Picking up from last week's post, it is interesting to again consider the element of "making love" with God with which I parted last week....because therer is a real element of love beyond understanding in our relationship with |Him who matters. On of the things we therefore all feel is the need to be loved...and to feel loved. And our relationship with Him is no different. He made us that way, to want - to need - to be loved. It is our constant struggle, it seems, to want to be affirmed, to be made to feel special, to be touched, to be singled out for admiration, to feel tangible proofs of love. Over and over again, we all share these yearnings in our life.
Henri Nouwen, a priest, is a much loved writer and a much admired academic as well who disarmingly, and with great honesty admits this longing to feel loved by God in many of his writings. One of his most famous works is "Inner Voice of Love", his diary from December 1987 to June 1988, during one of his most serious bouts with clinical depression. Yet he is particularly known for his reflection on the well known story of The Prodigal Son which Jesus explained to show his Father's love for us all as recorded in the gospels.
Nouwen put his stamp on Christian spirituality by conveying his understanding of this belovedness of God, that we are the beloved sons and daughters of God. One of his major ongoing themes involved his struggle reconciling his depression with his Christian faith. In "Return of the Prodigal Son", for example, Nouwen describes love and forgiveness as unconditional. Though this is not a novel idea, Nouwen's approach is arguably unique as he approached this theme from the angles of the younger son, the elder son, and the father. Each captures the unconditional quality of love and forgiveness in their own way. The younger son's life shows how the beloved lives a life of misery by thinking he can be loved only by meeting certain qualifications of the lover (which he fails to meet). The elder son's actions shows how the beloved can be depressed because he thinks he should receive greater love because he has done all the right things (i.e., that he has met these qualifications). The father alone understands how to love and forgive and is able to do so and be happy. Nouwen explains that we are the younger son at times (when we think we don't deserve the love or the forgiveness) and the elder son at times (when we think we deserve love or that another doesn't deserve it more than us), but that we are all called to be like the father (and that only by being like the father can we come closer to being loved as we should be loved).Yet we also learn that Nouwen himself struggled with this in his life. I beleive it was Ron Heizer who wrote that in his diaries Nouwen shares his yearnings for this love. He compiled the following description which exemplified his pleadings and which is culled from his various writings: "Today the small rejections of my life aqre too much for me - a sarcastic smile, a flippant remark, a brisk denial, a bitter silence, a failure to be noticed, a coldness from a colleague, an indifference from someone I love, a nagging tiredness, the lack of a soul mate, a loneliess that I can't explain. I feel empty, alone, afraid, restless, unsure of myself, and I look around for invitations, letters, phone calls, gifts, for someone to catch my eye in sympathy, for some warm gesture that can heal my emptiness. And right now I don't particularly want God, faith, church, or even a big and gracious heart. I want simply to be held, embraced, loved by someone special, made to feel unique, kissed by a soul mate. I'm empty, a half person. I need someone to make me whole".
Heizer explains that what Nouwen articulates in this is not a particular neurosis, immaturity or a lack of intimacy but he is expressing the universal human struggle for emotional and spiritual maturity...asnd that struggle isn't easy. "We weren't born simple,mature, whole, saints. That's life journey. We're born complex, lonely, greedy, restless, with powerful selfish instincts that remain with us even when we are mature....To feel this kind of need for tangible affirmation is not a sign that there's something wrong in our lives but simply a sign that we're emotionally healthy and not calloused, warped or depressed. In the end its's healthy to feel our need for the touch of another in a way that's so visceral that it drives us to our knees."
He adds that "maturity, emotional and spiritual, demands that ultimately we choose love, choose service, choose prayer and choose God not on the basis of a feeling but on the basis of value, truth, and goodness. We are mature when love is a decision that's not based upon an emotional pay-off for us but on the intrinsic goodness that's inside the other.
"But to come to this, we have to learn a new way of breathing emotionally. The excruciating pain we feel sometimes when precisely we want nothing more in the world than a physical and emotional touch that we can't have is, in essence, a weaning, the pain of the child who has to cry herself to sleep because her mother will no longer nurse her, but is forcing her instead to learn a new way of taking in sustenance. Our prayers don't seem to be heard because God, like the good mother, knows that giving a certain emotional breast back to the child only delays the inevitable. Maturity lies in learning how to breathe emotionally in a new way.
"The mystics called this 'a dark night of the soul'. And we are in one of these dark nights every time we feel the kind of aloneness that drives us to our knees pleading in mercy for the kind of tangible touch that, for a moment at least, would let us feel whole again". And that's when, I suppose, we feel - and see - God.
