Nouwen quoted in Toronto Star article by Michael Higgins

September 19th, 2005

Toronto Star, June 11, 2005
Opinion

Michael Higgins

While writing the chapter “Spiritual in Essence and Form” for Power and Peril: The Catholic Church at the Crossroads a few years ago, I was struck not only by the tremendous longing for spirituality exhibited by so many in our society, but also that this longing seemed, for too many, to defy definition.

In April, I gave a lecture at the Centre for Organizational Health, an affiliate of Homewood Health Centre in Guelph. Homewood tends to the emotionally and physically wounded in our society but increasingly recognizes the importance of healing the spiritually wounded. The CEO and chief of staff is Edgardo Perez, a professor of psychiatry at the universities of McMaster, Ottawa and Toronto who acknowledges the importance of spirituality in nurturing a meaningful integration of values, experience, knowledge, suffering and religious vision that combined make for wholeness/holiness.

Increasingly, healthcare professionals, administrators industry, government and university bureaucrats, medical authorities and researchers are acknowledging the role of spirituality for a healthy society. In other words, spirituality isn’t the exclusive provenance of frightened sectarians, market-happy entrepreneurs keen on the spiritual spin, pastors of the huckster persuasion, or the desperately credulous. Spirituality, in fact, is not elitist, insular, a commodity to be purchased, or an esoteric practice for the initiated.

In my talk, “The Spirituality of the Wounded” and I focused on two particular figures: Henri Nouwen and Jean Vanier.

In 1972, The Wounded Healer by the Dutch psychologist-priest Henri Nouwen ushered in a new attention to the “healer” and a new phrase into the lexicon of spiritual terms. Nouwen realized the loneliness and alienation often experienced by the healing professionals, and most especially those who are ministers of the spirit, could be a precious gift.

A psychologist of the heart and the soul, Nouwen wrote not only to guide others but in a sense to discover himself. He wrote to find himself. In his spiritual handbook, Making All Things New: An Invitation to the Spiritual Life, he highlighted the spiritual confusion that afflicts our culture: “One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there. We know where we belong, but we keep being pulled away in many directions, as if we were still homeless.”

Nouwen appreciated the profound displacement at the heart of contemporary humanity, a rootlessness that he himself shared. He understood that everything in our culture that defines success or fulfillment is predicated on those qualities that work against our yearning for wholeness. We need to cultivate what he calls “the discipline of solitude and the discipline of community,” because we need to attend to the silent voice of God, to eliminate the extraneous sounds that dominate our lives.

Still, a spirituality of the wounded was not exclusively Nouwen territory. Although he coined the phrase “the wounded healer,” he was quick to acknowledge those whose ministry with the wounded was of long-standing and estimable quality. And none perhaps fit into this category more fully than his European eulogist, the Canadian philosopher, spiritual writer, activist, and co-founder of L’Arche, Jean Vanier.

Vanier’s vision for the wounded, the making whole of our fractured humanity, is possible only when we attend to the logic of the heart. His spirituality of the wounded is a spirituality enmeshed in the world of broken bodies, broken minds, and broken spirits. But Vanier knows that to break open the “plague of cerebration” that poisons our culture, to expose the fallacies of reason, we must allow “the wounded” to heal our wounds, allow the maimed to touch our invisible scars of heart and mind. In short, we must be vulnerable as they are vulnerable. The “other” becomes a gift to us.

The clients, health-care professionals, supervisory staff, and excellent clinical leadership that I found at Homewood offered a wonderful example of a spirituality for the wounded that provides ample testimony to the wisdom that physical and emotional wholeness are never complete without spiritual struggle and growth.

Michael W. Higgins is president of St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario.
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Reprinted with permission.

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