Sharon Ramsay | The Strength of Weakness: Embracing Vulnerability in Ministry
Bruce’s guest today is Sharon Ramsay. Sharon has worked as a registered psychotherapist and registered marriage and family therapist, helping individuals journey through unexpected experiences in different seasons of life. She also is a board member of the Henri Nouwen Society! Sharon and HNS ED Bruce Adema discuss Henri Nouwen’s letter written to a Free Methodist Church gathering, and the letter echoes themes found in his book “The Wounded Healer.” In weakness there is strength, in woundedness there is healing, and in the gospel there is hope.
Links & References
Book Discussed:
Love, Henri
https://amzn.to/3fpnolF (US)
https://amzn.to/2C2lqcD (Canada)
The Wounded Healer
https://amzn.to/2AGOrKz (US)
https://amzn.to/3hdDkcr (Canada)
Available On
Transcript
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Bruce Adema: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the “Love, Henri” podcast, produced by the Henri Nouwen Society. My name is Bruce Adema, and I'm the Executive Director of the Henri Nouwen Society, and therefore, part of a great team that encourages spiritual transformation through the writings and legacy of Spiritual Guide Henri Nouwen. Maybe you've appreciated Henri's wisdom for a long time. Maybe you've just been introduced to it. Either way. I encourage you to sign up for the daily meditations on our website, Henrinouwen.org, and be reminded every day that you are a beloved child of God. Our guest today is Sharon Ramsay. Sharon received her master of divinity degree in 1994, and now works as a registered psychotherapist and marriage and family therapist helping individuals journey through unexpected experiences in different seasons of life. That's fantastic. Another wonderful thing about Sharon is she's a board member of the Henri Nouwen Society. Yay, Sharon. I love that. Thank you for joining us, Sharon. Now, I've introduced you in the most brief of ways. What more should we know about you that you would like to share with us?
Sharon Ramsay: Well, first of all, thank you, Bruce, for that introduction. And hello everybody. I would say it's important for folks to know that I am a wife and a mom, a daughter, a sister, and a friend to a number of folks. And I'm currently a doctoral student in counseling and spirituality and psychotherapy. So lots of interesting things. And perhaps the weirdest thing, or the thing I I love the best is that I love fountain pens and stationary. So the fact that Henri would've written letters to people really speaks to my Fountain Pens paper loving heart <laugh>.
Bruce Adema: Lovely, lovely. As we’re recording this, Sharon, I'm at my desk. The table that I use as my desk was Henri Nouwen's personal writing desk. He had it in his bedroom. I am so honored to have this piece of furniture that I sit at every day and do my job. It's a real privilege. I love that you're into pens. That’s another thing actually we share, I'll have to talk to you about that offline sometimes.
Sharon Ramsay: Fair!
Bruce Adema: Our podcast that we call “Love, Henri”, is because we're drawing on the letters that he wrote during his life. He was a prolific letter writer. He wrote many books. He gave many lectures. He led retreats. Many people became familiar with him or got to know him through one of those means, and they would write to him, asking him questions, seeking guidance from him, and invariably, Henri would write them back. He had this lovely habit of keeping every letter that he received. Not only that, he made a carbon copy of every letter that he wrote. So, in the archive at the University of Toronto, the Henri Nouwen Archive has over 16,000 letters by Henri. Now, some of them have been gathered and put together in a book called Love Henri. It's a lovely book. I encourage you to get a copy of it for yourself.
Bruce Adema: But what we're doing in this podcast is taking one of those letters and engaging in conversation with a guest who has insight into it, or something to add in the modern context to it today. That is Sharon. Now, the letter for today is a bit unusual in that it wasn't written to just one person, but to a gathering in a message addressed to pastoral workers, which came together for the annual conference of the Free Methodist Church. Henri shares reflections on weakness and vulnerability in ministry, a concept that he explored in his 1972 Classic, the Wounded Healer, and that he later exemplified as a member of L'Arche Daybreak, a community of care and support and love for people that have disabilities. Now, let me read for you Henri's letter to the Free Methodists. And remember that this was written 33 years ago in March, 1991.
Bruce Adema: Here's his letter.
Dear friends,
As you are gathering at your April meeting, I want to express to you my great regret that I will not be able to be with you. I am spending the month of April in Germany to do some writing.
Brian asked me to send you a few words to encourage you in your work and to assure you of my great desire to be connected with you.
As I think of the words that are your theme for your gathering, I realize how much I identify with those words.* The longer I live in the ministry, the more I feel the call to become weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, broken with the broken. My life with people who have a mental handicap has confronted me more and more with my own handicaps, my own weaknesses, and my own brokenness. But the more I was willing to be confronted in a gentle loving way, the more I discovered that God, indeed, chose to dwell where we can come together in a fellowship of the week.
There was a time when I really wanted to help the poor, the sick and the broken, but to do it as one who was wealthy, healthy and strong. Now I see more and more how it is precisely through my weakness and brokenness that I minister to others. I am increasingly aware of the fact that Jesus does not say, ‘Blessed are those who help the poor’ but ‘Blessed are the poor.’ For me, this means that I have to come in touch with my own poverty to discover there the blessings of God and to minister from that place to others. It is only as the ‘blessed ones’ that we can be a blessing for others, and I pray that we all dare to claim the blessing that rests in our poverty, our weakness, our non togetherness, and that we can proclaim to others that where they are broken and in great need, the voice of God’s love can often be heard.
It is clear we need to heal. It is clear we need to protest against violence and injustice. It is clear that we have to do anything possible to avoid oppression, exploitation and war. But this ministry of healing has to be a ministry in the name of the One who healed through his wounds and who revealed his healing presence as the crucified one, who took the marks of his crucifixion into his new life with God.
So I pray that you embrace your own weakness and your own suffering and your own pain with trust that, in this way, you can follow your Lord and make your own wounds a source of healing for others. Thus you can also become a true light for the world and a sign of hope and a prophetic voice that calls for peace and justice.
Your brother in Christ,
Henri Nouwen
*The words of the conference were: ‘To the weak I made myself weak. I accommodated myself to people in all kinds of different situations, so that by all possible means I might bring some to salvation. All this I do for the sake of the Gospel, that I may share its benefits with others’ (Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 9:22-23).
Bruce Adema: Well, that's a very thoughtful letter. It just cries out that care was taken in its composition. What was your reaction, Sharon, to Henri's letter, to this gathering of Free Methodists?
Sharon Ramsay: I think my first reaction was yes, in Amen <laugh>. And then, what came to my mind was second Corinthians chapter one, verses three to five, where the Apostle Paul writes, praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who comforts us in all of our suffering, so that we can comfort those who suffer with the comfort we've received. In short, what stood out for me was the reciprocal and ongoing nature of comfort in the midst of, of suffering. And the second part would be, certainly from a therapy standpoint, there is this idea that somehow the therapist, the helper has got it all together. And so we provide support from the bounty of strength and vulnerability that we present and our clients who are just people, the ones who are recipients. But I think what Henri reminds the gathering of the Free Methodist workers is that we too are in need of comfort. We too have known suffering, perhaps in various shapes and forms and various times, and there is something about that experience that we therefore share with those that we minister to. So it's back and forth as opposed to being very linear and unidirectional. So that speaks to me deeply.
Bruce Adema: Yeah. It seems that Henri is making a distinction, or maybe I'm drawing it myself, between sympathy and empathy.
Sharon Ramsay: Right.
Bruce Adema: I think we are conditioned to be sympathetic. But could it be that our calling is to be empathetic?
Sharon Ramsay: That's a good question. And perhaps I’m going to do the wrong thing and ask another question. I wonder if there is, depending on one's culture, I wonder if there is some sort of rule that we are not to show our weakness if we are in a position of power or strength or authority, that somehow weakness is to be avoided or hidden. It's only for certain people. And again, I would suggest that what Henri's doing is saying No, no. It, it's kind of contextual. It's kind of based upon the role. There are times when we are called to be the one that helps, and there are also times when we are the one who needs the help. And so there's no shame in either position. There's just, there's this relationship, there's this mutuality. And those of us who may spend more time helping would do well to remember that we too have been helped. We too have walked through suffering and weakness.
Bruce Adema: Yeah. Christ is certainly the great example. You know, Henri's book, the Wounded Healer, says that we need to understand ourselves as wounded people who are imitating the wounded healer.
Sharon Ramsay: I agree. And I think in an age, certainly now, 30 some odd years later, in the age of social media, there is so much curating of our image and so much wanting to tell a story about ourselves that is perfected and has risen above, which I suppose has its place. And it's hard to tell the story of I'm still working it out. There is a something in my gait that still isn't quite even, there's something in my heart that still feels heavy. There's something in my mind that's not quite put to right yet. I think there's something that Henri is calling us to remember, and be present to use that experience as a bridge to meeting with another person.
Bruce Adema: The idea that God in Christ has weaknesses is a startling proposition. But it's also encouraging. I find that the Lord can understand us and therefore we can understand each other.
Sharon Ramsay: Yeah. That's good. That's good. Well, I would suggest that part of that identification or understanding is that he was in real relationship with human beings, <laugh>. He was in real relationship with the natural world. So if, if the Lord were simply only God on high, only existed in perfection, it might be difficult for him to understand his creation. But the Lord lived physically on the earth, dealt with people in all of our <laugh> unique folly and joy <laugh>. And so there's something, I believe that Jesus understood, I'll say viscerally what it was to be disappointed, what it was to be betrayed, what it was to lose somebody, what it is to be angry and found a way of including his Father in those experiences. So I would suggest that for us, there's great consolation in identifying with Jesus and noting how he didn't stop loving or caring, even in those moments of real trial.
Sharon Ramsay: And sometimes I wonder if, again, speaking as a psychotherapist, sometimes, people despise the fact that they've been hurt. And obviously no one wants to be hurt, don't get me wrong. But there's this sense in which, who's with me when I'm hurting, who sees me when I don't quite get it? And again, I imagine Henri is asking us, or asking his readers to remember whether what it was like or even what it's like currently to be in need. And that's not to be despised. There's an embracing and eventually a reaching out that can occur in that point of need.
Bruce Adema: Yeah. Henri talks about how it's not that our calling is not to be there for people, but it's to be there with people.
Sharon Ramsay: A hundred percent.
Bruce Adema: And you can only be with those whom you identify with. That you have to understand it to be truly with them.
Sharon Ramsay: I wonder if that's where your idea, the notion of empathy comes in, Bruce, because if we are repulsed by suffering, that repulsion, revulsion might invite us to be distant, but what if in recognizing suffering, we were able to say, oh, I do know something of what that's like, and rather than being repulsed, we're drawn in. Right. Rather than, you know, I'll cast some kind of magic spell from afar, but I won't get close to you. What if we were able to embrace the suffering, not see it as so alien? Maybe we would get closer, maybe we'd become more curious. Maybe we'd be happy to sit simply alongside and give the gift of presence and not just solutions or ideas, but really sit with somebody or our own self and say, wow, this is a tough season. I do think there's something transformative about being able to acknowledge or attune to suffering as a part of life. It may not be the reason, may not be a reason of fault or having done something wrong. It might simply be just what is, and again, I hear that Henri is saying, you know, that you can be a true light if you actually get curious about this experience of suffering.
Bruce Adema: Yeah. Curious for the other. Not in a judgmental way, but in a compassionate way.
Sharon Ramsay: Absolutely. And in a way that invites maybe the sharing of what it's really like as opposed to the performance of what it should be. You know, we can sort of rush, I heard someone say in a training recently that the temptation is to rush around the stuck point. And I believe the call of the gospel is to go through the stuck point, and then the going through, we have companionship. There's something, not that suffering is the end goal, but there's something about the process of through that can, can in itself be healing. So who is around us that can actually go through it with us?
Bruce Adema: Yeah. Yeah. I think, a very terrible thing to say, which I've said, which maybe many have said. When they see someone suffer. Or even living the consequence of unfortunate decisions. We say there, but for the grace of God go I. You say that that person is the other. And, instead should say, Hey, that person is my brother, that person is my sister. And I need to not identify them in that way, but I need to come alongside. Not, there they go, but here I come.
Bruce Adema: That's nice. In the name of Christ.
Sharon Ramsay: Yes. And I wonder if identification is also in that circumstance, what would I also, what would I have loved if it happened in something we're familiar with? It would've been really great if someone had asked me, for example, is it in that place of suffering or weakness? I imagine the experience of feeling alone is quite prevalent. That feeling might invite us to not let anybody know that we're suffering or feeling weak. And so we get isolated. And again, in the wisdom of God, we're called into relationship that isn't exclusive. What's the right word I'm looking for? We can still come to God. Right? The door has not been closed. So what is it about our experience that tells us no one will want to talk to us? We don't belong, so therefore we isolate? Wouldn't it be great if the one who was coming alongside could demonstrate that invitation of relation to relationship? That I'm here because I see you and I hear you, and I want to be with you. That has the element to me of being healing in and of itself, whether or not we have solutions <laugh> to offer. We want to dismantle isolation.
Bruce Adema: We are called to be weak.
Bruce Adema: One of the stories in the Bible that came to my mind reflecting on this was Jesus talking about the pharisee, the religious prominent person. Who stood at the corner, made a big display of his religiosity and said, oh, I'm so glad I'm such an upstanding person. Thank you for not making me like one of these despised people over there. And then contrast that with a person who didn't have it all together, who in the solitude, beat his breast and said, Woe to me a sinner, pleading for mercy.
Bruce Adema: And that person was the one who received the gift of God. And the one who is so full of himself, he says, that person has already received his reward. What he wanted was adulation from the community. He got it. The one who was seeking to come in his brokenness to God received healing there.
Bruce Adema: And we are called to emulate that weak person.
Bruce Adema: The humility of it.
Sharon Ramsay: Yeah. And so that makes me wonder, what's the benchmark? You know, like it is it that I have all these things. I no longer need those things. Is the benchmark really about where I rank myself vis-a-vis other human beings? Or is the benchmark mark, how do I stand before God? And if we take the former idea, then the religious leader who's there vaunting his position as you, as the scripture says, he's received his reward, he wants adulation, cool. But if we have a higher perspective, we recognize that we each bear a certain amount of struggle and difficulty and joy and happiness. We each have our own portion of those things. And ultimately, what makes us human, ultimately, we long for relationship. Ultimately, we face difficult circumstances. Ultimately, we're looking for that. You want to be loved.
Sharon Ramsay: If we could have the per perspective of how my life has turned out, some things were my decisions. Other things just are, could I see my neighbor as being in a similar situation? And if my neighbor needed help, would I withhold it or would I want to give it because I would want to be helped? And I think that's also a place of vulnerability to recognize that I would want help. And while it might stink to have someone see me at my lowest, I would rather have someone offer than for them to see me and step over. So there's something really, really powerful in this letter about the invitation to care, because we've been cared for the invitation to return, to give back, to remember. That's a really helpful message for those of us who are in roles that are seen as being the ones who help the ones who heal, the ones who go into, there's something about that role that can obscure the times when we ourselves have needed help.
Bruce Adema: Henri in the last years of his life lived at L’Arche Daybreak, that community in the northern part of Toronto, where he lived and ministered to people that have disabilities of various kinds. But also to those that were caring for them. Henri wrote that he was a blessing to the people that he cared for. One in particular, a man named Adam, who had profound disabilities. He was Henri's partner, and they were put together. Henri said, I have been more blessed by Adam than he has been blessed by me. That Henri felt his own weakness, and that Adam had a strength that, that he was blessed by, that it was very much a reciprocal relationship. And that Henri had not been able to see his own weakness. He would not have been able to receive a blessing, and be part of that community of blessing that flowed back and forth between them.
Bruce Adema: How do we recognize our own weakness? The temptation is to say, we we're people that have it all together, have my health, got a good job. I don't have any obvious disabilities, so I'm good. But there is a weakness, there is a need in me. How do we come to recognize that and use that, as Henri says in this letter that our weaknesses become our strength. They become the gifts that we can give to others.
Sharon Ramsay: Well, my first thought is that it's in relationship. And by that I mean, it's possible to, in the exercise of our professional roles, it's possible to meet the folks that we help. Right. And in the meeting, there may be some situations where it feels really easy. Oh, I can do that. No problem. And yet, I would say that listening to someone tell their story when it connects even slightly with something in our own lives, we remember that experience. So, let's see if I can think of an example of this. I think about how we're not really good in conversations about death, right? That in our workplaces, you get a set amount of time for grieving. If it's this person, you get five days, this person, maybe you get half a day. And when we, we don't know what to say to someone necessarily who's experienced a death. We don't want anybody to cry.
Sharon Ramsay: Just like, sort of have the ritual and we're done with it. And it seems to me that if we are really wanting to encounter those spots, that we don't want anybody else to see, have someone show up who is experiencing that very thing. I imagine that for somebody who is an emergency room doctor, accustomed to all kinds of challenges a human body can face that there's a certain amount of training that allows you to get on with the job. And yet there could be that one person in the ER one day with their unique injury that gets us. And you think, oh my goodness. And then maybe there are tears or there's anger that something about encountering somebody in a particular place of need reminds us that we are not invincible.
Sharon Ramsay: And how do we push through? How do we attend to that? I would suggest that the attending to the impact of witnessing somebody else's vulnerability is the start of our dealing with our own vulnerability. So we've got to be able to see it or experience it. If you put language to it, I find it really difficult. Personally, I find it really difficult if the human body is seen as frail, if there's an injury, I find that really hard. I don't like hospitals. But the times in my life, when I have been called to visit folks in the hospital who are close to me, there is something I'll say miraculous that happens where I may be uncomfortable, but I know that my job right now is to be with this one who's in a rough spot. And so I can bring my discomfort with me.
Sharon Ramsay: I can take a break, but ultimately, they're not asking me to heal them. They're asking me to be with them. And then in my own times of weakness and vulnerability, the thing I long for is someone just to be with me. They haven't got to do anything about it, but I want their presence. So I think that might be part of our ongoing lesson. Can we just show up and be, rather than show up and try to do something? Because inevitably the doing may be off. It's not what the other person is wanting.
Bruce Adema: Like job's, friends. Job’s life fell apart in every way imaginable. And then his friends came and for seven days they just sat with him. And that was when they were being people with a blessing. After seven days, they started to talk and wrecked everything. If only they just stayed quiet just to be the friend that Job needed.
Sharon Ramsay: For sure. Or, or even like the New Testament story of the man born blind, and disciples full of their vigor, seeing him. It's like, oh Lord, who sinned? They see this man who does not have sight. And instead of, ironically, instead of seeing this man, they're looking elsewhere, for solutions. And Jesus corrects them. In my head, he has a little bit of a face palm moment, and goes, oh my goodness. Okay, guys, it's not about who sinned, it's about, this is the day that the Lord, that God is going to show up in his life. There's something else that's important in this particular moment. So again, in the presence of weakness, could we see opportunity? And whether the opportunity is something very simple like a cup of cold water or something more dramatic, like a healing, could we just be in the here and now? Could we be present to it and stop fussing and running around and getting very, very busy? I think that's part of our discomfort with vulnerability, whether it is the person or whether it's our own not knowing what to do. Let's get busy. Let's create a distraction. What if you just got quiet for a moment and paid attention to who is before us? I think that might be the place of blessing in those circumstances.
Bruce Adema: I know one, one of the mistakes that I can make, that many people make when we're in the presence of suffering . We don't know what to say. As you told us before. But when we do talk, we try to one up the suffering. We say, oh you have it bad, but you should have seen my sister-in-law. You know what she went through. Oh, it was even worse. And by doing that, we minimize the situation of the person. The idea of comparing doesn't really help anything. Yet we are called to take this message of embracing weakness and suffering into our daily lives and ministries. How can we integrate that message with the people that we come in contact with?
Sharon Ramsay: That's a great question. What that sort of lands in a particular way for me, my response is probably take a breath. Whether that's a breath of recognition, like, oh my, let me just resource myself again. And then there is a recognition, like a naming of what's happening here? What's happening here. Not everything that we see or we experience can be fixed. Right? We are in a time right now where there are many wars of various scales that are going on, and all of our words don't change that.
Sharon Ramsay: We are in situations where indescribable things happen on a regular basis, and our pity doesn't change that. So I guess what I'm saying is that we need to acknowledge what's happening, but then I think there's a moment of pause to say, you know, what, what could I bring to this situation? What could I offer? And then maybe that silence might invite some kind of conversation. And we're back to what you had mentioned before, that reciprocal nature of any kind of helping relationship. Why can we not be for a moment?
Sharon Ramsay: One of my mentors told me a story of someone who had really had a lot of services in their life, lots of people coming to the door, and each service had their own particular pathway to healing, the way to address the situation. And when my mentor came to the door, so part of a long parade of helpers, the person was like, I don't want to hear anything from anybody. You all come with your own ideas, but no one listens to what I have to say. And so my mentor made a decision to listen, to continue to do what they had to do, show up and listen, and did so for a year, not offering any solutions, not trying to correct, just really hearing out this one who had been inundated by people's perspectives on the situation. At the end of that year, the one who was supposedly in need said, you've listened to me and you haven't tried to change.
Sharon Ramsay: Now I'm ready to hear what you might have to say. And while that can sound kind of topsy-turvy, it suggests to me that the power of listening and attending and really seeing is the first step. And perhaps by having done that, there's this opportunity to demonstrate a willingness to hear, a willingness to understand, a willingness to continue to show up even when nothing is being asked of us at the moment. And then the help can be offered. And what I hold on to that from that story is my mentor laid aside all of the skills and interventions and possibility and education that they could have brought to the situation and got back to basics, listened, listened, respectfully, waiting for invitation as opposed to imposing their will. I feel like that those are the ingredients that then get doled out in different measure depending on the circumstance.
Bruce Adema: Okay. There's a lot of compassion that’s required for that, but also a lot of humility.
Bruce Adema: That we come into contact with people who have tremendous needs, are broken or weak in various ways. We have to have compassion for them. But also have the humility to say, that doesn't make them less than I, but together we can now journey along, towards the one who was so deeply wounded himself. I mean, Christ Jesus went in his incarnation, getting all theological, uh, okay. And for 30 years, strikes me as being like Job's friends. He lived his life, lived as a son, as a friend, not, addressing the big needs of the world. But then the time came when it was time for him to, to step forward. And even so, he was always one with the people, didn't set himself up as a king, but as a gentle teacher. I find that helpful for me. So, how do I comport myself? Not, not in a prideful way, but in a compassionate and humble way.
Sharon Ramsay: I appreciate you saying that, Bruce. What you just said calls back to mind for me, the second Corinthians passage where Paul is reminding the Corinthians that they have received comfort from God, and it's out of that comfort that they offer or can meet somebody else. If we forget, have a bit of comfort amnesia. Because now we're living the high life, or we're living really well, we lose that initial infilling that allows for the outpouring. I think that as a psychotherapist, I just need to have book knowledge and be able to spew it out, that knowledge is going to run out. However, it's been my experience, and certainly more so over the past four years, when I think when I consider what I have lived personally and professionally, those moments of deep struggle, I'm more inclined now to say, this is part of the human condition.
Sharon Ramsay: Yes, I have received some comfort. It's out of that, that I'm giving, but I'm also going to be receiving from my clients what they have learned, their learned wisdom, the solutions or the avenues that actually work have worked for them. And I'd be a fool not to pay attention to what they know, what they know they're willing to accept. When you speak about Jesus, knowing all that Jesus knew, he knew the beginning and the end of the story and everything in between, who still was willing to sit with folks who were on the margins. Who still was willing to speak back to those who he knew wouldn't hear him, who was still willing in that scene during the last Supper. He knows what Judas is up to and still says, you know, go ahead and do your thing. Jesus had a stillness about him, not that he was slow to act. But there was a stillness about him. And I imagine that being that breath. That pause, that recognition that, oh, this is part of it that allowed him to respond in the way that he responded when folks were really thick and not getting it.
Sharon Ramsay: Well, and I take that as comfort to say, let's be reminded once again, what is the dance that we are in as humans? We take some time to learn things. We are likely to rush off madly in all directions. We need that gentle landing when we say, oh, yeah. Doing it again louder, doesn't make it better. There's something about that pause, that stillness that's really important for us. And I imagine in the stillness, we then get to hear God's still small voice saying, you know, before you do that, let me in before you rush off, have a think before you blast somebody. What was the hurt for you? And could we maybe address it differently? I believe the call of God is to be able to address it differently, to take the time to pause. And again, in Henri's letter, he's not condemning them for the work they're doing. He's inviting them. And how much of this work is a reflection of your own learning growth, weakness, struggle. How much of being together is a chance to bandage one another's wounds? There's something really beautiful about that. Still mindful pause.
Bruce Adema: Well, thank you, Sharon. The themes of this letter are exquisitely developed in Henri's book, the Wounded Healer. And, uh, if anyone wants to ponder on these themes and hear Henri more on it, get a hold of that book and read it. You'll be blessed. It was in my own personal story, when I was at a low point, feeling my own weakness. I can't continue down this road. Then someone gave me that book and said, Bruce read it. And it changed my life. It gave me hope, gave me a perspective on, not only my own need, but on the nature of Jesus and what it means for me to be a servant of his. So, very important themes. And, Sharon, thank you for helping us to think through them so well. In your own life and experience, you're obviously a woman of faith, and a leader in the community. What are the spiritual practices that sustain you and, and keep you on the right path?
Sharon Ramsay: I would say probably the biggest one for me is music. I recently had the experience of hearing an exquisite choir in a cathedral. And it was a very small, even song service. And they were singing acapella and listening to the voices of these young people soar in that cathedral was, I felt I was transported. There's something about exquisite harmony that speaks to me. I'm also one who loves the boisterous, bring out the electric guitars and bass and the drums, and having that kind of musical experience. And I think because I believe music to be a gift of God, and the ability of us to, with all of our differences bring and make this to be cliche, joyful noise moves me. And so in times of sadness or disappointment, I'm apt to turn on, whether it be choral music or gospel music, or the, you know, needless contemporary something, and just listen to others express their faith in God.
Sharon Ramsay: And that moves me. I would say the scripture that I shared in Second Corinthians is what I would say the counselor's verse to remember that we're not just all outpouring, we're infilled as well. And then I would say community. So I do believe that we encounter the face of God and one another. And sometimes when it's too hard to reach out to God directly, having someone else be kind of God's proxy and remind us, remind me that I am loved and beloved is a balm for a soul that's feeling kind of bruised and battered.
Bruce Adema: Thank you for sharing that. And thank you, Sharon for being with us today, for taking the time to share. And we really, really appreciate that. So thank you.
Sharon Ramsay: Pleasure. Can I add one more thing? The one thing I would add is I only met Henri Nouwen once, and it was in the context of a retreat, that'd be 1991, maybe. I don't think at the time I knew anything about Henri Nouwen. No idea. However, my memory of the retreat and of him that we treat was, obviously he's a speaker. So if you bring a speaker in that someone's a big deal, what I remember is the humility of the man and his ability to move seamlessly amongst this group of new students. So it's quite something for me now to be part of the board and having this conversation thinking, I had no idea who he was, but there was sort of a warmth in the meeting, and now I'm learning more about him. So that's maybe another excuse to remember the value of how we are present with other people.
Bruce Adema: Okay. Well, thank you for sharing that. Thank you also to you, our listeners. If you've been listening to the audio version of the conversation, know that you can also find a video version on YouTube, which you can access through our website, Henrinouwen.org. And while you're there, you can poke around the website and learn about the other great programs and offerings of the Henri Nouwen Society as well, of course, you can sign up for the daily meditations, which many have told us they find great blessing in. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please leave a nice review, give it a big thumbs up. And it would be nice if you'd share this with your family and friends. Say that maybe there's something good and helpful and true in it. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening. And never forget that you are a beloved child of God.
