Reflections on Henri J.M. Nouwen's In the Name of Jesus

It didn’t take long for me to get sucked into this book. That’s not to say it was a pleasant read, rather it was an interesting combination of unpleasantly, yet compellingly, true. My heart resonated pretty closely with Nouwen’s portrayal of his life orientation. He had accomplished many things, worked extremely hard, and even found himself working in Boston on the beautiful campus of Harvard as a priest in their divinity school! In this he does not present some image of himself being prideful or arrogant in his position, he simply hadn’t been too stretched in his experiences. That said, his work at L’Arch, a home for mentally handicapped adults, opened him up to so much more, and his words in this book have opened me as well.

I struggled to understand what he meant about not seeking relevance. I work in youth ministry, and with students, if you are not relevant then you are nothing - at least so I thought. Then Nouwen broke my heart. He says that his experience at L’Arch forced him to “let go of my relevant self - the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things - and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments” (p. 28). Wow, I still find myself reeling and even wincing a little as I type that. There is a part of me that doesn't like it. There is beloved sin at risk in admitting it, but I don’t think this way. I can think of a thousand “but"s to insert, and even more correctives about what it actually takes to cross over into youth culture, but those are all simply stylistic points and miss the foundational idea entirely. As Nouwen says in the conclusion of his first chapter, “The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there” (p. 35). Wow.