Priest and Spiritual Guide (1932–1996)
Henri Nouwen, a Dutch-born priest and one of the most popular spiritual writers of his time, died thirty years ago today on September 21, 1996. Through dozens of books, he invited readers to enter more deeply into the spiritual life—intimacy with Jesus and solidarity with a wounded world. Much of his impact came from his willingness to confide his own woundedness. The spiritual life, he insisted, was not intended simply for saints. Instead, the call of Jesus was addressed to the lame and halt, all of us in our brokenness and humanity. It was a call to conversion, a call to our true home.
The search for home was a constant motif in Nouwen’s life. He taught at several prestigious American universities, lived for a while in a Trappist monastery, and explored the possibility of mission work in Latin America. Then, in 1986, he left his Ivy League position at Harvard Divinity School to become a chaplain to a L’Arche community in Canada, living with mentally handicapped adults. It was the site of his deepest conversion, the discovery of what it means to be truly “beloved of God.” His last books were marked by intimations of mortality and of the need to find a way of “befriending” one’s death. How, he asked, can we see our dying as a “new way for us to send our own and God’s spirit to those whom we loved and who have loved us?”
Nouwen died suddenly of a heart attack in Amsterdam on September 21, 1996.
“We have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.” —Henri Nouwen
