Safe in God’s Heart

FELLOW PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS in Nijmegen in 1957 thought initially that newly ordained Henri Nouwen wanted to cultivate important people. “We misunderstood,” recalls one. “Henri was genuinely interested in people. We didn’t notice that he was as interested in the janitor or groundskeeper as he was in the important people we were watching.”

Nearly 40 years later, this was still recognizably Henri Nouwen: eager to cultivate people of all lands, to really know them, to help them take root and grow, to nurture and nourish anyone he met.

HENRI FIRST CAME to the United States as a ship’s chaplain in his 20s, and gradually became a well-known spiritual author, teacher, and speaker. He was a hugely popular professor at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard, traveling widely, his influence extending to people of many faiths. He was never a cloistered academic.

Even so, it was remarkably courageous 10 years ago when Henri moved to L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Many members of L’Arche do not read, so Henri was choosing to live where his reputation meant nothing. His restless soul longed for a home where people would be less interested in his credentials than in who he was.

He found it: Everyone at Daybreak was interested in a 55-year-old priest of such brilliance who seemed unable to make a sandwich; who totaled a new car driving it away from the dealership; who spoke with his giant hands flailing and his whole gangly body quivering with his desire to communicate; whose Dutch accent could offer a whole meditation on “face” and only halfway in would we catch on that he was speaking of faith ; who might in a single week be giving talks on three continents; whose friends came hitch-hiking and in private planes; who loved to dance with the community’s children at liturgies; who willingly shared in his 30-some books details of his inner life that most of us would cringe to admit, much less publish! Daybreak met a deep need in the heart of someone very gifted and very broken, wonderful in his capacity for friendship and insatiable in his need for friendship.

Just as Daybreak loved Henri, he grew to love Daybreak. He developed a deep friendship with Adam Arnett (1961-1996), a man who never spoke a word. Henri describes that relationship in his forthcoming book, Adam (Orbis Books). Henri continued to accept speaking engagements, but rarely traveled without members of the community to speak with him. “People won’t remember a word I said,” he reflected, “but they’ll remember that Bill Van Buren and I stood here as friends and equals and spoke together.”

Once an audience of several thousand people was hanging silently on to his every word. As he reached the climax of his insights, Bill leaned over and spoke into the microphone: “I’ve heard that before.” It totally exploded the suspense. Henri loved to tell that story.

Henri drew out gifts in others with boundless confidence and creativity. When he’d been at Daybreak for four years, and Eucharist was becoming increasingly central in our worship, he thought of a low Communion table, large enough for lots of cups and flowers, low enough for people sitting on the floor to see. This was very Henri, attentive to community gathering and hunger, wanting everyone to be included and welcome.

The next stage of the project was also very Henri. He asked Joe Child at the Daybreak Woodery to design and build the table, then grew quite impatient and puzzled when the Woodery worked away at it gradually between its business contracts. He wanted it immediately!

When it was finally done, it was beautifully designed and crafted beyond Henri’s wildest hopes. He was delighted, grateful, eager for Joe to talk about the process of making it. Joe spoke of how the beautiful cherrywood pieced together was reject wood in the corner of a lumber yard—wood deemed too warped or damaged to be useful. The Woodery brought it back, and together built it into our Communion table. And that stage of the project too was Henri—eager for Joe to voice the story, eager to give credit to the Woodery, deeply grateful and pleased. It’s not Henri’s table; it’s our Communion table.

AT PRECISELY 8:30 a.m., having already written a dozen letters and met with someone, Henri could rush through the chapel onto the sacristy, struggle into his alb, fling on his stole so that the tassel at the back stuck up over his ear, dash back to sit, hastily begin a prayerful song off-key, then offer us a heartfelt homily about the importance of solitude, the place of quiet attentiveness where we hear God call our name, hear God call us beloved ones.

We loved this in Henri. He lived a chaotic emotional life that most of us can relate to, filled with yearnings, gratitude, insecurities, distractions, and delights, and he kept trying to see the larger meaning of that life, kept returning to the things he knew to be true about solitude and community, forgiveness, friendship, and love.

Henri didn’t want anyone to live a gray life, a life without color, passion, conviction. He challenged lives that had become routine, deadening, urging people to listen to their yearning hearts. One of Henri’s last homilies spoke of how a spiritual message is to be heard by a spiritual people—and Henri’s burning conviction was that we are all spiritual people. Every aspect of our lives, no matter how broken, confused, violent, or incoherent, is available for God to reveal to us how beloved we are.

Yet Henri couldn’t ever quite trust totally that he was beloved, truly at home. So the gift and struggle of his life remained intertwined, his insecurity and fear generating the gift of an enormous compassion for every other human being. We joked that Henri wrote the same book over and over, and that’s true, because Henri longed to offer a message of love and home that he both could and couldn’t believe, writing it again and again as he ongoingly glimpsed it and lost it, always finding new images to help people see God’s love and freedom—images like bread broken and shared, an empty church, open hands, clowning, circuses, mirrors, dancing, homecoming.

In his recent book, Can You Drink the Cup?, Henri urged readers not to be afraid of the raw material of our lives: “When each of us can hold firm to our own cup, with its many sorrows and joys, claiming it as our unique life, then we too can lift it up for others to see and encourage them to lift up their lives as well. The wounds of our individual lives, which seem intolerable when lived alone, become sources of healing when we live them as part of a fellowship of mutual care.” Henri spoke from experience, trusting that the truth of his often difficult life would help others.

IT WAS New Year’s Eve 1992 when Maurice Goldman died. There had been no deaths in our community for 10 years. The grief was enormous. Moe was a gentle man with Downs Syndrome and a wicked sense of humor, who did a fabulous imitation of Henri by turning his glasses upside down and waving his hands in Henri-like style.

Moe was buried on a bleak, cold, January afternoon: His Anglican priest, dressed all in black, read the simple, eloquent committal prayers commending his body to the earth. When those finished, Henri looked around at the dejected, cold little group of mourners and couldn’t stand “dust to dust” to be the final word for us. He literally leaped over Moe’s casket, plaid scarf flying, tweed cap askew, to stand beside his friend the Anglican priest and deliver an impassioned testimony to the resurrection—that while Moe’s body would return to the earth, his heart was already safe in God’s heart, forever.

We remembered this four years later, as we stood together to return Henri’s body to the earth. We shoveled hard, wet clay. His 93-year-old father threw in the first shovelful, and it dropped six feet to hit the casket with a loud resonant thud. So did the next, and the next, as we each took turns.

Gradually, imperceptibly, earth was landing on earth with a gentler sound. We held onto each other as Henri’s body returned to the natural cycles of life, and knew that his heart was safe with the God he longed for so long.

When this article appeared, Carolyn Whitney-Brown was a writer, artist, workshop leader, and spiritual director who was a member of L’Arche Daybreak with her husband, Geoff and their three children. (Parts of this article appeared in Toronto’s The Globe and Mail.)