Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life by Henri J.M. Nouwen

Author:Henri J.M. Nouwen [Nouwen, Henri J.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781101906354
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-03T21:00:00+00:00

Henri’s friend Jim Forest has remarried. He and his new wife, Nancy, who are living in Holland, have recently converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Henri writes from Daybreak, where he is visiting for a week.

MAY 4, 1988

Dear Jim and Nancy,

Thanks so much for your letters and for your words of encouragement sent to me and to Connie [Connie Ellis, Henri’s administrative assistant]. It was really good to know about your concern and your personal interest in my life. It obviously was a really great surprise for me to read that you both had joined the Orthodox Church. I have been sorting out my own response to your decision, and I discover that my main response is that I feel very sad that the Catholic Church in Holland has not been able to provide you with a “friendly spiritual life and sacramentally-centered home.”

It increasingly fills me with great sorrow that the Church in Holland has become for so many people a sterile place where deep spiritual life doesn’t seem to be encouraged or nurtured. I really do have a sense that the main reason for your move is precisely to find a welcoming spiritual home, and I am not surprised that the beauty, warmth and spiritual depth of the Orthodox Church has attracted you so much. I guess at some point I had hoped that it would have been possible for you to stay in the Roman Catholic Church and bring some of the Orthodox spirituality there, but I guess it is too much to ask of starving people to offer food to the hungry.

I certainly hope to be able to continue to stay in touch with you as you enter more deeply into the life and spirit of the Orthodox Church. A very close friend of mine, John Garvey, who writes a column in Commonweal, also recently took the same step as you have taken. I will send him your newsletter of April 18th, in which I am sure he will be very interested. As you can see from the introduction that he wrote for Circles of Love,*37 which I enclose, he finds much strength in the spiritual writers of the Orthodox Church.*38 I must also say that I myself have found the spiritual writings, especially of 19th-century Russian Orthodox mystics, an increasingly great source for my own spiritual development. Maybe I might even say that the older I become, the more I can really hear well the power and strength of that spiritual tradition.

I deeply hope that you will both be true bridge-builders between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. Somehow I find it very mysterious that, because of the Bolshevik Revolution, so many Orthodox Christians came to Western Europe and are now becoming a formidable spiritual force. Wherever I see renewal in the Roman Catholic Church, I see icons and I see literature from Russian Orthodox sources. Maybe the Orthodox Church came to the West in order to help the Roman Church to renew itself.

As far as I am concerned, I am still struggling but doing a little better.

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