as Father/Mother ourselves.
Recently, two Catholic thinkers, Laurence Freeman of the World Community of Christian Meditation, and Richard Rohr, the popular Franciscan friar and priest, used social media to remind their followers that our propensity for conflating our images of father and God comes from long-held belief in a punitive God that must be appeased with sacrifice.
Freeman wrote,
Much more often, our image of God is related not to those experiences of love, of joy, or of union, but it’s related to experiences of authority and punishment. A young child is taught to think of God as a sort of super parent. The very word we use about God, of course, Father, carries with it, in most children’s upbringing, an image of a person in the family who does the correction, who does the discipline. The idea of God as Father carries with it, therefore, this sense of control, this sense of dominance. And where there is punishment or this kind of relationship to authority, there is usually fear. We fear being punished, we fear being sent to hell.11
Rohr put it this way:
In authoritarian and patriarchal cultures, most people were fully programmed to think this way—working to appease an authority figure who was angry, punitive, and even violent in “his” reactions. Many still operate this way, especially if they had an angry, demanding, or abusive parent. People respond to this kind of God, as sick as it is, because it fits their own story line.12
As both Rohr and Freeman say, it is deep within our collective and individual psyches to think of God as a punitive parent. The Return of the Prodigal Son is so powerful because Nouwen, without speaking a word of theology or history, addresses this metanarrative with a gentle story of his own. He invites people to listen to his own experience of releasing this shaming image and to embrace an image of a feminine/masculine creator who envelops us in unearned, unconditional love. Nouwen uses the power of story to help us revise our image of God so we can allow God’s love to enter our lives with freedom and even joy.
Search for Intimacy
Nouwen sees the poster and has a visceral reaction. His body responds—his heart leaps in his chest. As much as he wants his father’s approval and love, he longs for the father’s touch. In an early draft of the book, he writes, “[The poster] seemed to respond to my own deepest yearnings, my own most hidden desires, my never satisfied hunger for affection and my unmitigated cry for God’s mercy.”13
Nouwen sometimes ascribed his longing for intimacy to effects of the parenting styles he experienced early on. Although he felt “enormous love” from his parents throughout his life, Nouwen also reported that in addition to his father’s work-to-earn-love messaging, his mother was “a nervous, scrupulous woman whose many fears prevented her from freely holding and touching” him (Home Tonight, 36–37). It is likely that his parents, and his mother in particular, were influenced by Dutch childrearing practices of the 1920s and 1930s, which stressed a parental attitude of cleanliness, tranquility, and regularity (or, in Dutch, the “three Rs”: Reinheid, Rust en Regelmaat). According to this regime, “feeding schedules had to be strict and infants were not to be picked up between feedings, for fear of spoiling them. Mothers were to let children cry until it was their suckling time and to refrain from cuddling. If possible, babies were to sleep in a quiet room undisturbed and alone. Older children had to obey, be polite, and were not allowed to disturb their parents.”14
These rules of childrearing were likely very hard on Nouwen, who by all accounts was an intense and unusually sensitive child. The language for describing himself (especially before being edited) tended to be hyperbolic and melodramatic.15 Being very sensitive was how Nouwen went through life.
The Loneliness of Celibacy
Long before he encountered the Rembrandt poster on Landrien’s office door, striking that deep emotional chord, Nouwen had taken vows as a Catholic priest. Like all Catholic priests, Nouwen was a celibate. He was committed to his vows and experienced the practice as a “holy vacancy.” In 1978, twenty-one years after taking his vows, he wrote,
The best definition of celibacy, I think, is the definition of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas calls celibacy a vacancy for God. To be a celibate means to be empty for God, to be free and open for his presence, to be available for his service.… I think that celibacy can never be considered as a special prerogative of a few members of the people of God. Celibacy, in its deepest sense of creating and protecting emptiness for God, is an essential part of all forms of Christian life: marriage, friendship, single life, and community life.… Every relationship carries within its center a holy vacancy, a space that is for the first Love, God alone. (Clowning in Rome, 43)
I believe that understanding Nouwen as a celibate is essential to understanding his response to Rembrandt’s painting of the parable as documented in The Return of the Prodigal Son.
We learn more about Nouwen’s position on celibacy from an article published in 2010 by A. W. Richard Sipe, a mental health counselor who spent eighteen years as a Benedictine monk and priest.16 Sipe recalls Nouwen’s reaction after hearing a talk that Sipe gave in 1991 called “The Celibate/Sexual Agenda.” Nouwen wrote,
I also feel there is a dimension to the issue of celibacy that is absent from your presentation and, by its absence, gives your presentation an overly strong “political” character. Somehow I think that we really need to think more deeply about the mystery of communion and start talking in a new way about sexuality from there. I am certainly not yet able to do so and I find myself quite wordless around this very sacred area. But I do feel that we have to move beyond pointing to the many weaknesses and failures in living a credible sexual ethic to a rediscovery of the deep meaning of the “vacare Deo” [to be empty for God].17
Sipe continues with a recollection of a visit he had with Nouwen at Daybreak in 1991 that sheds further light on Nouwen’s views. Sipe recounts that Nouwen’s first occupations were the subjects of meditation and spirituality (he was reading Eastern meditation teacher Eknath Easwaran at the time). He then remembers that the second topic Nouwen wanted to discuss was celibacy and sexual orientation. Sipe writes, “Mainly his questions were about orientation. What really is it? Is it possible to alter it? What are the origins? What are its implications for celibacy? How does it affect spirituality? He was not quite at a point of personal resolution then.” Sipe concludes, “Nouwen was the genuine article. He was exactly what he appeared—a priest struggling for integrity, exhausting himself in the service of others.”18
Integrity is a word that is often used to describe Henri Nouwen. It is part of his appeal to so many people. The shadow side of integrity perhaps is scrupulousness that can pinch and dry out sensuality and the pleasures of physicality. By his own account, Nouwen wanted to avoid doing something wrong. In The Return of the Prodigal Son he confesses, “Since childhood [I] have scrupulously lived the life of faith” (Prodigal Son, 66). He shares with us that he feels a kinship with the obedient elder son who saw his younger brother flaunt what was expected of him to live a life of his choosing. “And all my life I have harbored a strange curiosity for the disobedient life that I didn’t dare to live, but which I saw being lived by many around me” (Prodigal Son, 65).
We can only speculate what acts of disobedience tantalized Nouwen’s fertile imagination; but surely one of them was how to live out his sexuality as a gay man. Nouwen was never public about his homosexual orientation, and after he died many in his close circle respected his choice. Biographer Michael Ford, however, decided to tackle the subject head-on. His biography The Wounded Prophet (1999) took the thesis that much of Nouwen’s insecurity and neediness was an extension
