Posts tagged: Henri Nouwen
“The feeling of being abandoned is always around the corner. I keep being surprised at how quickly it rears its ugly head. Yesterday I experienced that nasty feeling in my innermost being. Just raw anxiety, seemingly disconnected from anything. I kept asking myself, ‘Why are you so restless, why are you so anxious, why are you so ill at ease, why do you feel so lonely and abandoned?’
I called and put a message on Nathan’s voice mail. Soon he called back and said that he would call again in the evening so that we could have ample time to talk.
Talking lessened my anxiety and I felt peaceful again. No one can ever heal this wound, but when I can talk about it with a good friend I feel better.
What to do with this inner wound that is so easily touched and starts bleeding again? It is such a familiar wound. It has been with me for many years. I don’t think this wound — this immense need for affection, and this immense fear of rejection — will ever go away. It is there to stay, but maybe for a good reason. Perhaps it is a gateway to my salvation, a door to glory, and a passage to freedom!
I am aware that this wound of mine is a gift in disguise. These many short but intense experiences of abandonment lead me to the place where I’m learning to let go of fear and surrender my spirit into the hands of the One whose acceptance has no limits. I am deeply grateful to Nathan and to my other friends who know me and are willing to bind my wounds so that, instead of bleeding to death, I can walk on to the full life.”
— Henri J. M. Nouwen, Sabbatical Journey: The Diary of His Final Year
“There is much mental suffering in our world. But some of it is suffering for the wrong reason because it is born out of the false expectation that we are called to take each other’s loneliness away. When our loneliness drives us away from ourselves into the arms of our companions in life, we are, in fact, driving ourselves into excruciating relationships, tiring relationships and suffocating embraces. To wait for moments or places where no pain exists, no separation is felt and where all human restlessness has turned into inner peace is waiting for a dreamworld. No friend or lover, no husband or wife, no community or commune will be able to put to rest our deepest cravings for unity and wholeness. And by burdening others with these divine expectations, of which we ourselves are often only partially aware, we might inhibit the expression of free friendship and love and evoke instead feelings of inadequacy and weakness. Friendship and love cannot develop in the form of an anxious clinging to each other. They ask for gentle fearless space in which we can move to and from each other. As long as our loneliness brings us together with the hope that together we no longer will be alone, we castigate each other with our unfulfilled and unrealistic desires for oneness, inner tranquility and the uninterrupted experience of communion.
It is sad to see how sometimes people suffering from loneliness, often deepened by the lack of affection in their intimate family circle, search for a final solution for their pains and look at a new friend, a new lover or a new community with Messianic expectations. Although their mind knows about their self-deceit, their hearts keep saying, ‘Maybe this time I have found what I have knowingly or unknowingly been searching for.’ It is indeed amazing at first sight that men and women who have had such distressing relationships with their parents, brothers or sisters can throw themselves blindly into relationships with far-reaching consequences in the hope that from now on things will be totally different.”
— Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
“In 1947, the great English poet W. H. Auden wrote a letter to his friend Ursula Niebuhr in which he confessed: ‘I don’t think I’m over-anxious about the future, though I do quail a bit before the possibility that it will be lonely. When I see you surrounded by family and its problems, I alternate between self-congratulation and bitter envy.’ The root of Auden’s fear of loneliness and his envy of the comforts of family is not hard to uncover: Auden was a homosexual Christian. And this dual identity created a tension for him: As a Christian of a relatively traditional sort, he believed homosexuality missed the mark of God’s good design for human flourishing. But as a homosexually oriented person, despite his Christian beliefs, he craved intimacy and companionship with other men. Caught on the horns of a dilemma like that, what was he to do with his loneliness?
Four years before writing to Niebuhr, Auden corresponded with another friend, Elizabeth Mayer. He described to her how he felt inescapably ‘different’ from others because of his preference for same-sex relations: ‘There are days when the knowledge that there will never be a place which I can call home, that there will never be a person with whom I shall be one flesh, seems more than I can bear.’
I am drawn to these haunting confessions of Auden’s because I, too, am a homosexual Christian. Since puberty, I’ve been conscious of an exclusive attraction to persons of my own sex. Though I have never been in a gay relationship as Auden was, I have also never experienced the ‘healing’ or transformation of my sexual orientation that some formerly gay Christians profess to have received. But I remain a Christian, a follower of Jesus. And, like Auden, I accept the Christian teaching that homosexuality is a tragic sign that things are ‘not the way they’re supposed to be.’ Reading New Testament texts like Romans 1:26-27 and 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 through the lens of time-honored Christian reflection on the meaning and purpose of marriage between a man and a woman, I find myself—much as I might wish things to be otherwise—compelled to abstain from homosexual practice.
As a result, I feel, more often than not, desperately lonely.
In recent years I have made it a point to read as many biographies of homosexual Christians as I can find. (‘We read to know we’re not alone,’ as the characters in the movie Shadowlands say.) Invariably, they talk about loneliness.
Henri Nouwen, to take one example, the late Catholic priest and popular author on spirituality who was also a celibate gay man, wrote this in one of his last journal entries before his death: ‘[I have an] inner wound that is so easily touched and starts bleeding again… I don’t think this wound—this immense need for affection, and this immense fear of rejection—will ever go away.’
Philip Yancey describes the reason for Nouwen’s loneliness:
[Knowing about his homosexuality,] I go back through Nouwen’s writings and sense the deeper, unspoken agony that underlay what he wrote about rejection, about the wound of loneliness that never heals, about friendships that never satisfy…. Nouwen sought counseling from a center that ministered to homosexual men and women, and he listened as gay friends proposed several options. He could remain a celibate priest and ‘come out’ as a gay man, which would at least release the secret he bore in anguish. He could declare himself, leave the priesthood, and seek a gay companion. Or he could remain a priest publicly and develop private gay relationships. Nouwen carefully weighed each course and rejected it. Any public confession of his identity would hurt his ministry, he feared. The last two options seemed impossible for one who had taken a vow of celibacy, and who looked to the Bible and to Rome for guidance on sexual morality. Instead, he decided to keep living with the wound. Again and again, he decided.
Yancey concludes, poignantly: ‘I know of no more difficult path for a person of integrity to tread.’
The same theme—loneliness—is sounded over and over in the biographies of homosexual Christians I’ve read. Auden’s, Nouwen’s, many others’ I can’t name here—it comes up in all of them. And it is my experience.
Perhaps the greatest unresolved question of my life is, How can I give and receive love, how can I experience intimacy and mutual self-giving commitment, if I am not permitted to marry a person of the gender to which I am attracted?
With every year that passes, I realize more and more that I don’t want to live life on my own. More than anything, I would like to have a life partner. But I keep circling back to the conclusion Nouwen arrived at: fulfilling that desire seems impossible, so long as I continue looking to Scripture to guide my moral choices.”
— Wesley Hill, “A Few Like You”: Will the Church be the Church for Homosexual Christians?
