This week I attended a conference on addiction and rehabilitation sponsored by Guest House, a respected treatment and recovery operation centered in Michigan but with a wide reach. I know nothing about addiction and rehab from either a personal or clinical perspective but the organizers wanted a keynote on Henri Nouwen and the controverted notion of the “wounded healer.” That, I felt, I could do.
Here are some snippets and shards from the address:
- Nouwen chronicled his peregrinatio or going forth into strange lands, metaphorical and literal, in journal form, homily and essay searching for spiritual integration recognizing its tenuousness, fragility, incompleteness, its summons to exploration, its disconcerting capacity to destabilize, to surprise, to awaken, and to change.
- Nouwen was a “reporter of his own inner life”—some mighty score of books, thousands of articles and short pieces and personal letters, and many diaries. He came to understand near the end of his life that the woundedness of others, his own woundedness, were not simply existential realities to be recorded, analyzed, probed, and exorcized but rather a summons to intense and authentic living. He wrote: “I am increasingly convinced that it is possible to live the wounds of the past not as gaping abysses that cannot be filled and therefore keep threatening us as but as gateways to new life.”
- Nouwen’s conceptualization of the “wounded healer” may have a contested and somewhat mysterious genesis but what is poignantly evident is the application of the term or category to himself as pastoral psychologist, lecturer, spiritual writer, and universal pastor. Speaking of his own particular wound, he observes: “What to do with this inner wound that is so easily touched and starts bleeding again? It is such a familiar wound. It has been with me for so many years. I don’t think this wound—this immense need for affection and this immense fear of rejection—will ever go away. It is here to stay, but maybe for a good reason. Perhaps it is a gateway to my salvation, a door to glory, and passage to freedom.”
- Nouwen was a cipher for the many who were drawn to him, because he represented their deepest but unarticulated yearnings, because he invested his suffering with meaning, because he could, through compassion, elevate his pain, alleviate the anguish of others, open his own heart to that reciprocity that feeds our humanity. He was a herald of the incontrovertible but rarely tasted truth of God’s undifferentiating love.
- Nouwen’s special genius for compassion is evidenced by his accompanying many of his friends through the crucible of grief, fear, and isolation as they wrestled with shocking death (Rebecca Jonas is just one example), the quiet passing of a treasured gem (Adam Arnett is just one example), as well as the emotional and spiritual deprivations that define the great ruptures in our lives (examples are too numerous to catalogue).
Michael’s new book The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis (House of Anansi, Sept. 2024) can be purchased through Amazon Australia.
Dr. Michael W. Higgins has been involved with investigating and expanding the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, particularly in Canada, for over forty years. Dr. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto.
With thanks to Pontifex Minimus.
Pontifex Minimus is written on the ancestral territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation peoples, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.