my consolation and when I find I have nothing to say, when I have only tears for what is happening in my life, I look at Rembrandt or at Van Gogh. Their lives and their art heals and consoles me more than anything else” (Home Tonight, 13).
When Nouwen was a child, the Nouwen family owned an original watercolor by Marc Chagall of a vase of flowers standing in front of a window. It was purchased by Nouwen’s parents, Maria and Laurent, in Paris, shortly after their wedding and before Chagall’s international fame. It hung in the family living room while Nouwen was growing up. Nouwen says that the painting, closely associated with his mother, who loved it very much, had imprinted itself so deeply on his inner life that it appeared every time he needed comfort and consolation. “With my heart’s eye I look at the painting with the same affection as my parents did, and I feel consoled and comforted” (Behold, 19).
Visio divina, or “divine seeing,” is an ancient contemplative practice that invites the practitioner to encounter the divine through images. Sharing roots with the practice of lectio divina—the practice of reading Scripture and then holding what one has read in the heart and contemplating it from there—visio divina is an interaction with an image to create a powerful experience of the divine. Practitioners of lectio and visio divina use the imagination to become each person in the story or image, to feel what they are feeling, to think what they are thinking, and to experience what they are experiencing.28
Visio divina as explained by Nouwen is more about gazing than looking. Instead of a kind of scrutiny, judgment, or evaluation, gazing is gentle, and allows for revelation. “Gazing,” Nouwen explains, “is probably the best word to touch the core of Eastern spirituality. Whereas St. Benedict, who has set the tone for the spirituality of the West, calls us first to listen, the Byzantine fathers focus on gazing” (Behold, 22).
One day, Nouwen and his friend Sue Mosteller decided to go to the art gallery together. Nouwen was excited to show her a Vincent van Gogh painting of which he was particularly fond.29 Nouwen bounded up the gallery steps and headed straight for the painting. It was in a small frame and depicted a field, trees, and flowers. Nouwen sat down on a bench in front of the painting and Mosteller sat down beside him. Nouwen stared at the painting with a look of deep concentration. Mosteller looked at the painting, too, but after a few minutes was ready to get up and move on. Nouwen, however, continued to gaze. Mosteller tried to see whatever it was that he was seeing. She examined the details one by one, the composition, the brushstrokes, but after a few minutes, she again grew restless. “Henri!” she finally said, “What are you doing?” Nouwen turned to her in surprise and said, “I am in the painting! I am in the South of France and it is so beautiful. Aren’t you? Look at the colours! Look at the light!”30
This story allows us to speculate that Nouwen saw with a kind of spiritual vision. He could look at the world through the eyes of his heart, and perhaps even sometimes with the eyes of God. It was a practice he consciously cultivated. When Nouwen saw the little poster in Landrien’s office, he didn’t simply see a beautiful painting—he walked through the gate and into the outstretched arms of the father.
Nouwen was attuned to art through birth and culture. He was born in the land of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, including Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer, as well as famous Dutch painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian, and M. C. Escher. Nouwen would have been immersed in these paintings as a child and young man. As an adult, he felt a particular affinity with two of these artists: “I am a Dutchman, Rembrandt is a Dutchman and van Gogh is a Dutchman.… They are confrères” (Home Tonight, 13).
An Active and Developed Imagination
As well as exposure to great art, Nouwen had an active and developed imagination. We can enjoy pondering how differently he might have seen the world, as he walked through it, from the way we do. It calls to mind the story of his fascination with the trapeze troupe the Flying Rodleighs who were mentioned earlier.
While most people who saw the Flying Rodleighs perform at a circus enjoyed a beautiful aerial dance or a daring feat of athleticism, Nouwen, with his spiritual vision, saw God, the universe, and the whole meaning of existence. The trapeze act was yet another icon—this time an icon in motion—and it caught his imagination every bit as firmly as Rembrandt’s painting. He wrote, “From the very moment they appeared, my attention was completely riveted. The selfconfident and joyful way they entered, smiled, greeted the audience and then climbed to the trapeze rigging told me that I was going to see something—better, experience something—that was going to make this evening unlike any other.”31
Nouwen first saw the Rodleighs while vacationing with his ninety-year-old father in Freiburg, Germany, in 1991. There was a peacefulness to the visit that flowed from Nouwen’s lived experience of the Rembrandt painting. Nouwen reflected, “[Our] visit had about it that wonderful quality of mutual freedom and mutual bonding that can develop when both father and son have become elders.”32
One day during the holiday, Nouwen saw a poster for the Circus Simoneit Barum. It was traveling through town, and they decided to attend a show. Sitting under the big top they enjoyed the animals and clowns, the juggling acts and tumblers, but it was the last act—that trapeze troupe called the Flying Rodleighs—that changed everything.
Nouwen was transfixed. Later, when he tried to articulate what it was that gripped him with such intensity, he had this to say: “The ten minutes that followed somehow gave me a glimpse of a world that had eluded me so far, a world of discipline and freedom, diversity and harmony, risk and safety, individuality and community, and most of all, of flying and catching.”33 He saw in this aerial dance an image that satisfied his lifelong desire to be totally free and totally safe. “I somehow caught a glimpse of … the mystery in which complete freedom and complete bonding are one and in which letting go of everything and being connected to everything no longer elude each other.”34
Nouwen’s ensuing trapeze obsession is an echo of his earlier experience with the Rembrandt painting. He asks, “Wasn’t the tenminute spectacle of these five people in mid-air like a living painting put together by great artists?” “Is this trapeze act perhaps one of the windows in the house of life that opens up a view to a totally new, enrapturing landscape?”35
Life Imitates Art
The trapeze act was such a vivid image for Nouwen in part because it resonated with his understanding of life as a vast canvas on which to draw our experiences. Like his confrère Rembrandt, who painted, etched, and drew more than ninety self-portraits in his lifetime, Nouwen wrote and rewrote his self-portrait through thousands of diary entries. He saw self-portraiture as a means to self-knowledge and a way to interpret his experiences. He made a practice of asking himself, “What did I do until now and where do I want to go?” He was always reviewing his life through the eyes of God and updating his portrait. He would encourage other people to “paint” their lives as well. Consider the phrasing he uses in a letter to a friend: “Your intuitions are so right and your basic orientation so valuable that a PhD might in the long run offer you the best frame to put your own painting in.”36
Nouwen as Artist
Nouwen was attuned to art and artists because he was one himself. Perhaps more suitable than any other definition of who he was is the term “artist.”37 He used language and images to create meaning. Moreover, he saw his life as part of a larger story—God’s story. Over
