Lessons in Vulnerable Love

“A SUGGESTION: Speak much about Jesus.” Henri Nouwen’s recommendation to a friend, captured in Love, Henri—a new collection of his personal correspondence—encapsulates the priest and author’s private and public ministry. More than almost any other modern figure, Nouwen bridged Catholic/Protestant doctrinal divides with his writing to bring spiritual healing and comfort, even as he wrestled with what he termed his inner “demons.”

Edited by Gabrielle Earnshaw and released in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of Nouwen’s death, Love, Henri highlights the priest’s struggle for inner peace and his extensive web of deep friendships. While the collection does not present any shocking revelations, and contains fewer transcendent moments of raw emotion than other collections of Nouwen’s writing, it works well as a meditation on what it means to love selflessly and extend oneself over a lifetime.

In the collection, Henri is both protagonist and antagonist, healing and wounding those in his life. While Nouwen himself acknowledges “a kind of enthusiasm” in his own writing that “seems a little bit too easy,” the gift is watching him participate in these seeker/giver relationships. In early letters, he is often overly attached: “Maybe your distance simply means that I force myself upon you and there is not a mutuality that makes friendship possible.” Later, though, we see him “speak about [his] inner struggles as a source of self-understanding” and solidarity, rather than a way “to avoid difficult positions and responsibility and evoke some sympathy.”

Nouwen simultaneously condemns what he views as oppressive forces within the Catholic Church and issues strong defenses for its undivided existence. Thus, the collection contains diverse grappling: a moving cry of sympathy for a woman who has felt excluded in the Eucharist; a self-aware critique of over-romanticizing those with disabilities; a plea for an activist to tread lightly in lambasting religion; a lament for a gay priest leaving the church.

This last letter—to Maurice Monette, who married a man and left the priesthood—presents a helpful look at Nouwen’s treatment of sexuality. “The time has come for people like you and me,” he says to Maurice, “to call each other to a new way of faithfulness ... that allows us to live in the church without feeling oppressed by the church.” Nouwen’s attitude toward his own sexuality appears as a work in progress throughout the collection. In 1988, he writes to a pastoral care leader in charge of a “reorientation” ministry for those with same-sex attraction that he has “been trying to really enter into the furnace of God’s love ... to really let God heal me.” Later, though, in 1995, he comforts his gay friend Everet: “Trust that Jesus loves you so much that he will send to you the man you are waiting for ... Your sexuality is your gift.”

Our understanding of Nouwen is frustratingly limited in these revealing sections by one of the shortcomings of this collection: the exclusion of letters written to Nouwen. Without seeing the questions, pain, and friendship of those addressing him, the most intriguing sections of the book are often cut short. For instance, letters in 1986 reveal Nouwen’s passion and romantic overtones to his friend Nathan Ball: “Your love for me has given you a knowledge of me that nobody has ever had,” he writes. But then the letters stop, right at the point of their break in friendship.

The letters to Ball, as well as their gaps, speak to this collection’s central inquiry: Can we be truly happy without a soulmate? “Of course,” the celibate Nouwen would say; in God is found an intimacy that surpasses any human relationship. But the question is less about faith, surprisingly, and more about human companionship: Can temporary love, added up and enjoyed in different seasons from different people, equal a marriage commitment?

Earnshaw leaves the question unresolved, but the love, tenderness, and good exuded by Nouwen in these letters make it a joy to ponder. His life is worth examining.