I Blame my Sister (or how Henri Nouwen saved my soul)

I realized recently that I write and talk a lot about Henri Nouwen and his books.  I have read somewhere between 20 and 30 of his books, and there is no doubt that he has been one of the key influences on my development as a person and as a pastor.

But I've never told the story of how I came to discover this great man, this saint of the church.  Here it is:

It's all my sister's fault.  Well, sort of.  The story begins a bit before that.

When I was in my first ministry class at Olivet Nazarene University, our professor - Dr. Ron Dalton - recommended that we all read a book called The Wounded Healer by a guy I'd never heard of, Henri Nouwen.  Being a good student (and wanting a good grade), I got my hands on the book and read it.  At the time, I thought it was a good read but didn't see it as anything special.

Fast forward a bit...to the part about my sister.

By the time I was midway through college, my sister and I had started to develop the kind of relationship where we could talk - really talk - about almost anything.  We weren't where we are now, but we were on the way.  Occasionally, she would tell me about some book she was reading and sometimes she would even ask what I thought, since she knows that I am a compulsive reader.  I remember feeling so happy that someone thought my opinion on books was worth hearing.

I also recall one memorable conversation about Deepak Chopra and the things he had to say about faith.  It was that conversation that, as a protective brother and future pastor, got me a bit concerned about my sis.  After all, Chopra is not exactly an orthodox Christian by any stretch of the imagination.  So I resolved - without telling my sister - to pay a bit more attention and devote more time to the books she mentioned to me.

Fast forward a bit again.  Some time later, my sister started talking about this book Return of the Prodigal Son, by that guy Henri Nouwen.  Wanting to be sure that I could converse with my sister about the book from a theological perspective, I bought it and read it.  And I was a goner.  

Soon I started reading everything I could get my hands on by Nouwen.  I was obsessed with the message of this unassuming priest.  I even remember feeling a bit deflated when I realized that Nouwen had died in 1996 and that I would never have the chance to write to him or see him, and even more deflated when I realized that this great man of God had spent years of his life in South Bend, IN - a scant 2 hour drive from my home.

One year for Christmas (or maybe it was my birthday), my wife let me order every book by Nouwen that Amazon had in stock.  It was around 30 books.  I have since donated many of those, but the best ones - Return of the Prodigal Son, A Cry for Mercy, The Inner Voice of Love and his Spiritual Journeys still sit on my shelf just a few feet from where I sit writing.

Why did I become so obsessed with Nouwen.  The simplest way to put it is that, from that first reading of Return of the Prodigal Son, I found in Nouwen a voice that was missing in my life.  Missing and much needed.

I spent (and still spend, unfortunately) way too much of my time beating myself up for my failures and telling myself that God and others would not, could not truly love me until I fixed my flaws, until all the faults and failures had been overcome and I achieved the unachievable - becoming perfect.  I was locked in an unwinnable battle, but it was a battle that I thought I had to fight, a battle that everyone had to fight.

Nouwen was the first voice in my life that made clear to me that my wounds, faults and failures are just as much gifts from God as my victories and gifts.  He was the first voice that I was able to hear that convinced me that God's love for me is not dependent on anything and that God is not waiting and watching for me to fail so that God can punish me.  In particular, the following quote from The Inner Voice of Love sums up the message of Nouwen to me:

"Avoid all forms of self-rejection.  Acknowledge your limitations, but claim your unique gifts and thereby live as an equal among equals."

Many times in my life, when I have been on the precipice of total despair in my calling and ministry, those words have been able to, by the grace of God, pull me back to my center, to the God who loves me and will continue to love me even if I fail at every church I ever pastor.

That's how Henri Nouwen saved my soul - even after he died.

And like I said, it's all my sister's fault.

Thanks, E.

Five Questions

Since my sister (who writes this blog) did this, and because I'm feeling somewhat less than theological today, I thought I'd tackle this five questions thing.  The task is to answer five particular questions.  So here goes.

What are you really good at?  What are you really bad at?


I'd like to think that I am quite good at reading books and assimilating/integrating what I learn into my worldview.

I know that I am bad at paying attention to small details, especially in relationships.  I can come across as insensitive and uncaring because I simply don't think of those little things most of the time.

Have you ever been in a car accident?


I once looked down for about 2 seconds to turn up the volume on the radio and, when I looked up, I didn't have enough time to stop before rear-ending a little old lady's car, which was stopped to turn left.  No one was hurt, but I remember the bills for repairs...

Why did you attend your college?

Which one?  Including grad school, I've attended five.  Here goes.

Purdue University - because I wanted to major in Physics/Mathematics and Purdue was 1/3 the cost of Rose Hulman Institute of Technology.

Olivet Nazarene University - because I was going to major in religion...and there was this really pretty girl who was going to be there.

Nazarene Theological Seminary (grad school) - because everyone told me that's what Nazarene pastors did, go to NTS and get an M.Div.

Indiana Wesleyan University (grad school) - because their program was tremendously practical and close to home.

Northwest Nazarene University (grad school) - because the program was online.

How did your parents' relationship affect you?

The tough one.  Fair warning, there might be some surprising stuff here.

First, I don't remember much of what life was like with my parents before they divorced when I was 8.  Looking back, the fact that they divorced affected me in one key way: it made me absolutely determined - fanatically so - that the divorce trend in our family would end with me if it kille me.

Second, there was a time when I moved custody from my mom to my dad.  It was a volatile situation for awhile, and I felt like I had somehow single handedly ruined the civil relationship my parents still had with each other.  Let me say, to be clear, that neither of my parents ever did anything specific to make me feel that way - I just did.  From that experience, it took me awhile to realize that I didn't have to choose sides.  I didn't have to hate one parent to love the other.

Mostly, what I have learned from my parents' relationships - with each other and with their new significan others - is that I have to be true to who I am and trust that God will bring the right people into my life who will accept me for that person, not for some mask I put on or something I can do with them.

What are the three happiest moments of your life?


1. The day I found out Melissa loved me, too.  I had sent her an e-mail after church and spent an hour listening to sappy love songs, worrying about whether I had blown it, and generally being very nervous...until I got a response.  Then all was right in the world.  Best day of my life.

2. Tie.  11/19/05 & 1/23/08 - I thought I knew was love really meant.  Until Hannah and Ike were born.  Life was irrevocably changed for the better on both of those days.

3. This one is somewhat abstract - when I discovered Henri Nouwen and his books.  More than anyone else - living or dead - Nouwen taught me how to accept who I am and to learn to not just accept my woundedness but to use that woundedness as a base for life and ministry.

There.

The Call to Cognitive Dissonance

Several years ago, during a period of clinical depression in my life, I discovered the concept of cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive dissonance is the psychological term for what happens in your mind when it is presented with two conflicting ideas or constructs.  As an example, if I am convinced that people on welfare are only on welfare because they are too lazy to get a job, when I meet someone on welfare who is not lazy but who cannot find a job, I will experience cognitive dissonance.  The dissonance only resolves when the tension between the conflicting ideals/constructs is resolved - I must either adjust my assumption about people on welfare or somehow convince myself that the person in question really is too lazy to get a job.

While I was talking with my therapist about some of the depression issues I had, the concept of cognitive dissonance came up.  He suggested that many of my symptoms were a result of unresolved cognitive dissonance in my life - dissonance between what I had always believed to be true about the world and about God and what I was beginning to discover as I entered young adulthood.  Since I had not been able to resolve the dissonance, it was growing stronger and causing problems.

The solution, then, was to systematically rid myself of the cognitive dissonance.  So that is what I began to attempt to do - ruthlessly rooting out cognitive dissonance in order to make myself "healthy"...because cognitive dissonance is evil.  Or so I thought.

What I have come to realize since is that the problem was not the existence of cognitive dissonance or even that cognitive dissonance itself was evil.  Rather, the problem was that I was unprepared to deal with cognitive dissonance when it presented itself.  The systems in which I grew up - at home, at school and at church - all tended to ignore cognitive dissonance by offering unsatisfying or simplistic answers to tough questions or by going to extreme lengths to mitigate or eliminate tension between ideas/constructs. So when I reached my twenties and was faced with real cognitive dissonance, I was caught off guard.  My depression was not a direct result of the cognitive dissonance, but an indirect result - caused by my inability to accept the reality of cognitive dissonance and even befriend that dissonance.

So why is all of this important?

First, cognitive dissonance itself is not evil.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more I come to realize that cognitive dissonance is the root of transformation and, therefore, the root of Christian faith.  If it were not for the tension between what I say I believe and the reality of my actions, where would I find the impetus for change?  If there is no dissonance between sin and grace, where do we find and how do we proclaim the gospel?

Second, we cannot hope to eliminate cognitive dissonance.  This is quickly becoming a core truth for me - cognitive dissonance simply is.  There is no avoiding it - unless we choose to live in a world completely detached from reality (which, unfortunately, many of us do).  Cognitive dissonance, as I have already said, is the source of transformation.

Moreover, cognitive dissonance is found in the very core tenets of Christian faith.  What is the cross but an exercise in cognitive dissonance?  Love meets hate.  Death meets life.  Grace for life comes through the horror of the crucifixion.  The resurrection is also a source of cognitive dissonance - we "know" that people do not come back from the dead...yet we are convinced and believe that Jesus did exactly that.  This leads to my third, and most important, realization.  The very idea of God creates cognitive dissonance - the God who is simultaneously distant from us and close to us.

Third, because cognitive dissonance is always around us and forms the source of transformation, the task of the church and of the Christian community is not to eliminate cognitive dissonance in faith by offering simplistic answers to resolve the tension(s) presented by life.  Rather, our task is to model and teach what it looks like to live a life that is, if not comfortable with, at least accepting of cognitive dissonance.  As Peter Rollins puts it, in a sentence that is simply profound:

That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.

I spent way too much time following those therapy sessions trying to eliminate cognitive dissonance from my life only to discover that every time I get rid of one form of it, another pops up in its place.  I am gradually coming to the place where I understand that, while I do not always like the cognitive dissonance in my life, it serves a purpose.

Ultimately, I believe that the call of Christ in the gospel is for people to embrace the call to cognitive dissonance.

A New Tribe

It's time for me to return from my summer blog sabbatical.  Since I wasn't in class, I spent my summer reading, relaxing and, oh yeah, I found a new tribe.

Several months ago, I wrote about severing my relationship with the denominational family I had called home for my entire life (you can read it Here).  It was a challenging time and I confess that I was both  hurt and disconcerted by the experience.

So I embarked on a search for a new tribe - a new denominational family in which I could fulfill the call of God in my life.  I didn't know where I would find one or even if I would find one.  All I knew as I started the journey is that I could not go back, that the place that once was home was no longer.

Now, if I'm honest, I fully expected this search to take some time longer than it did.  Because I sit here today writing about my new denominational home, the United Methodist Church.

I have been a long distance admirer of the UMC for some time now, and had even flirted with joining their tribe in the past.  The fear of change, though, kept me where I was.  It was not until I had no choice that I took the plunge.  I began serving as the pastor of Bringhurst United Methodist Church in Bringhurst, Indiana on July 3 of this year.

And you know what?  I find myself asking on a regular basis asking myself what took so long.  The UMC appears to be exactly what I needed in worship and ministry.  Whereas I felt in my old denominational family that I had to work hard just to be accepted and fit in, and I felt afraid to be myself in many circumstances, I have felt welcome from the first moment.  It has been refreshing.

There are two key lessons I learned in my surprisingly brief sojourn in the wilderness of tribe-lessness.

The first is this: My old denomination family was not bad.  I fear that I have given that impression in the way that I have spoken and written about the experience.  It was different.  I have good friends there and I still pray for the work of that denominational family to be blessed by God.  It simply was not the place where I fit.  And that's okay.  One of the reasons different denominational families exist is so that God can place people where they will fit best.

The second lesson is this: no denominational family is perfect.  When you spend 30 years in one denominational family, it is easy to unreasonably expect that it will be perfect.  I fell into that trap, and no denominational family could live up to that.  Consequently, I am bringing a new level of awareness to my joining with the UMC.  I know that I will not like or agree with everything in the UMC.  And that's okay.  In fact, I told the district superintendent of the UMC that I did not want to make the ultimate decision about long term, career ministry in the UMC until after a year just so that I could take time to evaluate some of those areas.  Imagine my shock when the response was, "That's a great idea."

The crazy thing is that I don't need a year.  I know.  This is the place I belong.  I finally found a home where I don't have to pretend to be something less (or more) than I am.

I have found my new tribe.

Suffering as the Way to God

Last night I started, or  restarted, a discipline I have done before and had let slide - the prayerful reading of Scripture (aka lectio divina).

I chose as my starting point the book of Hebrews.  I'm not entirely sure why I chose Hebrews, but choose it I did and over the course of the last 24 hours or so, I've found myself wrestling with one verse in the second chapter:

"In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered." (Heb. 2:10)


Those two bold words are the ones that leapt off the page and lodged themselves in my brain, the ones I can't seem to dislodge.  Fitting and suffered.  What this verse is saying is that Jesus' suffering - the mocking, the beating, the scourging, the cross, the dying - was all appropriate, that it was the way it should be.

It is fitting that Jesus suffered?  Really?

I have always had a bit of a hard time with the idea that Jesus "had" to die on a cross.  Maybe it's just me, but I suspect I'm not the only Christian to be troubled in such a way.  "Couldn't the God who is all-powerful have come up with another way?" That's the question that comes to mind.

If I'm honest, I've never been able to answer that question adequately.  I have always had to resort to my confidence that God is greater than anything I can ever comprehend and that I am simply not meant to comprehend the necessity of the cross.

Until last night.  As I prayed over this verse, God granted to me the beginnings of an insight into the cross and why it is indeed "fitting" that Jesus "suffered."

Suffering is, you see, the ultimate equalizer.  It respects no one's power and no one's money.  The powerful and wealthy can suffer just as much as the weak and the poor.  That is why we have to say that Jesus's suffering was fitting.  Because any other way would have left the old divides and structures still standing.

Sure, Jesus theoretically could have come to reign in a political way and overthrown Rome as so many of his disciples expected.  In doing so, though, Jesus would have demonstrated a path to God available only to the powerful or those with influence.  Surely the poor have no recourse or resource to overthrow governments.

But again, the poor can suffer.  That they can do, it is often a daily occurrence in the life of the poor, of the oppressed, of the weak.  Left without any ability to look out for themselves, they are forced to ride the wave of the strong and hope and pray for the best, for a break from their suffering.

By pioneering, by demonstrating a path to God through suffering, Jesus opens the path to all and flips the usual way of doing things on its head.  Whereas in the everyday world of Rome strength and money and power prevail, in the Kingdom of God weakness and poverty prevail.  Everything is upside down.

Instead of being at a loss, the poor lead the way.  It is the rich and powerful who must face difficulty on the path to God described by the Jesus whose sufferings were "fitting" - difficulties raised by the very things that set them "above" the poor and the weak.

It has never made sense to me before and it still doesn't completely make sense, but I am beginning to see that the God who transcends everything I know and am is, shockingly, better at laying out the path of salvation than we are.

Jesus' sufferings may make us uncomfortable, and rightfully so - but there is no longer any doubt in my mind that they are indeed "fitting."

The Power of Confession

For a long time now I have been fascinated with the practice of confession - specifically the practice of confessing one's shortcomings and failures to a trusted friend or pastor.  Some denominations consider confession to be a sacrament (such as Roman Catholics), while others ignore it altogether (such as Nazarenes, Wesleyans, and others).  And of course, there is a spectrum of views in between.

Growing up in a non-confession church, I have always been told that confession to another person is unnecessary because I only need to confess to God.  Since God is the one who forgives, the argument goes, God should be the one to whom I confess.  If I desire to do so, I may confess to another friend, but it is by no means considered a sacramental act and is often not even encouraged.

As I've been reading about spiritual direction and guidance over the last several days, though, one particular thing has stood out to me.  In more than one religious tradition, confession is seen as an integral part of spiritual direction.  Sharing with a spiritual director the struggles that one has is seen as crucial to experiencing full awareness of God's presence in one's life.

Initially, that idea made me uncomfortable.  After I thought about it, though, I began to wonder if my discomfort is rooted in a misunderstanding of the power and purpose of confession.

For many Christians, confession is seen as a punitive and preventative act.  The shame associated with telling another person our sin becomes a driving force to keep us from doing it again and can even be used as a deterrent for others.

As a case in point, let me share a story.  There is a young couple I am friends with who, before they got married, found themselves expecting their first child.  The man attended a large baptist church and was quite involved in ministry.  When the couple confessed their "sin" to the pastor of this large baptist church, the pastor insisted that the man needed to confess his sin in front of the entire 3000 person congregation.  Without going into how wrong and offensive the pastor's actions were, it is clear that in this situation confession used as a tool for punishment.

No wonder so many Christians fail to practice the discipline of confession.

What if, though, confession was not a punitive thing?  What if instead it should be seen as an act of healing?  This is the view of confession that I ran across in my reading.  In Gary Moon & David Benner's Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls, Father Gregory Rogers describes it like this:

Confession is seen as an indispensable means for making new the grace of forgiveness, providing an opportunity for the penitent to find direction in order to overcome the passions and sins that easily beset the believer.  The emphasis is not on the legal aspects of sin but on the healing of the heart that has been damaged by sin.


We have all experienced the relief that comes from "getting something off our chest."  There is something powerful about baring our souls to another that is apparent to all of us.  It is why we seek out close friends and confidants when we are going through a tough period in our lives.  We know - deep in the recesses of our soul - the value of talking to another.

Yet for too many of us there is a line in those conversations that we seem unwilling to cross even with our closest of friends.  We would rather struggle alone with our sins and shortcomings than allow another to come alongside and offer us assistance on the road to healing.

I am absolutely convinced that the church needs to recapture the discipline, the sacrament of confession if it is to be effective in living out God's Kingdom in the world today.  That will only happen, though, when we begin to recognize that the purpose and power of confession lie not in punishment but in healing.

My Life Has Become a Poem

One of my favorite poems is Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken.  There is something poignant about the image of standing at a fork in the path and having to choose which direction to take.  That image is probably why The Road Not Taken has achieved the status as an iconic American poem.

These days, I feel as though my life has reached the point of mirroring the poem - or at least its first lines:

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood..."

Right at this moment I see myself standing in that yellow wood; listening to the breeze blow through the trees; considering the two paths that lay ahead of me and wondering what lies down each; wishing that I could see just a little bit farther down each, just around the next bend or over the next hill.

But alas, I can't.  I have not the time to travel down one a ways and then return to take the other.  I must choose one or the other.

Which is why I say that my life has become a poem.

The parallel is not exact, though, because the two roads I face do not mirror those described by Frost.  He describes a road well traveled and a road not so well traveled.  By contrast, I see two paths that appear equally worn.

On the left is a path that looks for all intents and purposes like it ends in a dead end about 100 yards down the road.  But there might be a narrow path at the cul-de-sac at the end of the path.  It's a little foggy and I think I see something, but can I risk choosing a path without knowing that it actually leads somewhere?

On the right, though, is a path that bends sharply at about 100 yards.  It clearly goes somewhere, I just have no idea where.

And so here I stand.

The frustrating part is that this time I can't fall back on the "God wants one and not the other" position.  Because of what I believe about God and the future and free will, I am forced to admit that both are viable options.  To be sure, one path may be God's "best" for me, but that does not mean that God will not bless me on the other path.  There is no "right" answer in terms of one path leading to happiness and one leading to destruction.

It would help if the two paths were a bit more like Frost's, if there were some obvious distinguishing characteristic that makes one clearly preferable over the other.  But again, there is no such mark - they both look equally worn and equally attractive.  There are pros and cons associated with each.

None of which helps make the decision easier.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..."

And I have have no idea which one I'm taking.