Reaching Out by henri j.m. nouwen

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Doesn’t feel right to rank this one with the star-system; a good quiet read, especially the first two sections on loneliness/solitude and hostility/hospitality; Nouwen’s books repeat themselves often and also state the obvious, but I always find surprising new gems in his simple-seeming books.

Been thinking a lot about my philosophy of teaching lately, and he says beautiful things here about teacher as host, class as a space of hospitality: “A good host is the one who believes that his guest is carrying a promise he wants to reveal to anyone who shows genuine interest. It is so easy to impress students with books they have not read, with terms they have not heard, or with situations with which they are unfamiliar. It is much more difficult to be a receiver who can help the students to distinguish carefully between the wheat and the weeds in their own lives and to show the beauty of the gifts they are carrying with them.” (87)

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GanSan

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Story:
While Aryssa was away in California, I would walk to the park alone and sit on a bench beneath the trees. For two weeks I listened to the same birds, read the same book, and received a daily Howyadoing from a man walking his dog. I would end the day by calling Aryssa and reading passages from Reaching Out to her, telling her how Nouwen, more than any other author, knows my heart-cry, and that the book was doing a real number on me. Our call usually ended with her saying that she looked forward to hearing more tomorrow, after I spent more time in my "Contemplation Station" (her nickname for my bench). I loved that time, even though I missed Aryssa. Richard Rohr says that we enter spiritual maturity through great love and great suffering. While my love for Aryssa is small and my suffering from her absence was even smaller--that time beneath the trees, reading Nouwen and missing Aryssa, matured me into a more sensitive, attentive person, and I'm so thankful for it.

Review:
I won't review this book for the same reason I won't review Thomas Merton's books. They're too special to name or analyze. I consider Reaching Out on par with Rowan Williams' Being Series, Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation and Thoughts in Solitude, as well as the mystical Catholic text The Cloud of Unknowing. Those books, as of now, form the tapestry of my faith, and I recommend them to everyone!

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Komato-kun

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

What a book! Nouwen's writing on the movement from loneliness to solitude was so convicting. A bit "disconcertingly vague" at times, as my mother would put it, but overall a wonderful little book for spiritual growth.

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Inferno792

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Simply beautiful. ‘Reaching Out’ has easily become a favorite of mine. Chapters 5 and 8 were particularly practical. I would certainly recommend this for anyone in a pastoral role, but also for anyone who is interested in growing in their spiritual life with Christ.

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We-are-all-crazy

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Though I haven't read much Nouwen, my experience of this book is reminiscent of my experience of his book With Open Hands, which I read at the end of 2021.

I already feel inclined toward Nouwen for two reasons. One, his writing, especially his journals and letters, has lastingly formed my dad's thinking and feeling as a Christian psychologist. Second, I'm often dissatisfied with how I hear both his fans and critics speak of his writing. Their responses mirror many readers' responses to Shusaku Endo. Nouwen receives both shameless flak and effusive praise, and while those are seemingly opposed responses, I think they converge in their tendency to sentimentalize him. Similarly, Endo is often subject to thin, watery readings, with people swift to assume his heterodoxy, both affirmatively and censoriously.

I'm not saying that everyone has these two men wrong or that I have finally unearthed long submerged secrets of their writing. I have found Nouwen sentimental and Endo heterodox. But I think their reputations often loom too largely for clear-minded readings. It took me several poor readings of Endo to begin reading him more maturely (and only after I had read others' mature thoughts on his writing).

I say all this precisely because I thought this book would be too sentimental, and it knocked my ever-loving socks off. It's been a while since a spiritual work so easily mapped onto my life. Already a reassuring experience, this mapping is even more comforting because Henri writes in the acknowledgement, "This book is closer to me than anything I have written."

Nouwen wants to know what it means to live a spiritual life, a life in the Spirit. The spiritual life is, of course (though I often forget this), always life. He wants to know how we can move beyond "our inner restlessness, our mixed feelings toward others, and our deep seated suspicions about the absence of God." These are the three movements:

loneliness to solitude
hostility to hospitality
illusion to prayer

A seemingly contrived structure that Nouwen thoughtfully holds together. It makes head and heart sense.

I don't want to bombard this review with quotes because the book has a cumulative effect. Bits and pieces won't quite work. The third section only arises out of the first and second. Still, I'll conclude with one of his thoughts on our failures of hospitality. Nouwen captures how our gatherings—at church, at work, at home—can fail to open up our lives to one another:

"Most people keep encouraging each other to keep their body and mind in constant motion. From a distance, it appears that we try to keep each other filled with words and actions, without tolerance for a moment of silence. Hosts often feel that they have to talk all the time to their guests and entertain them with things to do, places to see, and people to visit. But by filling up every empty corner and occupying every empty time their hospitality becomes more oppressing than revealing" (73).

In constant motion and speech, we don't allow our guests the space necessary for the "[artificial] distinction between host and guest" to "evaporate." I think my friends Joel and Grace have figured out how to avoid this. Almost every Sunday, they open up their home after church, and it has become a place where "guests" can enter in and, because the space is sufficiently open, we can eventually open up our lives to one another.

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Mason216

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

The late Henri Nouwen's works are always worth reading. I was surprised, however, when this book seemed to start off slowly for me. As I got into it, I realized that the first two "movements" of the book's title promise, "The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life," relate to things I've gone through some time ago (though I probably will again). The movement from loneliness to solitude is something that I've dealt with since I was a lonely / solitary child. The movement from hostility to hospitality has been a lifelong pursuit and one that I encourage now in others. But the movement from illusion to prayer got me right where I live.

As with his other books that I've read, Nouwen's writing here is full of simple wisdom, helpful illustrations, and poignant memories. His relatively early death has been a loss to all those who seek the spiritual path.

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FurankuSan

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Thoughtful and thought-provoking. I appreciate the somewhat juxtaposed realism and spirituality. Nouwen's voice is honest and therapeutic. He doesn't pretend life is easy; he responds to loneliness, hostility, and illusion, with succinct direction towards God.

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Idiotman

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Key idea: Nouwen teaches us how to convert our loneliness into solitude and our solitude into healing action.

First Movement: We are lonely as a society and we mask our loneliness by busyness. As Nouwen says, “We must find the courage to enter into the desert of loneliness and change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude” (Nouwen 34). Solitude allows us to listen to and enter into the troubles of others.

Love protects “and respects the aloneness of the other and creates a free space where he can convert his loneliness into solitude” (44).

Second movement: From Hostility to Hospitality

Hospitality is “a fundamental attitude toward our fellow human being” (67). It is a “creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy” (71).

Indeed, we resist these “open spaces,” those moments in which we have nothing to do

Nouwen has some good criticisms of the bureacratizing of education, though he would probably be horrified even more at today’s standardization model. In education we often give “solutions without the existence of a question” (85). Rather, the best thing I can do is a teacher is open a space for my students to grow.

Healing: “healing means, first of all, the creation of an empty but friendly space where those who suffer can tell their story to someone who can listen with real attention” (95). “We let strangers become sensitive and obedient to their own stories” (96). It is the “receiving and full understanding of the story so that strangers can recognize in the eyes of their host their own unique way that leads them to the present and suggests the direction in which to go.”

Lonely people cannot create the free spae they need.

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Reaching Out

henri j.m. nouwen gerard w. hughes

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henri j.m. nouwen

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