Buying this in bulk so I can give everyone I know a copy.

“… a step toward the platform where the father embraces his kneeling son. It is the place of light, the place of truth, the place of love. It is the place where I so much want to be, but am so fearful of being. It is the place where I will receive all I desire, all the I ever hoped for, all that I will ever need, but it is also the place where I have to let go of all I most want to hold on to. It is the place that confronts me with the fact that truly accepting love, forgiveness, and healing is often much hard than giving it. It is the place beyond earning, deserving, and rewarding. It is the place of surrender and complete trust.”

Amazing book. Personally impacted how a parable in the Bible that is well known and I have read often can be taught again with such weight and poignancy.

Talks quite a bit about the prodigal son painting by Rembrandt so kinda have to like art history for that. Conclusion chapter about the father and our call to be most like him is what pushed it to 5 stars.

Also, epilogue is amazing because the author is a priest who wrote this book while living in a L’arche community and has some incredibly profound points about disabilities, intelligence, joy, and grief.

Perhaps a Holy Saturday story — of an expectant father with two wayward sons searching far and wide for what can only be found at home.

So much of the time it feels like Nouwen is writing about my life as much as his own. So far, this is yet another example.

Beautiful book that for me needed to be soaked up slowly. 3-4 months for me to read 140 pages. After finishing, and claiming no expertise in the matter, I'm going to say all pastors should read this book.

Why? Because of this conclusion: "Our community is full of wayward and angry children, and being surrounded by peers gives a sense of solidarity. Yet the longer I am part of the community, the more that solidarity proves to be only a way station on the road to a much more lonely destination: the loneliness of the Father, the loneliness of God, the ultimate loneliness of compassion."

The more I read Nouwen, the more I am impressed with his ability to conclude profoundly, leading me empathetically and subtly through knowledge of myself to surprising conclusions about who I can and should become.
Thanks again, Henri.

In short, Nouwen gets it. This book is chalk full of wisdom and truth about the Christian life. 10/10 would recommend.
“Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “how am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.”

The Futile, Powerless God of Henri Nouwen

"Today I personally believe that while Jesus came to open the door to God's house, all human beings can walk through that door, whether they know about Jesus or not. Today I see it as my call to help every person claim his or her own way to God." – Henri Nouwen

The parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 used to be my favorite Bible passage. Until a contemplative mystic priest named Henri Nouwen ruined it for me.

Several years ago, I wrote about my brief encounter with "contemplative Christianity", which I was introduced to through the works of Brennan Manning, Richard Foster, and Basil Pennington. Although I was a much younger Christian and could not discern that their practices of "inner seeing" and "hearing" God were not biblical (through trance-like meditation, extreme fasting, repetition of mantras, "breath prayers" and other mystical practices), I started to get the sense that something was just "off" about it all. Naturally, unbiblical practice and adding "spiritual disciplines" (that have more in common with paganism than Scripture) will shape one's theology.

These men, and many more like them - Thomas Merton; Henri Nouwen; David G. Benner - claimed to be Christians at one time, (gradually transitioning to a theistic Buddhism - Merton converted entirely to Buddhism while still a Catholic monk) but in fact their theology has more in common with Eastern religions than Christianity. Christian mysticism is itself an oxymoron - see CARM (Christian Apologetics Research Ministry) or Gotquestions.org for more info about contemplative spirituality, and it's connection with the New Age.

Contemplative prayer, by design, focuses on having a mystical experience with God. It was while reading one of Benner's books, "The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call of Self-Discovery" that God gave me a wake-up call. I began what would become a 10-year journey, researching theistic philosophies such as pantheism, panentheism, universal salvation, trancendental meditation (which contemplatives call "the silence"), etc. Another four years of theological training to become a biblical counselor helped solidify my ability to "test all things", and compare teachings to the Bible's clear teaching.

Nevertheless, it was with some anticipation that I picked up Henri Nouwen's "The Return of the Prodigal Son" recentlyon the recommendation of a friend. A meditation (in the Christian sense of the word!) on Rembrandt's famous painting, I settled in to enjoy the sensitive priest's insights into this beautiful picture of God's love.

As I began reading, two things emerged by the end of the Introduction: Nouwen was a man who sincerely loved the Lord and His people. And, he was firmly in the contemplative/mystical camp (a fact I already knew), but the casual reader, unfamiliar with the New Age terminology used by contemplatives, might not pick that up. Words may be ascribed different meanings by different people, which makes doctrinal error so slippery. I began to take notes.

The Good, the Bad, and the Blasphemous

There was much that was very, very good in "Prodigal Son". There was nothing mystical in his analysis and personal reflection on the painting per se, or in how he inserted himself into the parable - to identify with each of the three main characters. Many of his points about grace, accepting forgiveness, and the unconditional love of the Father were excellent, especially coming from a Catholic writer. “More than any other story in the Gospel, the parable of the Prodigal Son expresses the boundlessness of God’s compassionate love. And when I place myself in that story under the light of that divine love, it becomes painfully clear that leaving home is much closer to my spiritual experience than I might have thought.” Nouwen deeply sought fellowship with Christ. The problem, as evidenced by his faulty theology, is that he was seeking it in broken cisterns - not in the Word of God.

Before the end of the first section, a study on the younger son himself, Nouwen referred to "inner light", "inner seeing", and "inner healing". All of these may sound like fairly benign terms to one unfamiliar with mysticism, but they all point towards the "going within to find enlightenment" theophostic philosophy taken from Eastern religions. (Christianity, by contrast, teaches us that we need a new spirit and a new heart - and to look to Jesus). In all of the ways Nouwen mentioned how he "heard from God" - most notably, "in the center of [his] being", he never once mentioned the Bible. For even an immature believer, this should be a major red flag - the way God specifically reveals Himself to us is through His Word. Not through mystical means, which are condemned in Scripture (Deut. 18:9-12a).

The vast majority of what Nouwen wrote about our propensity to "flee to the wilderness", away from God's love, and the thought-patterns (insecurity; pride; comparison and jealousy) that harden our hearts was excellent. His insights into the human condition and how we relate to God rivaled those of any Reformed biblical counselor. I would just start to relax and enjoy the book when I would be blind-sided by a heretical statement such as "Judas sold the sword of his sonship" (and thus lost his salvation), or "I am touching here the mystery that Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake.”

A Powerless God?

According to Nouwen, God is "powerless" to prevent His children's rebellion (p. 90); "naive" (p. 99); "both Father and Mother" (p. 94); "she" and "her" (p. 96); "needs me as much as I need Him" (p.99) and the real sin is "ignoring [our] 'original goodness' (p. 101). The final section of the book, on the Father, is where Nouwen's faulty view of God became most apparent and the entire analysis fell apart.

Let's compare Henri Nouwen's god with the God of Scripture. Sovereignty means that God, as the ruler of the Universe, has the right to do whatever he wants. He is in complete control over everything that happens. (Psalm 115:3; Daniel 4:35; Romans 9:20.) He has no need of anything outside of Himself; and He is not standing like a beggar, hat in hand, needful of our love (as is the case with Nouwen's god.)

Further, Nouwen's idealistic view that ALL are children of God and have "original goodness" completely contradicts what Scripture states about unregenerate man: Abominable – Rev. 21:8 Sinners – Rev. 22:15 Fault finders – Job 41 Corrupt – Psalm 14:1,3; Rom. 3:10 Evil – 2 Tim 3:13 (just to name a few unsavory characteristics).

Perhaps most bizarre was Nouwen's dogged insistence - straight out of Wiccan and New Age belief systems - that God is feminine as well as masculine; both Mother and Father. The Bible clearly teaches that God is Father; it's not really open to debate or interpretation.

The Price of Error

False teaching is often hard to spot, precisely because it sounds so good. It's usually mixed in with just enough Truth to be palatable. But to anyone with a strong grasp of Scripture, the problem with Nouwen's doctrine - especially his view of salvation and the nature of God - should have been obvious. (I had deliberately NOT shared my personal opinion while pointing out the book's shortcomings, but followed a clear-cut format: "Nouwen says: X. The Bible says:Y.") Scripture speaks for itself.

How can Bible-believing Christians, when faced with such clear-cut instances of deviant theology, not spot the error? We should be horrified by Nouwen's powerless God; rejection of original sin and depravity of man; universal salvation (many paths lead to God), and blasphemous statements that God is "Mother" and Christ "became the Prodigal Son"? It is willful deception that, when shown the clear words of Scripture, rejects them for the sake of defending the heretic. I will never be able to read Luke 15 again without the bitter taste of false teaching in my mouth.

I don't think I've found an author who speaks directly to my soul the way that Nouwen does.

"I knew that I would never be able to live the great commandment to love without allowing myself to be loved without conditions or prerequisites" (14).

"I leave home every time I lose faith in the voice that calls me the Beloved and follow the voices that offer a great variety of ways to win the love I so much desire" (40).

"As long as I keep running about asking: 'Do you love me? Do you really love me?' I give all power to the voices of the world and put myself in bondage because the world is filled with 'ifs'...These 'ifs' enslave me, since it is impossible to respond adequately to all of them. The world's love will always be conditional" (42).

"I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found...It's almost as if I want to prove to myself and to my world that I do not need God's love, that I can make a life on my own, that I want to be fully independent" (43).

"Although claiming my true identity as a child of God, I still live as though the God to whom I am returning demands an explanation. I still think about his love as conditional and about home as a place I am not yet fully sure of. While walking home, I keep entertaining doubts about whether I will be truly welcome when I get there" (52).

"One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God's forgiveness...While God wants to restore me to the full dignity of sonship, I keep insisting that I will settle for being a hired servant" (53).

"Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to his Father's home. All of this he did, not as a rebellious son, but as the obedient son, sent out to bring home all the lost children of God" (55).

"Trust is that deep inner conviction that the Father wants me home" (84).

"As Father, he wants his children to be free, free to love. That freedom includes the possibility of their leaving home, going to a 'distant country,' and losing everything. The Father's heart knows all the pain that will come from that choice, but his love makes him powerless to prevent it...As Father, the only authority he claims for himself is the authority of compassion. That authority comes from letting the sins of his children pierce his heart" (95).

"He has no desire to punish them. They have already been punished excessively by their own inner or outer waywardness. The Father wants simply to let them know that the love they have searched for in such distorted ways has been, is, and always will be there for them" (96).

"The mystery, indeed, is that God in her infinite compassion has linked herself for eternity with the life of her children. She has freely chosen to become dependent on her creatures, whom she has gifted with freedom. This choice causes her grief when they leave; this choice brings her gladness when they return. But her joy will not be complete until all who have received life from her have returned home and gather together around the table prepared for them" (102).

"When I look from my place in the world into God's Kingdom, I quickly come to think of God as the keeper of some great celestial scoreboard, and I will always be afraid of not making the grade. But as soon as I look from God's welcoming home into the world, I discover that God loves with a divine love, a love that cedes to all women and men their uniqueness without ever comparing" (103).

"In all three parables which Jesus tells in response to the question of why he eats with sinners, he puts the emphasis on God's initiative...In all three of the parables which Jesus tells to explain why he eats with sinners, God rejoices and invites others to rejoice with him" (106, 113-4).

"I am beginning now to see how radically the character of my spiritual journey will change when I no longer think of God as hiding out and making it as difficult as possible for me to find him, but, instead, as the one who is looking for me while I am doing the hiding" (106-7).

"People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it" (117).

"the final stage of the spiritual life is to so fully let go of all fear of the Father that it becomes possible to become like him...Though I am both the younger son and the elder son, I am not to remain them, but to become the Father" (121).

"Spiritual fatherhood has nothing to do with power or control. It is a fatherhood of compassion" (127).

"grief is the discipline of the heart that sees the sin of the world, and knows itself to be the sorrowful price of freedom without which love cannot bloom" (129).

"There is a dreadful emptiness in this spiritual fatherhood. No power, no success, no popularity, no easy satisfaction. But that same dreadful emptiness is also the place of true freedom. It is the place where there is 'nothing left to lose,' where love has no strings attached, and where real spiritual strength is found" (132).

SO GOOD!!!

Coming Home


The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1636


The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1642


The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1668

I was trained as an art historian, so I tend to look at Rembrandt's three versions of the parable of the Return of the Prodigal Son in terms of the artist's stylistic evolution: the baroque energy of the etching made when the artist was 30, the moving simplicity of the pen and wash drawing done six years later, and his final version, painted only a few months before he died, portraying the reunion of father and son almost as a holy ritual. This was certainly the impression of Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen in 1983, when he first saw the painting—actually only the left-hand side of it—blown up as a poster in a colleague's room. He immediately saw it in terms of God the Father receiving the repentant sinner, feeling that it was speaking directly to him. A year later, on a trip to Russia, he spent two days in front of the picture at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (now taking in also the watchers at the right-hand side), and continued to think and write about it for the next four years. During this time, he would give up his post at Harvard, go into retreat for a year, then take up a post as chaplain to the L'Arche Daybreak community in Toronto, a center for the mentally handicapped. His has been a long spiritual journey.

There are many reasons why I should not have liked this book. I tend to read only fiction and to stay away from memoir. My training in art history urges me towards objective analysis, rather than believing that the picture has a subjective message for me. And most importantly, although I was brought up as a Christian, I rejected that faith in my late teens, whereas Nouwen is a Catholic priest of a strikingly evangelical bent, and makes no bones about talking of God as though of a personal acquaintance:

n  Jesus has made it clear to me that the same voice that he heard at the River Jordan and on Mount Tabor can also be heard by me. He has made it clear to me that just as he has his home with the Father, so do I.n

And yet, if this were a novel about a man struggling with major decisions in his inner life, I would lap it up, much like Marilynne Robinson's Home. Even more so, perhaps, if the religion were Judaism, Buddhism, or Islam, since I would accept it as a belief that I personally have never shared, rather than seeing it as a reproach to the young man I no longer am. And Nouwen writes very personally indeed. He is always there as a human being, as a man given to anger, arrogance, friendship, and devotion, and as a son in real life who has missed opportunities to tell his own father of his love.

I tend to be cautious about reading too much of an artist's life-story into his work, and Nouwen cautions himself against doing too much of this also. But nonetheless, he makes a great deal of Rembrandt as a prodigal son himself. A brash young man who set out with the world his oyster, he took the art world by storm before he was scarcely out of his teens. He made money and squandered money. But, as Nouwen writes, "during his sixty-three years, Rembrandt saw not only his dear wife Saskia die, but also three sons, two daughters, and the two women with whom he lived." He was to lose all his money, declare bankruptcy, and never again be entirely free from debt. He had…

n  …lived a life marked by great self-confidence, success, and fame, followed by many losses, disappointments, and failures. Through it all he had moved from the exterior light to the interior light, from the portrayal of external events to the portrayal of inner meanings, from a life full of things and people to a life marked by solitude and silence. With age, he grew more interior and still. It was a spiritual homecoming,n

What Nouwen says about Rembrandt's interior light is not merely poetic whimsy; it can be seen quite clearly in his late paintings. He is also implying that while the artist may have started out as the prodigal son, he ended up as the father. The old man in the picture is one of the artist's great studies of old age, on a par with his own late self-portraits, such as the one in London's National Gallery below, painted in the year of his death. But what I find so moving is that while the artist looks out with enquiring eyes, as though the world still hold mysteries that he has not solved, the father in the Prodigal Son painting is at least partially blind; he now sees with the inner eye.


Self-Portrait, 1669

Rembrandt starts as the prodigal and ends as the father. The moment he saw that poster, Nouwen identified himself with the errant son. But in thinking about the picture, seeing it in full in Saint Petersburg, and talking to friends who may have known him better than he knew himself, he was persuaded that there was a lot of the elder son in him too: the dutiful, self-satisfied Pharisee who kept to the law and dismissed those who didn't. That realization involved a painful journey into humility. Later still, he was persuaded that the most difficult task of all was to make himself worthy of becoming the father, in his own ministry and in his understanding of his relationship with God. Let's hear him in his own words:

nWhen, four years ago, I went to Saint Petersburg to see Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son, I had little idea how much I would have to live what I then saw. I stand with awe at the place where Rembrandt brought me. He led me from the kneeling, disheveled young son to the standing, bent-over old father, from the place of being blessed to the place of blessing. As I look at my own aging hands, I know that they have been given to me to stretch out toward all who suffer, to rest upon the shoulders of all who come, and to offer the blessing that emerges from the immensity of God's love.n

The book is dedicated to the author's own father, for his ninetieth birthday.

This book completely blew me away on so many levels. Very much enjoyed how Henri J.M. Nouwen gave a tremendous amount of history on Rembrandt’s painting of The Prodigal Son. There was so much that I didn’t know about the painting. I loved how Nouwen made comparisons between his life and what he felt was Rembrandt’s interpretation could have been. I saw so much of myself between the pages, that I had to stop reading and get hold of myself.

This was the perfect book to read during lent. I highly recommend reading!

Really quite poignant. I was incredibly moved by the last section on the Father in the story, and give it five stars just for that. I never considered how the fundamental Christian call to "Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful" is contained within the parable itself.

In reflection, to become the Father is to learn how to live in the tension of pain and joy within the world. To know what the world could be, but what it is not. It is also to celebrate the joys and healing—albeit imperfect—that occasion us, knowing they are but a preview of a kingdom to come. We must also celebrate our basic dignity and humanity that is also a call to Sonship and Daughtership through Christ's redemption.

"God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising Him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found."