The Wounded Healer

 I’m finishing up reading The Wounded Healer, by Henri Nouwen.  It talks about the predicament modern humans find themselves in due to increasing chaos and brokenness in the world, and the implications of this context for those who would minister to others today. 

 

 

So many of us feel like victims of circumstance just grasping at straws in the universe to try and form a life that makes some sort of sense.  Hope for the future is mostly gone and we’ve settled for trying to make our own present bearable.  Our third-person sentences tend to be critical and dismissive, and we hope that the honest vulnerability in our first-person sentences will earn us some measure of favor in the eyes of the person in front of us.  Our experiences often don’t create the meaning and camaraderie that we hope for, and so we are constantly forced to look for a new a new group, a new agenda, even a new ideology.  And often when these things don’t serve us we settle for the marginal safety of apathy.

 

 

Nouwen says that the leader of tomorrow (which I would call the leader of today since he wrote this fifty years ago) will be an articulator of inner events, a man of compassion, and a contemplative critic.

 

 

The articulator of inner events

 

The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life, who can give names to his varied experiences, need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering…

 

…only he who is able to articulate his own experience can offer himself to others as a source of clarification.

 

… he must first have the courage to be an explorer of the new territory in himself and to articulate his discoveries as a service to the inward generation.

 

 

This section reminded me of Ronnie Steven’s sermon about Joseph’s interpretation of Pharoah’s dreams.  He made the statement, “All people of the world have dreams and longings.  The children of God know where they come from.”

 

 

A man of compassion

If we now realize that the future generation is not only an inward generation asking for articulation but also a fatherless generation looking for a new kind of authority, we must consider what the nature of this authority will be.  To name it, I cannot find a better word than compassion.  Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority.

 

… the danger is that [the Christian leader’s] skillful diagnostic eye will become more an eye for distant and detailed analysis than the eye of a compassionate partner.

 

 

A contemplative critic

 

More than anything else, he will look for signs of hope and promise in the situation in which he finds himself.  The contemplative critic has the sensibility to notice the small mustard seed and the trust to believe that “when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches.” (Mt. 13.31-32). He knows that if there is hope for a better world in the future the signs must be visible in the present, and he will never curse the now in favor of the later.

 

…he is a man of hope who lives with the unshakable conviction that now he is seeing a dim reflection in a mirror, but that one day he will see the future face to face.

 

 

And here’s the beautiful connection between all of this and the journey of growth in prayerfulness that God has had me on.  Nouwen concludes this section of the book by suggesting that all three of these characteristics come to bear through prayerfulness.

 

Having said all this, I realize that I have done nothing more than rephrase the fact that the Christian leader must be in the future what he has always had to be in the past:  a man of prayer, a man who has to pray, and who has to pray always.

 

 

There is so much more in the book that I found instructive, helpful, and affirming of things I was already discovering.  I am feeling the need to grow in my sensitivity to the hints of other people’s inner reality, in my compassionate and prudent response to those hints, and in my spontaneity in prayer.