Reaching Out With Henri Nouwen: A Lenten Journey

Last updated on: February 16, 2016 at 9:57 pm by Karl Persson

Reaching Out With Henri Nouwen: A Lenten Journey 2016-02-16T21:57:56-04:00 Karl Persson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22:27b-40, NRSVCE

While affirming that these words do in fact sum up the law and the prophets, there are those of us who can’t help wondering whether they don’t also sum up the heart of life’s complexities. To know what is it is to love ourselves is itself a profound difficulty – to love others, a further difficulty – and to love God, more difficult still. And we get confused. Fleeing from the shambles inside us, we so often turn to the others in our lives – whether humans or God – as means of fleeing the terror we fear inside ourselves; rather than loving others as ourselves, and God over all, we use God and others, making them loci of escapism from the self we can’t come home to. This ends poorly for all involved; we are tormented by a self-delusion we can never quite escape, and those others involved bear the wounds we inflict. This, indeed, is the story of humanity since the first humans felt themselves naked and hid.

But if this is the human story since Eden, it is also – in reverse – the story of Christ’s deliberate journey toward the cross, for it is precisely at His cross that all these matters come to a head. It is here that Christ will resist the temptation to bid others – whether an army of angels or disciples ready to go to war for him – to face the darkness that only He can face. It is here He will know the alienation of self far more profound than the weak inventions of modern existentialism, in which He who is God Himself will pray with the Psalmist, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” – and mean it. And it is towards these events – these crises held in the person of Christ – that we with Him set our faces like flint. For His work is not to endure these things so that we can forgo suffering them. Rather, it is to endure them so that our own version of this walk towards death, our ars moriendi, will not be alone – even as it is to endure them so that His own life – His resurrection – will likewise not be alone; that where He is, there we may also be. And regardless of where we are individually on this journey toward the cross, Lent is our yearly way of marking it, reminding us of its centrality in our spiritual journeys, and causing us to reflect on our own progress down this road with Christ.

In this spirit, we at the Inner Room invite you to join us as we contemplate such Lenten matters along with one of the most spiritually and pastorally sensitive Christian authors of the twentieth century, Henri Nouwen. Various of us writing for the Inner Room have been marked by his deep and measured reflections on the interactions of God, others, and self in a book that (in good Nouwenian fashion) plays down its own brilliance through the humble title, Reaching Out. While our intention is neither to work through the book in a formal, programmatic way, nor to limit posts to reflections on this book, we are proposing it as something of a touchstone for orienting our thoughts as we proceed with Christ toward Jerusalem, the very heart of the tangle of complexity consisting of God, others, and self. We invite you to join us, and pray that we, you, and others may be blessed as we all walk together toward the cross in Jerusalem that is yours, mine, and, most importantly, His.

Stay in touch! Like The Inner Room on Facebook:

The Inner Room

Previous Post

February 5, 2016

How is Edification Like an Eggplant? On the Gathering, Preparation, and Digestion of Old Spiritual Texts

Next Post

February 16, 2016 Reaching Out Amidst OCD and Depression: Tuesday Lenten Reflection I

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Advent Awe Hope Lent listening Pentecost Prayer Reflection Silence Solitude Space Uncategorized wonder

Select a Month February 2017 January 2017 November 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was the father of John the Baptist?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Simeon Joseph Nathan Zechariah