on Nouwen’s “wounds” at the expense of his qualities as a “prophet,” he does have a point. Nouwen might have been able to accept celibacy as part of his priestly vocation, but it would have been harder to endure an internalized homophobia derived from the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Society’s acceptance of homosexuality changed radically over the course of Nouwen’s adult life, but in the early years of his career, homosexuality was generally seen as aberrant even in the liberal academic environments in which he circulated. The World Health Organization listed homosexuality as a health risk until as late as May 17, 1990. His father, like the majority of people in those years, thought that homosexuality was a disease.19 Indeed, Nouwen himself wrote an article titled “Homosexuality: Prejudice or Mental Illness?” for the National Catholic Reporter in 1967 in which he argues for the latter.20
In the last year of his life, Nouwen described his views on homosexuality this way: “My own thoughts and emotions around this subject are very conflicted. Years of Catholic education and seminary training have caused me to internalise the Catholic Church’s position. Still, my emotional development and my friendship with many homosexual people, as well as the recent literature on the subject, have raised many questions for me. There is a huge gap between my internalised homophobia and my increasing conviction that homosexuality is not a curse but a blessing for our society” (Sabbatical Journey, 27).
Nouwen’s younger brother Laurent suggests that Nouwen sublimated his sexuality into religion; that his life, in fact, was “a battlefield between vocation and sexuality.”21
As true as this statement might be, Laurent Nouwen would be the first to argue that it would be simplistic to reduce Nouwen’s search for intimacy to one factor. This was, in fact, what Nouwen feared would happen if he engaged in public discourse on the subject. We can acknowledge its significance, but turn our attention to his stated search—his search for God.
Search for God
When Nouwen saw the poster he collapsed. At first, the reason for his strong reaction was pure exhaustion and a deep longing for his father’s love. But gradually he began to see that the painting was actually a “large gate” for him to meet the One he had been searching for since he was born—“the God of mercy and compassion.”22 He found that the longer he looked at the painting, the more he saw that the image of God created by Rembrandt was not simply a friendly Father, but the womb of the divine Creator. He was returning to the womb, the seedbed of his true self. For these moments at least, his search for God was sated.23
Yet, his search wasn’t over. When Nouwen’s journey with the Rembrandt painting ended, another one began. In 1991, just as The Return of the Prodigal Son was entering the production stage with his publisher Doubleday, Nouwen became transfixed by another image of God. This time, it was a trapeze troupe called the Flying Rodleighs. In this group of creative people, Nouwen saw God as the catcher and us as the flyers who can take risks because of our trust that we will be caught. The full meaning of this image would take years for Nouwen to understand, but one facet of the attraction was its physicality. The trapeze-troupe image called Nouwen to consider his body and the physical aspect of the spiritual journey. It appears that the next leg of Nouwen’s journey was to be a physical one. He was being called to enter into his body more fully. This is an important turn in Nouwen’s life and one we will return to later in greater depth.
Henri Nouwen collapsed in front of the prodigal son poster in 1983. A number of factors, including his nature as a spiritual quester, led to that moment. When The Return of the Prodigal Son ends, we have witnessed a metamorphosis. A central event on the way was forgiving his father. He shifts his focus from the father he doesn’t have to the father he does; and he finds freedom. He courageously lets go of the privilege of sonship and claims the gift of spiritual fatherhood. Nouwen senses the freedom of being a child of God without the prison of resentment or self-occupation. Blessing others becomes important.
As readers, we recognize this story because it shares elements of a hero’s journey. Nouwen goes through trials and emerges on the other side a changed man. He lives his struggles differently in light of his newfound wisdom.
John O’Donohue, in his book Anam Cara, suggests that there is a place inside every one of us that has experienced God’s unconditional love and that we spend our lives trying to get back to it. He writes, “We are capable of such love and belonging because the soul holds the echo of a primal intimacy.”24 Nouwen, through his personal story, tells this universal truth of life.
Chapter 2
Visio Divina and the Spiritual Vision
What you carry in your heart is what you see.
(Henri Nouwen)25
One might assume that the Rembrandt painting that struck Nouwen like a “lightning bolt” was a peak experience, a once-in-a-lifetime epiphany. In fact, Nouwen was on the lookout for “glimpses” of God at all times. As I noted earlier, he saw God in a trapeze troupe, for instance, and at the very time Nouwen was transfixed by “his painting,” he was captivated by yet another image. This was a reproduction of a Rublev’s Trinity icon, placed on the table in the room where he was staying in Trosly by Jean Vanier’s secretary, Barbara Swanekamp. The Trinity icon, and other icons after it, became so connected with Nouwen’s spiritual life that in 1987, five years ahead of The Return of the Prodigal Son, he would publish a book about them. That book, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, is important because it shows us how Henri Nouwen saw art and explains his capacity to enter so fully and fruitfully into the painting by Rembrandt.26
Behold the Beauty of the Lord was published in February 1987 by Ave Maria Press. It explores the power of looking at religious iconography in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and is structured around Nouwen’s meditation on four icons and the meaning he found in them. As iconographer Robert Lentz pointed out in the foreword, it is not a scholarly work (though Nouwen prepared for the manuscript by reading deeply into the subject); it is a response of his soul (Behold, 11).
For Nouwen, icons allowed for transcendence without language and thought. He suggests that when we are tired, restless, or depressed, when we can’t pray, read, or think, we “can still look at these images so intimately connected with the experience of love”27 (Behold, 20).
In addition to helping us pray when we don’t have words, Nouwen’s book teaches us that we can choose what we see. We can take conscious steps to safeguard our inner space. Nouwen recognizes that we are bombarded with images, many of which are damaging, and we must be vigilant about where we put our attention. He writes, “It is easy to become a victim to the vast array of visual stimuli surrounding us. The ‘powers and principalities’ control many of our daily images. Posters, billboards, television, videocassettes, movies and store windows continuously assault our eyes and inscribe their images upon our memories.… Still, we do not have to be passive victims of a world that wants to entertain and distract us. We can make some decisions and choices” (Behold, 21).
Nouwen suggests that we commit images of art to memory, similar to how we might memorize the Jesus Prayer or passages from the Psalms. We memorize them to bring to mind when we need them. Nouwen, for instance, memorized work by Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh. During his “Returning” retreat, he shared,
