Book by Henri J.M. Nouwen [1]
Book review with personal insights and selected quotations by David Tillman – August 2011
I have found that reading Henri Nouwen’s, “The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life – Reaching Out,” has given me a model to better understand our spiritual relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God. I see the value in understanding this model as I provide pastoral care to others and with my self-care. As Nouwen states in the introduction (see notes below) I can see that during a life or health crisis, a person would tend to shift their polarity, or way of thinking, in the direction of loneliness from solitude, hostility from hospitality, and illusion from prayer. I see the awareness of these expected shifts will offer me another reference point as I care for others. Nouwen has a wonderful way of explaining the movements of spiritual life that speaks to me. Below are selected quotations from his book that I will read from time to time to re-enliven my awareness of Nouwen’s thoughts and insights regarding the three movements of spiritual life.
Introduction: “The first polarity deals with our relationship to ourselves. It is the polarity between loneliness and solitude. The second polarity forms the basis of our relationship to others. This is the polarity between hostility and hospitality. The third, final and most important polarity structures are relationship with God. This is the polarity between illusion and prayer.” (p. 11)
“Although after many years of living we often feel more lonely, hostile and filled with illusions than when we had hardly a past to reflect upon, we also know better than before that all these pains have deepened and sharpened our urge to reach out to a solitary, hospitable and prayerful mode of existence.” (P. 11)
Chapter 1 – A Suffocating Loneliness
“The contemporary society in which we find ourselves makes us acutely aware of our loneliness. We become increasingly aware that we are living in a world where even the most intimate relationships have become part of competition and rivalry.” (p. 15) “By running away from our loneliness and by trying to distract ourselves with people and special experiences, we do not realistically deal with our human predicament.” (p. 17-18)
“And by burdening others with these divine expectations, of which we ourselves are often only partially aware, we might inhibit the expressions 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.” (p 19) “But real openness to each other also means a real closeness, because only he who can hold a secret can safely share his knowledge. When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendships and develop lasting relationships of love. An intimate relationship between people not only asks for mutual openness but also for mutual respectful protection of each other’s uniqueness.” (p. 20) “When we try to shake off our loneliness by creating a milieu without limiting boundaries, we may become entangled in a stagnating closeness.” (p 20) “Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.” (p. 21) ‘But sometimes we meet and hear that exceptional person who says: “Do not run, but be quiet and silent. Listen attentively to your own struggles. The answer to your question is hidden in your own heart.” (p. 23) “The few times, however, that we do obey our severe masters and listen carefully to our restless hearts, we may start to sense that in the midst of our sadness is joy, that in the midst of our fears there is peace, that in the midst of our greediness, there is the possibility of compassion and that indeed in the midst of our irking loneliness we can find the beginning of a quiet solitude.” (p. 24)
Chapter 2 – A Receptive Solitude
“A man or woman who has developed this solitude of heart is no longer pulled apart by the most divergent stimuli of the surrounding world but is able to perceive and understand this world from a quiet inner center.” (p. 25) “Unless our questions, problems and concerns are tested and matured in solitude, it is not realistic to expect answers that are really our own.” (p. 27)
Chapter 3 – A Creative Response
“It would be paralyzing to proclaim that we, as individuals, are responsible for all human suffering, but it is a liberating message to say that we are called to respond to it. Because out of an inner solidarity with our fellow humans, the first attempts to alleviate these pains can come forth.” (p. 41) “The movement from loneliness to solitude, therefore, is not a movement of a growing withdrawal from, but rather a movement toward, a deeper engagement in the burning issues of our time. The movement from loneliness to solitude is a movement that allows us to perceive interruptions as occasions for a conversation of heart, which makes our responsibilities a vocation instead of a burden, and which creates the inner space where a compassionate solidarity with our fellow human beings becomes possible.” (p. 43)
Chapter 4 – Creating Space for Strangers
“In a world so pervaded with competition, even those who are very close to each other, such as classmates, teammates, co-actors in a play, colleges in work, can become infected by fear and hostility, when they experience each other as a threat to their intellectual or professional safety.” (p. 49)
“To convert hostility into hospitality requires the creation of the friendly empty space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them to a new relationship. This conversion is an inner event that cannot be manipulated but must develop from within. Just as we cannot force a plant to grow but can take away the weeds and stones which prevent its development, so we cannot force anyone to such a personal and intimate change of heart, but we can offer the space where such a change can take place.” (p 54)
Chapter 5 –Forms of Hospitality
Parents and Children, Teachers and Students, Healers and Patients.
“When we have lived a while in the walls of our lives have become marked by many events – world events, family events, personal events- as well as our responses to them. These marks speak their own language and often lead to a dialogue, sometimes limited to the heart, but occasionally expressed in words and gestures, It is in these situations that we reach out to each other and that parents, children, teachers, students, healers, patients and all people meet on their way through life and start speaking to each other and discovering each other as part of a larger community with a common destination.” (p. 71)
Chapter 6 – Hospitality and the Host
“As long as we are lonely, we cannot be hospitable because as lonely people we cannot create free space. Our own need to still our inner cravings of loneliness makes us cling to others instead of creating space for them.” (p. 72) “To the degree in which our loneliness is converted into solitude we can move from hostility to hospitality. (p. 73) “But it remains true that loneliness often leads to hostile behavior and that solitude is the climate of hospitality. When we feel lonely we have such a need to be liked and loved that we are hypersensitive to the many signals in our environment and easily become hostile toward anyone whom we perceive as rejecting us. But once we have found the center of our life in our own heart and have accepted our aloneness, not as a fate but as a vocation, we are able to offer freedom to others. Once we have given up our desire to be fully fulfilled, we can offer emptiness to others. Once we have become poor we can be a good host. Poverty is the inner disposition that allows us to take away our defenses and convert our enemies into friends. We can only perceive the stranger as an enemy as long as we have something to defend” (p. 73) “Turning the other cheek means showing our enemies that they can only be our enemies while supposing that we are anxiously clinging to our private property, whatever it is: our knowledge, our good name, our land, our money, or the many objects we have collected around us. But who will be our robber when everything he wants to steal from us becomes our gift to him? (p. 73)
The Poverty of the Mind:
“This story illustrates that well-educated ministers are not individuals who call to tell you exactly who God is, Where good and evil are, and how to travel from the world to the next, but people whose articulate not-knowing makes them free to listen to the voice of God in the words of the people, in the events of the day and in the books containing the life experience of men and women from other places and other times. In short, learned ignorance makes one able to receive the word from others and the Other with great attention. That is the poverty of mind.” (P. 74-75)
The Poverty of the Heart:
“When our heart is filled with prejudices, worries, jealousies, there is little room for a stranger. In a fearful environment, it is not easy to keep our hearts open to the wide range of human experiences. Real hospitality, however, is not exclusive but inclusive and creates space for a larger variety of human experiences.” (p. 75)
“So hospitality requires poverty, the poverty of mind and the poverty of heart.” “But real training for service asks for a hard and often painful process of self-emptying. The main problem of service is to be the way without being “in the way.” And if there are any tools, techniques and skills to be learned they are primarily to plow the field, to cut the weeds and to clip the branches, that is, to take away the obstacles for real growth and development. Training for service is not a training to become rich but to voluntarily poor; not to fulfill ourselves but to empty ourselves; not to conquer God but to surrender to his saving power. All this is very hard to accept in our contemporary world, which tells us about the importance of power and influence.” (p. 77)
“While the movement from loneliness to solitude makes us reach out to our innermost self, the movement from hostility to hospitality makes us reach out to others.” (p. 77 – 78) “To help, to serve, to care, to guide, to heal, these words were all used to express a reaching out toward our neighbor whereby we perceive life as a gift no to process but to share.” (p. 78)
Reaching out to our God; from Illusion to Prayer
Chapter 7 – Prayer and Mortality:
“It is only the lasting effort to unmask the illusions of our existence that a real spiritual life is possible. (p. 80) “the most basic movement of the spiritual life, which is the movement from illusion to prayer. It is through this movement that we reach out to God, our God, the one who is eternally real and from whom all reality comes forth.” (p. 80)
“What is closest to our person is most difficult to express and explain. This is not true for lovers, artists and tightrope walkers but also for those who pray. While prayer is the most difficult subject to speak about and becomes easily the subject for trivialities and platitudes. While it is the most human of all human acts, it is also easily perceived as the most superfluous and superstitious activity.” (p. 81)
“Because when we do not stay in touch with that center of spiritual life called prayer, we lose touch with all that grows from it. When we do not enter into that inner field of tension where the movement from illusion to prayer that place, our solitude, and our hospitality easily lose their depth. And then, instead of being essential to our spiritual life, they become pious ornaments of a morally respectable existence.” (p. 81 – 82)
“The greatest obstacle to entering into that profound dimension of life where our prayer takes place is our all-pervasive illusion of immortality. At first, it seems unlikely or simply untrue that we have such an illusion, since on many levels we are quite aware of our mortality.” (P. 82)
“Indeed, it takes only a small disruption to lay our illusion of immortality bare and to reveal how much we have become victimized by our surrounding world suggesting to us that we are “in control.” Aren’t the many feelings of sadness, heaviness of heart and even dark despair, often intimately connected with the exaggerated seriousness with which clothed the people we know, the ideas to which we are exposed and the events we are part of? This lack of distance, which excludes the humor in life, can create a suffocating depression which prevents us from lifting our heads above the horizon of our limited existence.” (p. 82)
“Sentimentality appears often where intimate relationships become “dead heavy” and people cling to each other with a nearly suicidal seriousness. (p. 83) “Our human relationships easily become subject to violence and destruction when we treat our own and other people’s lives as properties to be defended or conquered and as gifts to be received.” (p. 84)
“The idols of our own dreams, however, are humbling reminders that we still have a long way to go before we are ready to meet our God, the God created by our own hands or minds, but the uncreated God out of whose loving hands we are born. Idolatry, which is the worship of false gods, is a temptation much greater than we tend to believe. It will take much faithfulness and patience to allow not only our conscious but also our unconscious life to move from illusion to prayer.” (p. 85)
“The paradox of prayer is that we have to learn how to pray while we can only receive it as a gift. It is exactly this paradox that clarifies why prayer is the subject of so many contrasting statements.” (p. 87)
Thomas Merton writes: “The union of the Christian with Christ…is a mystical union in which Christ Himself becomes the source and principle of life in me. Christ Himself…” breathes” in me divinely in giving me His Spirit.” (p. 89) So, the paradox of prayer is that it asks for serious effort while it can only be received as a gift. We cannot plan, organize or manipulate God; but without a careful discipline, we cannot receive him either.” (p.89)
Chapter 8 – The Prayer of the Heart
“In the first place, we have to pay careful attention to the word of God as it is written in the holy scriptures.” (p. 96) “Secondly, we simply need quiet time in the presence of God.” (p. 97) “But word and silence both need guidance.” (p. 97) We need someone who can suggest to us when to read and when to be silent, which words to reflect upon and what to do when silence creates much fear and little peace.” (p. 98)
Chapter 9 – Community and Prayer
“The movement from illusion to prayer requires a gradual detachment from all false ties and an increasing surrender to him from whom all good things come. It takes courage to move away from the safe place into the unknown, even when we know that the safe place offers false safety and the unknown promises us a saving intimacy with God.” (p. 107)
“Prayer is the language of the Christian community. In prayer, the nature of the community becomes visible because in prayer we direct ourselves to the one who forms the community. We do not pray to each other, but together we pray to God, who calls us and makes us into a new people.” (p. 112)
“By prayer, community is created as well as expressed. Prayer is first of all the realization of God’s presence in the midst of his people and, therefore, the realization of the community itself. Most clear and most noticeable are the words, the gestures and the silence through which the community is formed. When we listen to the word, we not only receive insight into God’s saving work, but we also experience a new mutual bond.” (p. 112)
Conclusion
“We do not have to deny or avoid our loneliness, our hostilities and illusions. To the contrary: When we have the courage to let these realities come to our full attention, understand them and confess them, then they can be slowly converted into solitude, hospitality and prayer. This doesn not imply that a mature spiritual life is a life in which our old lonely hostile self with all its illusions simply disappears and we live in complete serenity with a peaceful mind and a pure heart. Just as our childhood shows the struggles of our youth, so our solitude bears the signs of lonely hours, our care for others reflects at times angry feelings and our prayer sometimes reveals the memory and presence of many illusions. Transformed in love, however, these painful signs become signs of hope, as the wounds of Jesus did for the doubting Thomas.” (p. 116)
[1] Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, (Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, NY, 1975)
