably won’t ever be able to find out. You need time, money and, most of all, talent, and I don’t have any.”

You are free to do what you want

– if, that is, you really want it!

By now I had become angry at him, at society, and, to some degree, at myself for letting things just be as they are. I felt a strong urge to break down all these walls of fear, convention, social expectations and self-deprecation, and I blurted out, “Why don’t you quit your job and write your novel?” “I can’t,” he said. . . . I kept pushing him, “If you really want it, you can do it. You don’t have to be the victim of time and money.” At this point, I realized that I had become involved in a battle I was determined to win. He sensed my intensity and said, “Well, I’m just a simple journalist, and I guess I should be content with that.” “No, you shouldn’t,” I said. “You should claim your deepest desire and do what you really want to do . . . time and money aren’t the real issue.” “What is?” he asked. “You are,” I answered. “You have nothing to lose. You are young, full of energy, well trained. . . . Everything is possible for you. . . . Why let the world squeeze you in? . . . Why become a victim? You are free to do what you want—if, that is, you really want it!”

He looked at me with increasing surprise, wondering what it was that had gotten him into this bizarre conversation. “Well,” he said, “I’d better go. . . . Maybe one day I will write my novel.”

I stopped him, not wanting to let him off so easily. “Wait, Fred, I meant what I said. Follow your desire.” With a touch of sarcasm in his voice, he said, “Sounds good to me!” I didn’t want to let him go. I realized that my own convictions were at stake. I believe that people can make choices and make them according to their own best aspirations. I also believe that people seldom make these choices. Instead, they blame the world, the society, and others for their “fate” and waste much of their life complaining. But I sensed, after our short verbal skirmish, that Fred was capable of jumping over his own fears and taking the risk of trusting himself. I knew also, however, that I had to jump first before he could, and so I said, “Fred, give up your job, come here for a year, and write your novel. I will get the money somehow.”

Later—many years later—Fred told me that, when I said this, he got very nervous and began questioning my motives. “What does this man really want of me?” he thought. “Why is he offering me money and time to write? I don’t trust this. There must be something else going on here!” But, instead of saying any of this, he only objected, “I am a Jew, and this is a Christian seminary.” I pushed his objection aside. “We will make you a scholar in residence. . . . You can do what you like. . . . People here will love having a novelist in the house, and, meanwhile, you can learn something about Christianity and Judaism too.”

A few months later, Fred came to Yale Divinity School and spent a year there trying to write his novel. It was never written, but we became close friends, and today, many years later, I am writing this book as a fruit of that friendship.

During the ten years or more that followed our time together at Yale, both Fred and I lived lives very different from what we anticipated when we first met. Fred lived through a very painful divorce; remarried; and now he and his wife, Robin, are expecting their first child. Meanwhile, he worked at different jobs, not very satisfying at first, until he found a position that offered him ample scope for the exercise of his creative abilities. My own journey was no more predictable. I left the academic world, went to Latin America, tried the academic world again and finally settled in a community with people who have a mental handicap and their assistants. There was much struggle, much pain, and much joy in both our lives, and we were able to share these experiences at length during regular visits. As time passed, we grew closer and became more and more aware of the importance of our friendship for each other, even though busyness, distance, and personal lifestyles often stood in the way of our seeing each other as much as we wanted.

From the very beginning of our friendship, we were quite conscious of our radically different religious backgrounds. At first, it seemed as if this would make it hard to support each other spiritually. Fred respected me as a Catholic priest and showed sincere interest in my life and work, but Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular were little more than one of his many objects of interest. For myself, I could quite easily understand Fred’s secular Judaism, despite my feeling that he would gain much by growing closer to his own spiritual heritage. I vividly remember once telling Fred that it would be good for him to read the Hebrew Bible. He protested, “It doesn’t speak to me. It is a strange faraway world. . . .” “Well,” I said, “read at least the Book of Qoheleth [Ecclesiastes], the one that opens with the words: ‘Vanity of vanities. . . . All is vanity.’”

The next day Fred said, “I read it. . . . I never realized that there was a place for a skeptic in the Bible . . . one of my type. . . . That’s very reassuring!” I remember thinking, “There is much more than a skeptic in you.”

As we both grew older and became a little less concerned about success, career, fame, money, and time, questions of meaning and purpose came more into the center of our relationship.

In the midst of the many changes in our lives, both of us came into closer touch with our deeper desires. Different though our circumstances were, we both had to deal with the pains of rejection and separation, and both of us realized increasingly our desire for intimacy and friendship. To avoid being drowned in bitterness and resentment, we both had to draw on our deepest spiritual resources. Differences became less important, similarities more obvious. As our friendship grew deeper and stronger, our desire for a common spiritual foundation became more explicit.

One day, while walking on Columbus Avenue in New York City, Fred turned to me and said, “Why don’t you write something about the spiritual life for me and my friends?” Fred was familiar with most of what I had written. Often he had given solid advice on form and style, but seldom did he feel connected with the content. As a Jew, living in the secular world of New York City, he couldn’t find much comfort or support in words that were so explicitly Christian and so clearly based on a long life in the church. “It is good stuff,” he often said, “but not for me.” He felt strongly that his own experience and that of his friends required another tone, another language, another spiritual wavelength.

As I gradually came to know Fred’s friends and got a feel for their interests and concerns, I better understood Fred’s remarks about the need for a spirituality that speaks to men and women in a secularized society. Much of my thinking and writing presupposed a familiarity with concepts and images that for many centuries had nourished the spiritual life of Christians and Jews, but for many people these concepts and images had lost their power to bring them into touch with their spiritual center.

Fred’s idea that I say something about the spirit that his friends and he “could hear” stayed with me. He was asking me to respond to the great spiritual hunger and thirst that exist in countless people who walk the streets of big cities. He was calling me to speak a word of hope to people who no longer came to churches or synagogues and for whom priests and rabbis were no longer the obvious counselors.

“Why don’t you write something

about the spiritual life for me and

my friends?”

“You have something to say,” Fred kept telling me, “but you keep saying it to people who least need to hear it. . . . What about us young, ambitious, secular men and women wondering what life is all about after all? Can you speak to us with the same conviction as you speak to those who share your tradition, your language, and your vision?”