a beautiful book with so much truth

I love Henri Nouwen from Reaching Out and the The Wounded Healer, and even from this book, although I'm torn about how I really feel about it.

Some passages were pure gems. He talks many times about being aware of others' inability to hold our pain, and how it leads to us feeling rejected and even isolated. I loved his take on growing away from the need to tell your "story", the need to see your past as an explanation of your present...and that you can grow away from the duality of "before and now". You really are not your past!

Nouwen's main point is that God's love is what we ultimately seek when we think we seek communion with others, who can never be all we need. What Nouwen is actually talking about (but doesn't realize) is how self-love is the real savior of our souls, and that no external thing can substitute our soul's need for deep self-love. This of course is all explained through the religious lens of needing God's love during times of despair. Translating this language into a paradigm that made sense to me was tiresome, although I did know what I was getting myself into when reading a Christian writer. (This may be beside the point, but I feel bad for religious people who use God as a smoke screen for self-love. They give no credence to the soul's need to love itself, but instead use "God" as a stand-in.)

I did not dislike this book at all. It just broke my heart. Because the fact is that...it's all rather irrelevant. When you look at WHY Henri went through this Dark Night at all...it was not an inescapable part of the human experience one must overcome through deep epiphanies. Here's the fact of the matter:
Henri Nouwen was gay, but in the closet. He committed himself to a life of celibacy--only for religious purposes, of course--and he was miserable. That's the reality. I believe vows of celibacy are a heartbreaking practice born of a sinister, gangrenous judgment that originates from shame. Celibacy is a cruel and unusual punishment, and it destroys people. It is unnatural and unhealthy, and it makes people fucking crazy. I can only conclude that Henri made the celibate vow because he saw no way out of his sexuality--he could not openly be gay due to the time period he lived and presumably his Christian beliefs. So he hid who he was, fell in impossible love (euphemistically called "close friendships") and was, as any human being would be in his situation, completely depressed.

Henri, no one ever asked you to do that.

The fact is, none of this is spiritual. Which is what makes it so heartbreaking. You have someone who cannot ever be their true self--in fact feels shame about who they are--and then spends their life fighting the inevitable depression that comes with that, as the life they want deep down passes them by. They then have to write a book about this mysterious anguish, all the while coaching themself that their most intrinsically human needs are really just a need for more love from God. It ain't. Ultimately, this is really just a coping strategy in the midst of being unable to meet one's needs...you tell yourself that >every< need you have can be met through spiritual union. This is really a strategy to gain some illusion of control over that which seems out of your control. Though of course what's >actually< in your control is coming out and saying, "This is who I am." But that's out of the question, I guess.

It is a sad, sad thing to see someone who has deluded themselves into seeing every unmet need they have as a lack of spirituality. Fact: you're never going to reach a place of transcendence so ethereal that it nullifies your real needs for human companionship and love. Just admit that you're a human being!

He says that the friendship he lost ended because he expected too much from this person. I don't believe that. (People don't always have accurate views of their own experiences because of denial, coping mechanisms, etc.) I think Henri was a fucking normal person who needed, like anyone else, to have a life companion. He had to say that he was needy and demanding of this person to make sense of his heartbreak; to blame himself, to give some sort of explanation for why it ended. Explanations make us feel more in control.

The whole thing is just heartbreaking. This isn't to say that people don't experience these times of despair in their lives due to something else besides loneliness, although his particular story and road home would seem to lend itself to others who also experience deep loneliness.

My real response to this book is not about this book at all. It is to tell people: showing up as your authentic self is the only way to freedom. Loneliness is normal when you're alone. You deserve the companionship you desire. The companionship you desire is normal. You don't need to transcend your feelings of loneliness--there's nothing wrong with you. Ask yourself what you need, and try to love yourself in the heartache. Yes, companionship makes life better.

“But I have heard the inner voice of love, deeper and stronger than ever. I want to keep trusting in that voice and be led by it beyond the boundaries of my short life, to where God is all in all.”

Many, many thoughts and feelings about this book. Perhaps Goodreads isn’t the place for all of them. Nonetheless, these pages spoke with love to me along my own journey through anguish to freedom. For that, I am grateful.

Thank you, Henri Nouwen, for sharing your “secret journal” with me. Thank you, Katie Heckel, for recommending this to me and countless other Wesley Foundation folks.

The introduction implores the reader to take this book slowly. I have been reading this off and on for a while and I will say taking it slowly has helped me grasp the truth as well as pray and reflect on the themes Nouwen brings up in my own life.

made me cry and gave me hope. highly recommend for anyone going through a difficult time

This is a book to be read and absorbed in small doses. It is a deeply personal and very honest book written during a time of great pain. But it is a hopeful book. It's as though Nouwen is writing to himself from place of hope. My sense is that, through effective advice and sheer force of will, Nouwen imagined a place of hope from which he could write to himself sitting in despair. From this imagined place, Nouwen looks back and sees a path to wholeness, a path to an existential, a real place of hope.

As is the case with all truths, there is no chronological to do list that gets you there. Instead, there are markers, guideposts, lodestars. By careful reading and thougtful discernment, we can benefit fromthese markers, guideposts and lodestarts to find our own path to wholeness.

This book is essential reading!

"God's love is all the love you need, and it reveals to you the love of God in the other. So the God in you can speak to the God in the other. This is deep speaking to deep, a mutuality in the heart of God, who embraces both of you."

"You have to begin to trust that your experience of emptiness is not the final experience, that beyond it is a place where you are being held in love. As long as you do not trust that place beyond your emptiness, you cannot safely reenter the place of pain. So you have to go into the place of your pain with the knowledge in your heart that you have already found the new place. You have already tasted some of its fruits. The more roots you have in the new place, the more capable you are of mourning the loss of the old place and letting go of the pain that lies there. You cannot mourn something that has not died."

Healing, hopeful

This book is excellent for anyone who is going through the pain of rejection, abandonment, self-doubt or feelings of worthlessness. You do not need to be Christian to recognize Nouwen's universal truths. Every small chapter, or "spiritual imperative" is a gem, worth highlighting in its entirety. I read this book once through, and then went back through slowly to highlight particularly helpful passages. Now I am eager to retreat for awhile, to do the solitary work I must do to become whole.

Imagine that a priest, writer, and professor with great spiritual wisdom underwent a spiritual collapse. What would he tell himself in these “dark nights of the soul”? What kind of wisdom would he apply to his own life after fifty years of theoretical and practical investigation of his relationship with God? When at the edge of despair, what would he remember the most?

Henri Nouwen’s personal spiritual journal of the most difficult period of his life reads just like that – these are deeply personal reflections of what he knows he needs to seek after in himself, his relationships with others, and his relationship with God, and the small steps that he takes to make it through his journey. It is so personal that Nouwen himself refused the urgings of friends to publish it and did not give the okay until shortly before his death, eight years after the events in question. While the imperatives contained here are clearly meant for the very specific struggles that Nouwen was himself dealing with, every honest spiritual seeker will be able to find some of his own struggles in Nouwen’s struggles and some deep wisdom in the words Nouwen wrote to himself during this time. This is not a book to be read through in a few sittings – it is something to take one day at a time, reflecting deeply on what it has to say.

As I said in another review, this book had a powerful impact on me in conjunction with Brennan Manning's Ruthless Trust.
I have profited from all Nouwen's books, but this and The Return of the Prodigal have been the most important.

هذا الكتاب لا يُقرأ لمرة واحدة ولا يصح له القراءة السريعة , فكلما احسست بالضجر أو انتباتك المخاوف توجه للفور لهذا الكتاب و الهج في كلامته حتماً ستتغير الأمور.

I really like Henri Nouwen and felt sad that I did not connect with this book as much as others of his that I’ve read. Maybe because it was so personal for him or because of the style. Still enjoyed and can imagine how it does really resonate with some people