Cardón, State of Oaxaca (1887) by José María Velasco:
The Great Comet of 1882 (1910) by José María Velasco:
Finished reading: The Wounded Healer by Henri J. M. Nouwen 📚
Nouwen’s work is simple, yet penetrating. This one is no exception.
Perhaps the main task of the minister is to prevent people from suffering for the wrong reasons. Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition.
Therefore ministry is a very confrontational service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts.
No minister can save anyone. We can only offer ourselves as guides to fearful people. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely in this guidance that the first signs of hope become visible. This is so because a shared pain is no longer paralyzing, but mobilizing, when it is understood to be a way to liberation. When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.
Religion in the United States (source):
Without hope, we will never be able to see value and meaning in the encounter with a decaying human being and become personally concerned. This hope stretches far beyond the limitations of one’s own psychological strength, for it is anchored not just in the soul of an individual, but in God’s self-disclosure in history. Leadership therefore is not called Christian because it is permeated with optimism against all the odds of life, but because it is grounded in the historic Christ-event, which is understood as a definitive breach in the deterministic chain of human trial and error, and as a dramatic affirmation that there is light on the other side of darkness.
Every attempt to attach this hope to visible symptoms in our surroundings becomes a temptation when it prevents us from the realization that promises, not concrete successes, are the basis of Christian leadership. Many ministers, priests, and Christian laity have become disillusioned, bitter, and even hostile when years of hard work bear no fruit, when little change is accomplished. Building a vocation on the expectations of concrete results, however conceived, is like building a house on sand instead of on solid rock, and even takes away the ability to accept successes as free gifts.
Hope prevents us from clinging to what we have and frees us to move away from the safe place and enter unknown and fearful territory. This might sound romantic, but when we enter with our fellow human beings into the fear of death and are able to wait for that person right there, “leaving the safe place” might turn out to be a very difficult act of leadership.
In fact, it is an act of discipleship in which we follow the hard road of Christ, who entered death with nothing but bare hope.
Christian leadership is a dead-end street when nothing new is expected, when everything sounds familiar, and when ministry has regressed to the level of routine. Many have walked into that dead-end street and found themselves imprisoned in a life where all the words were already spoken, all the events had already taken place, and all the people had already been met.
But for a person with a deep-rooted faith in the value and meaning of life, every experience holds a new promise, every encounter carries a new insight, and every event brings a new message. But these promises, insights, and messages have to be discovered and made visible.
Christian leaders are not leaders because they announce a new idea and try to convince others of its worth. They are leaders because they face the world with eyes full of expectation, and with the expertise to take away the veil that covers its hidden potential.
Christian leadership is called ministry precisely to express that in the service of others new life can be brought about. It is this service that gives eyes to see the flower breaking through the cracks in the street, ears to hear a word of forgiveness muted by hatred and hostility, and hands to feel new life under the cover of death and destruction.
Carl Rogers (quoted in Henri J. M. Nouwen):
…I have—found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets who have dared to express the unique in themselves.
…[W]hen one has the courage to enter where life is experienced as most unique and most private, one touches the soul of the community. Those who have spent many hours trying to understand, feel, and clarify the alienation and confusion of one of their fellow human beings might very well be the best equipped to speak to the needs of the many, because all of us are one at the well-spring of pain and joy.