What do we have to offer?

I have been wrestling recently with the meaning of being a pastor. Some of my recent posts reflect some of the questions and tensions. Often in times like these, I pull out well-worn books on my shelf: Will Willimon, Eugene Peterson, Henri Nouwen.

Here is one passage from Nouwen’s In the Name of Jesus:

I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. … The great message that we have to carry, as ministers of God’s Word and followers of Jesus, is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love as the true source of all human life.

This is Nouwen’s deep conviction. I want to ask if he is correct, but I fear this is part of my recent struggle — the search for certain answers to uncertain questions. So, I will respond without attempting to pretend I know enough to judge him.

I hear in the call to “irrelevance” a different voice than the ones that animate my denomination. And so, I fear that listening to Henri Nouwen will make me an unfit United Methodist.

I see he ends with the “source of all human life,” and so I wonder if he is unconcerned with eternal questions. Is the pastor concerned finally with this life only? Or is eternity assumed by Nouwen and so unstated? Any true human life will extend beyond the grave, he might say. I do not know.

He says we offer our own vulnerable self. But is that true? I recall the painting on the seminary wall of Methodist preachers climbing into a ship with the words “Offer them Christ.” In addition to proclaiming Christ, do we not also offer Christ? And is this not something more important than our vulnerable selves?

Nouwen may have part of an answer to my questions:

The Christian leader of the future is the one who truly knows the heart of God as it has become flesh, “a heart of flesh,” in Jesus. Knowing God’s heart means consistently, radically, and very concretely to announce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begins to invade the human soul, this is not something that comes from God. This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without any condition or limits.

Would John Wesley let Nouwen preach to a Methodist society? Or is such a question pointless given the change in time and place between the men? Would the Board of Ordained Ministry approve Nouwen’s candidacy? Would he lead people to Christ?

I am full of questions this week and few answers.

Nouwen and Wesley: Incompatible?

Ministry is entering with our human brokenness into communion with others and speaking a word of hope. This hope is not based on any power to solve the problems of those with whom we live, but on the love of God, which becomes visible when we let go of our fears of being out of control and enter into his presence in a shared confession of weakness.

— Henri Nouwen, ¡Gracias!

Henri Nouwen keeps talking to me.

His gentleness and his earnest and lovely writing always charm me. I cannot help but like him when I read his books. I cannot help but find myself underlining sentences and marking paragraphs for later reference. He writes words that cause my soul to take notice.

His writing, I suspect, is not that valuable to non-Christians or even, perhaps, Christians who do not share his educated and Western affluence. He never quite escapes his own paternalistic attitude toward the poor and the disabled. They are always in some ways “others” that he must cross gulfs to understand. They are often — even when he tries to avoid it — objects of his affection or compassion. Their existence often appears to be most cherished by Nouwen when they help him understand himself better.

To his credit, Nouwen knows this about himself. He sees his own need to control and his own reliance on his education and social position. He understands his own consuming desire for praise and admiration. He feels them as burdens in some ways, but burdens he never completely lays down. His participation with the poor or disabled always has the quality of a voluntary act, one he could walk away from. His choice to be among them always has a whiff of noblesse oblige about it, even as he writes of the gifts they give him.

I find Nouwen so constantly intriguing, though, because I believe he knew this about himself. I don’t think he was falsely humble or hypocritical. He knew his soul was divided against itself in many ways. He did not pretend to has escaped the fallen nature — what he called brokenness — of humanity, even as he sought healing.

He remains for me a testimony about how hard we recoil against true Christ-like humility and how powerful are the temptations that lure us to pride and self-justification.

As a United Methodist who values John Wesley’s teachings, I am troubled by some aspects of his testimony, though. Nouwen often seems to me to embrace his brokenness to such a degree that he cannot imagine being truly healthy. He hopes to become slowly more mature in his thinking and spirituality. With the help of good therapy, he learns to put away childish things, but he does not appear to expect to be renewed.

Perhaps this is a sign that I read Wesley too strongly or Nouwen too weakly, but I do hear something incompatible in their voices. Even though both would affirm that life in the body will always be a life of temptation and a life subject to frailty and error, Wesley sounds more optimistic about the power of grace to heal brokenness (break the power of sin) than Nouwen does. Nouwen feels resolved to a life without the possibility of victory over sin. Wesley is not.

I am not certain what to make of this incompatibility. But I take note of its presence. It calls me to further reflection and prayer.

In praise of incomprehensibility

Among the books by Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved is one of my favorites. It holds this place in my heart not because of what it achieves but because it fails.

The book was written at the request of a friend who wanted Nouwen to write something about the life of the Spirit that would speak to secular people. The book is a meditation on the Christian life written within the framework of the four movements of the Eucharist – take, bless, break, give. At the end of the book, Nouwen reports on the negative reaction of his secular friend.

Nouwen quotes him:

Although it is clear that you try to write for me and my friends from your own center and although you express to us what is most precious to you, you do not realize how far we are from where you are. You speak from a context and tradition that is alien to us, and your words are based on many presuppositions that we don’t share with you. You are not aware of how truly secular we are. Many, many questions need to be answered before we are able to be fully open to what you say about the life of the Beloved.

Among these questions are: Who is God? Who am I? Why am I here? How can I give my life meaning? How do I get faith?

This part of the book speaks to me because I was not a cradle Christian, and I could have put myself in this secular friend’s shoes at one point.  I had some questions that were a lot more pointed than these.

But here is what I have learned since those days. Answering these questions was not for me the first step toward faith. Following Jesus was. As long as I stood apart and insisted that someone provide a series of intellectual answers to intellectual questions, I moved no closer to God. I am only learning the answers to these questions as I have followed Jesus.

It is out of this experience that I find Will Willimon persuasive when he says the key issue is not apologetics but conversion. I do not mean that we should not answer secular questions like the one’s above, but I do not think we should expect our answers to have deep impact. You do not get the answer to the question “Who is Jesus?” without following him. If you try to understand him without following him, the best you can hope for is the confusion of Pilate muttering “What is truth?”

I suppose this is why I am skeptical of calls to speak in ways that the culture can understand. I don’t mean we should try to be obscure, but rather that we cannot avoid being obscure if we are speaking truthfully. How did Paul put it? The gospel is foolishness to the Greeks. Yes. And to Americans.

To quote Willimon:

Too often popular American evangelism presents the gospel as the solution to all our problems, the resolution of all conflict, another technique for making nice people nicer, successful people even more successful.

“My life was a mess. I was on drugs. I was addicted to sex. I ate high cholesterol snacks. Then I found Jesus … and everything got fixed.”

Against the notion of evangelism as simplification of the gospel to the point where no one could raise objections, accommodation of the gospel to the unformed and uninformed limits of our listeners, I would like to plead for another way, a way that sees the prime evangelistic moment, not in resolution and solution, but in the gap, the gap between us and God, as well as the peculiar way in which God deals with that gap in Jesus Christ.

I have no doubt Nouwen’s secular friend would find Willimon — and Jesus for that matter — even less comprehensible than Henri Nouwen.

Methodists in the wildernss

Do you think John Wesley was very good at the wilderness?

This week, I’ve been carrying around the gospel lectionary about Jesus being driven out into the wilderness and returning to preach the gospel. It is the wilderness that has taken hold of my attention. What is the wilderness? What do we do in the wilderness? What happens in those days? Why are Americans so bad at wilderness?

And I found myself this morning thinking about John Wesley.

On the one hand, he clearly had a long wilderness experience. It drove him to the colonies and nearly to despair. His response seemed to be to put his head down and bull rush through. Wesley did not appear to do Sabbath very well. He did not wait in the wilderness for 40 days to pass.

Or at least not so far as I can see from his letters, journal, sermons, and other writings. Although he often spoke of “waiting in the means of grace” for the work of the Holy Spirit, I never get the feeling from reading him that there was ever anything passive about this waiting.

In his sermon “The Wilderness State,” Wesley dismisses the notion of writers such as Henri Nouwen who teach the necessity of spiritual darkness and wandering in the wilderness. Wesley instead confronts the wilderness with his full array of spiritual diagnostics. He examines the various causes of spiritual darkness and proposes a series of cures depending on the cause. None of these cures, however, is to wait and be still. This just is not in Wesley’s spiritual medicine cabinet.

Richard Foster’s very helpful book Streams of Living Water places Wesley in the Holiness stream of Christianity, which is not a surprise. Nouwen, to the surprise of no one, is a contemplative in Foster’s typology.

These thoughts and observations raise for me questions about the nature of our denomination. Are we a home for all six of Foster’s streams of Christianity? Should we be? Or should we be an expression of our founding stream, holiness?

Of course, there is no simple answer to this question, but I do think some of our denominational struggles these days are over this set of questions. They are questions of identity. I wonder if having a more explicit appreciation of that fact would help us deal with the tensions created by our own wilderness wandering.

Bonhoeffer – Nouwen, God – self

Reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer one day and Henri Nouwen the next is a bit like riding a see-saw.

Bonhoeffer tells us that the path to our true self is to find and follow and obey God.

Nouwen tells us that the path to God starts by delving into our inner and true selves.

When I read John Wesley, I hear Bonhoeffer’s voice much more strongly than Nouwen’s in the background.

Nouwen and Wesley

At the end of his book The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen writes this:

When the imitation of Christ does not mean to live a life like Christ, but to live your life as authentically as Christ lived his, then there are many ways and forms in which a man can be a Christian.

The line grabbed my attention because it is in deep tension with John Wesley’s basic understanding of holiness. For Nouwen, holiness is deep authenticity of life. For Wesley, holiness is exactly what Nouwen seeks to move away from. Holiness is the imitation of Christ’s very life.

I wonder how other Wesleyans encounter Nouwen.

Is anyone aware of Nouwen writing at length about the Sermon on the Mount?

Self, neighbor, God

Henri Nouwen in his book Reaching Out writes about three polarities that define the spiritual life. They overlap in ways.

With regard to ourselves, we move from loneliness to solitude.

With regard to our neighbors, we move from hostility to hospitality.

With regard to God, we move from illusions to prayer.

When I first read this book, I was unsettled by Nouwen’s counsel that spiritual effort could get us where we need to go. It felt too much like self-help. But as I read it again, I saw that my reading was too blunt-edged. Nouwen’s evocation of faith is not the pounding blast of the shouting pastor, but it is the bedrock on which all his spiritual searching is based.

This is not a system. You do not start with self and move to neighbor and then to God. Or rather, you might, but I may not. Each of these three movements of the spirit reinforce and interact with each other. It is a complex process that takes years of patience and seeking. It is not well-suited for our quick fix society or our preaching that offers 5 biblical principles for a better life.

These three overlapping polarities of the spirit make sense to me. In ways, they highlight an aspect of Wesleyan theology that may be underdeveloped. Wesley speaks quite strongly into two of those polaritites – neighbor and God. Much of his project can be seen – perhaps – as an effort to get people of his day to include the neighbor in what was sometimes an exclusive focus on God.

But I do not recall Wesley writing much of what Nouwen terms the movement from loneliness to solitude. Perhaps the idea is meaningless to Wesley – so much navel gazing. Wesley was a great admiring of Thomas a Kempis, who did not seemed to see concern with the self as bordering on idolatry and certainly as resisting the call to submerge our will in Christ. Perhaps that would be Wesley’s reaction to Nouwen as well.

It is an interesting question. At least to me.

Do we know how to be alone?

I’ve heard Henri Nouwen used so much in sermons that I start to tune out whenever his name is invoked.

But then I read one of his books and recall why those preachers pull him out so often.

To this quote below, I wonder if “no blog to write” should be added to his list:

When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves, we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game which makes us believe that everything is fine afterall.

The quote is from Reaching Out. How often do we church people abet this conspiracy of busyness with our programs and projects and group meetings? Do we teach people how to be alone?