Befriending Life: Encounters With Henri Nouwen

(Doubleday, 2001, Hardcover, pp. 272) Edited by Beth Porter, with Susan M.S. Brown and Philip Coulter

In the years immediately following Nouwen's death, the idea began to circulate among his friends of writing their memories about Henri, sharing their stories of how he had influenced their lives.  Visitors to Daybreak voiced these same ideas and found a listening ear in the person of Sue Mosteller, Literary Executrix of the Henri Nouwen Estate. With her own desk piled high with work related to her responsibilities as Executrix, Sue approached her friend and Daybreak resident, Beth Porter, asking if she would consider undertaking the work of gathering and editing the stories circulating among Nouwen's friends. The result is Befriending Life.

Contributors, 42 in all, were asked not to eulogize Nouwen, but to write about him as the complex person he was.  The resulting collection is an offering of choice vignettes, treating the reader to close-ups of the ever restless, ever devoted lecturer, writer and spiritual guide, described by the editor in her preface as "at times both the most wise and the most broken among us."

I watched Henri minister to many people; he could go to the core of an issue or problem without fear.  One of his gifts was the ability to really listen.  Often the people he counseled recognized what they needed but were not able to act on it.  Henri's strong belief that we are the beloved of God and that God is a forgiving God freed them where they had been stuck, to ask for what they needed and to be still in order to listen to the answer.  Most times people came away on a new path.  "Working with Henri", by Kathy Christie

Read a book review from the Presbyterian Record, April 2002. 

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