have a larger vision for their lives. In one letter to a friend he suggested the friend try to have “a Grand Canyon experience.” He was referring to a time in his own life when seeing the Grand Canyon opened him up “to the mystery in which we are part.” He said to the friend, “You too need a Grand Canyon experience.”38 We need to see our lives as part of something bigger than mere survival or worldly success.
Many of the insights in The Return of the Prodigal Son revolve around having a new vision such as this. Nouwen teaches us that when we act like the sons of the parable we cannot see properly. To clarify what I mean, let’s review the Gospel of Luke chapter 15, where the famous parable of Jesus can be found.
A father has two sons: elder and younger. The elder son remains by the father’s side, doing the work of a dutiful son, while the younger son asks for his inheritance so that he may leave; the younger son obtains the inheritance from his father and then leaves, squandering it all wastefully, eventually begging forgiveness and the ability to return to the father. When the younger son returns, the elder son questions his father, asking why he is so forgiving of the younger, wasteful one. The father replies, essentially, you have always been here with me, but he was lost and now is found.
Nouwen admitted myopia when stuck in the role of the elder son. He wrote, “When jealousy, resentment and bitterness have settled in my heart, I become unable to see what is already given to me. I am so focused on the seeming preference of God for the other that I completely lose sight of what is given to me.”39 Depression, he said, restricts vision, too: “I completely lose sight of the love that surrounds me, and no longer can see the reality as God sees it. Depression makes me see from below where I am and disables me to see from above where God is.”40
Nouwen noted that Rembrandt, seemingly aware of the potency of the eyes of his characters, “chose to portray a very still father who recognizes the son, not with eyes of a body, but with the inner eye of the heart” (Prodigal Son, 89).
The Rembrandt painting became an icon for Nouwen, a gate through which he could walk into the house of God. But he could do that only because he had been practicing that kind of seeing for a very long time already.41
Anton T. Boisen and Henri Nouwen
Seeing Anton Boisen so closely and being able to experience how a deep wound can become a source of beauty in which even the weaknesses seem to give light is a reason for thankfulness.
(Henri Nouwen)42
When Henri Nouwen was asked in 1982 which people had most influenced him, he said Vincent van Gogh, John Henry Newman, and the people he ministered to.43 He didn’t mention Anton T. Boisen. This is not surprising. Boisen, the founder of clinical pastoral education in the United States, was the subject of Nouwen’s keen interest and study for more than a decade between 1960 and 1970, but by 1982, he had moved on to other influences. Even so, it could be argued that there is no one who influenced Nouwen’s life and work more than Boisen. Boisen, in fact, is in every fiber of The Return of the Prodigal Son. Yet, by the time Nouwen was writing it, Nouwen’s use of Boisen was not conscious. He had built on Boisen’s ideas, synthesized them, and made them his own.
Nouwen was likely first introduced to the work of Boisen by Willem Berger at the University of Nijmegen. Berger was a professor of pastoral theology while Nouwen was there working on his psychology degree.44 At the time of his studies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Catholic Church in the Netherlands, after a period of outright rejection of Freud and others,45 was moving into a position of nuanced support. In 1953, Pope Pius XII addressed participants of the International Congress of Psychotherapy with these encouraging words: “Be assured that the Church follows your research and your medical practice with her warm interest and her best wishes. You labor in a terrain that is very difficult.”46 Nouwen was in the vanguard of newly ordained priests choosing to study psychology rather than the more traditional disciplines of theology, classics, and languages. Under the influence of Berger and other leading Dutch thinkers such as Han Fortmann,47 Nouwen chose Boisen as the subject for his doctoral thesis.
Nouwen would continue his work on Boisen when he moved to the United States to study in the program of theology and psychiatric theory at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, from 1964 to 1965.
After completing the program at Menninger, Boisen would also be the subject of a second doctoral thesis for an advanced theology degree at the University of Nijmegen.
When Nouwen joined the psychology department at the University of Notre Dame in 1964, his first academic appointment, Boisen was the subject of many lectures and was mandatory reading for students in his classes. Later, at Yale Divinity School, Nouwen’s 1972 course on pastoral care also drew heavily from his work on Boisen. Boisen was, in fact, the subject of Nouwen’s first book, one that he never completed, and of which no excerpts have ever been published. But, interestingly, Nouwen would not refer directly again to Boisen, the subject of so much of his attention for two decades, after 1977.48
In spite of Boisen’s disappearance from Nouwen’s life and work, evidence that he was a major influence can be found in the Nouwen Archives, where one finds shelves of material on Boisen. Over the course of his decade-long research and study, Nouwen visited the Topeka State Archives in the Kansas Historical Society to consult Boisen’s papers and had all of Boisen’s case histories mimeographed.49 Included in this trove are fifty articles either on or by Boisen, many heavily annotated in Nouwen’s hand.
The Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) movement, founded by Boisen, began in the United States in the 1920s to educate ministers and chaplains for work in hospitals, psychiatric facilities, and other clinical settings. For adapting the clinical case study method that was introduced by Richard Cabot to the training of chaplains, Boisen is considered a pioneer of the case study method for pastoral care work. He developed a detailed methodology that was used in the process of gathering information about a person. Students using the assessment tool learned how to reflect systematically about the human condition, both psychologically and theologically.
A central tenet of Boisen’s thought was that a person is a “living human document” on which experiences of life are written.50 He taught that the same authority given to text should be given to the language used by those in mental struggles. In a speech to clinicians in 1950, he put it this way: “We are not trying to introduce anything new into theological curriculum beyond a new approach to some ancient problems. We are trying rather to call attention to the central task of the Church, that of saving souls, and to the central problem of theology—that of sin and salvation. What is new is the attempt to begin with the study of living human documents rather than books, and to focus attention upon those who are grappling with the issues of spiritual life and death.”51
Boisen was born in 1876 in Bloomington, Indiana, to German immigrant parents. He graduated from Indiana University in 1897. Influenced by his father’s passion for languages and nature, he taught French for two years in a Bloomington high school before earning a master’s degree in forestry from Yale University in 1905. For three years he was a forest assistant for the US Department of Agriculture.
He started charting his own course at age thirty-five, enrolling in Union Seminary in New York City, where he was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1911. Under the tutelage of Dr. George Albert Coe, Boisen began developing a view of the psychology of religion grounded in both religion and the study of human behavior. Boisen then served as both a Presbyterian and a Congregationalist pastor, was chaplain at the Iowa State University campus, and during World War I served with
