Part 9: From the Moral to the Mystical

The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.
― Karl Rahner

For Christian leadership to be truly fruitful in the future, a movement from the moral to the mystical is required.
– Henri Nouwen

Somewhere beyond right and wrong, there is a garden. I will meet you there. 
― Rumi

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races—the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
— Maria Rilke

“What do you think Henri would think of my thesis work?” I asked Laurent Nouwen over coffee, sitting across from him on his 10th-floor apartment balcony overlooking the Rotterdam skyline that overcast September day.

He responded, “I think Henri would say, ‘Don’t just write about me, but write about yourself, and maybe I can be of some help to express yourself.’”

Laurent explained, “Use Henri's life and journey as a means of making sense of your own.”

The mere fact that I was hearing these words directly from the mouth of Laurent Nouwen himself already felt like a mysterious kind of fulfillment of Henri’s (postulated) wish. After all, why else would I be sitting across the table from Henri’s own younger brother in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, if Henri’s life hadn’t already somehow led me there?

How else would I have ended up here, in this moment, if I wasn’t searching for my own answers by using Nouwen’s life and example?

When I returned from my much-needed summer vacation in Norway at the end of August, I was staring at my last semester of grad school.

Against my academic advisor’s recommendation, I was registered for two courses (as opposed to just one), Systematic Theology and Spiritual Guidance and Soul Care - these alongside my biggest challenge yet: my thesis.

From the very beginning of my master’s program, I knew what I wanted my thesis to explore: Henri Nouwen and his Sexuality.

More specifically, however, I wanted to delve into the spiritual meaning of sexuality within the context of Christianity. What place did sexuality have, if any, within our spirituality? For years, I had feared that faith and (non-hetero)sexuality were oppositional—mutually exclusive and at odds with one another. Yet, I couldn't shake the growing suspicion that this was a false dichotomy, a constructed opposition rather than a genuine incompatibility.

Henri Nouwen's life and legacy offered the perfect lens for both an academic and personal inquiry into this tension. His silent struggles with his own sexuality, juxtaposed with his world-renowned spirituality, provided a unique vantage point to explore the possible interconnection of sexuality and spirituality.

For context, Henri was a Dutch Roman Catholic priest, psychologist, and world-renowned spiritual author widely considered one of the most influential spiritual thinkers of the twentieth century. He published thirty-nine books that have been translated into thirty languages and have totaled over eight million copies, many of which are still in print today. To say that he has helped shape millions of spiritual lives, both Christian and non-Christian, around the world would be no hyperbole.

And yet, despite its confirmed and enduring presence in his life, he left nothing short of a mystery concerning his own queerness as he remained closeted to the public for the entirety of his life. 

Wary to ever write explicitly about the matter in a self-revealing way (a discerned act considering the characteristic religious and social homophobia of his time), he only left behind a scattered trail of evidence of his ongoing spiritual struggle regarding the enduring presence of his own queerness.

Amid these scattered pieces of evidence, however, there seemed to be many indications that he had discovered or approximated some kind of integration, reconciliation, and peace, even if incomplete and only partial, regarding his sexuality and his faith by the end of his life.

I was curious about this evidenced yet mysterious integration.

How did he do it? What did it mean? What could we learn from it?

Additionally, in an interview near the end of his life, he revealed a growing intuition he had about the nature of faith and sexuality, an intuition that he never thoroughly explored before he died. He revealed this intuition in an interview with a biographer, saying:

I haven’t found yet the best ways to write about sexuality because I still have the feeling that in order to write well about sexuality, you have to speak about it from a place of mysticism and not just from the place of morality. When you speak about morality, we deal with questions about what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do, what’s good and what’s not so good, and all that. I do think there are a lot of discussions on that level [but] I don’t feel any need to join in these discussions, not that they are useless - that’s [just] not my vocation. But I have a very strong feeling that there’s something to be said about sexuality, and about intimacy and sexuality, which has to come from a place of communion…. Every human being lives a sexual life, whether you’re celibate or married or whatever. Sexual life is life. That sexual life has to be lived as a life that deepens the communion with God and with our fellow human beings. And if it doesn’t, then it can be very harmful. I haven’t found the right language for it yet, and I hope I will one day.^[1]

Despite having never found the “right language” to write about the matter before he died, it seemed his life and writing somehow bore witness to his inner wrestling with the “moral and the mystical perspectives” of sexuality within his own experience.

I was curious about the implications of this intuition.

What did viewing sexuality (or anything else) from a “mystical perspective” mean? How was this different, in practice, than a “moral perspective?”

And so I got to researching.

Given that, at the time, he had only died 25 years previously, I connected with some of Henri’s friends and family, such as his own younger brother Laurent, who were still alive and got to interview them for my research.

I read more and more of his published oeuvre.

I dove into his letters and private correspondence.

I read commentaries of his work, academic articles, and critiques of his life and his writing.

What began to readily emerge was that Henri’s life was indeed marked by a distinct and undeniable movement from a place of deep self-estrangement to a place of deepening self-reconciliation.

His self-estrangement began very young, as it was just at the young age of six that he discovered his homosexual orientation. In the years that followed, he developed an increasingly critical and fearful posture towards it, ultimately hoping for some kind of “salvation” from it.

This is no surprise considering his background in and devotion to a conservative catholic worldview, which made all of sexuality out to be taboo, something to be suspicious or wary of, not to mention its particular attitudes towards homosexuality. Additionally, his academic discipline of clinical psychology, which he studied for many years and earned a doctorandus degree in, conceived of homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” for much of Henri’s life.

In such an environment, what else is a person to do other than to wage war on themselves?

Such self-disowning and self-estrangement come at a price, however.

Many of Henri’s closest friends, colleagues, and family members attest to this, remembering him as a very complex person.

Not only was he generous, compassionate, kind, empathic, and wise—someone who had a tremendous capacity to truly see and witness other people and, as some considered him, a “saint”—but he was also known for being incredibly needy, neurotic, troubled, and deeply anguished.

He had this perpetual mistrust or anxiousness related to love, somewhat compulsively needing (and at times, demanding) reassurance or consolation of other people’s love for him.

Perhaps Tara Brach, the writer on spirituality and psychology, was right when she wrote: “The belief that we are deficient and unworthy makes it difficult to trust that we are truly loved.”^[2]

Nevertheless, Nouwen slowly came to discern that the root of one’s spiritual and psychological suffering is not so much the stimulus as it is the response to the stimulus. This is to say, his anguish was less related to his particular homosexual human condition and more related to his particular response to his homosexual human condition.

For Henri, because sexual feelings touch the core of a person, to live in resistance to them, to deny or pretend they do not exist, was akin to severing oneself from their very heart and to mutilate their inner world.

Henri wrote in an article about homosexuality and pastoral care, one of the few places we see him write explicitly about the topic, that:

Man cannot deny without harm his most essential feelings. Homosexual just as heterosexual feelings touch the core of a man's internal life, and he who pretends not to have them is like a man who pretends to be able to live without a heart.^[3]

This seemed to indicate a critical shift in Henri’s perspective.

While at one point he feared his human condition (and its sexuality) was a barrier to his intimacy with God and the security of God’s love, something to be “repaired” or “fixed” or “overcome” - over time, he eventually came to realize his human condition was perhaps the precise place (and the only place) of the union with God and the reception of the love and belonging that he so longed for.

Henri wrote:

The gospel makes it overwhelmingly clear that Christ came to reveal the real human condition and to challenge people to face it without fear. Christ does not judge feelings or emotions, He only asks people not to deny or distort them, but instead make them available for God’s love.^[4]

Whether he liked it or not, Henri’s homosexual human condition was the only human condition he had. And in order to make his real human condition “available for God’s love” it would require the total acceptance of himself as he was. Any effort to subvert, deny, distort, or evade himself would only inadvertently lead to his evading of God’s love and presence as well.

This idea is captured poignantly in the Orthodox Father Anthony Bloom’s saying which goes: “As long as we ourselves are real, as long as we are truly ourselves, God can be present and can do something with us. But the moment we try to be what we are not, there is nothing left to say or have; we become a fictitious personality, an unreal presence, and this unreal presence cannot be approached by God [or love].” ^[5]

Said in another way: to reject our human condition, whatever it may be, is to forfeit the only receptacle we have for love and belonging. Coming to an awareness that his human condition was not an obstacle to his desired union with God but rather his singular opportunity for it, marked a shift in his understanding of the spiritual life — a movement towards an increasingly mystical conception.

Mysticism, as defined by Bernard McGuinn, emeritus professor of Historical Theology and researcher of Christian mysticism, is “those elements in Christian belief and practice that concern the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the effects attendant upon a heightened awareness of God’s immediate and transformative presence.” ^[6]

For Nouwen, his mystical perspective centered on God’s unconditional love for all people, and he wrestled intimately with the immediate transformative implications of receiving such unconditional love into our lives. If a mystic is, as Richard Rohr says, “simply one who has moved from mere belief or belonging systems to an actual inner experience of God,” then Nouwen was a mystic in the sense that he was increasingly cultivating an inner experience of God's unconditional love for him and working out its implications in his own life.^[7]

Henri gradually came to see then that self-rejection was, in fact, the “greatest enemy of the spiritual life” because it overtly contradicted the inherent truth of one’s unconditional dignity and belovedness. As a result, he came to understand that much of our true spiritual work was related to somehow relinquishing or unlearning our elaborate tools of self-rejection, as they posed the greatest threat to our sense of belovedness and belonging in the world.

Naturally, such relinquishing requires, on some level, confronting and interrogating the things that inhibited such self-acceptance to begin with. The primary of these being, of course, a moralistic perspective of sexuality, the perspective that catalyzed his self-disowning early in his life.

As he exposed the spiritually obstructive nature of his moralistic perspective and increasingly adopted a mystical perspective of life, one which was imbued with the core notions that nothing human was alien to God and that the most essential identity of any human being was that of the “Beloved,” it seems he finally found the sense of security and trust necessary to be able to risk the confrontation with his real human condition, to accept himself fully, to vulnerably make his whole integrated self “available for love,” and thereby to finally encounter the depths of his own unconditional belovedness and dignity.

This was transformational for Henri, as it would be for anyone.

As I considered the implications of this, suddenly, his self-revealed intuition about the necessity of viewing sexuality from a “mystical perspective” versus a “moral perspective" made all the more sense.

It seems he intuitively understood the following: a mystical perspective of life facilitated the self-acceptance necessary to experience authentic spiritual transformation and wholeness, whereas a moral perspective of life heightened one’s self-rejection, which thereby inhibited our sense of belovedness and belonging and, in turn, inflicted psychological and spiritual suffering.

Arriving at this insight from Nouwen’s life was a watershed moment for me.

Suddenly, I understood my life with greater clarity: I had long viewed my human condition as my adversary, my foe, my enemy - and yet, Henri helped me understand that was never the case.

The true enemy all along was not my human condition but, rather, my estrangement, rejection, and resistance to it.

My enemy was not my human condition — but my alienation to it was.

It seemed my real spiritual work was just beginning then: not to be something I wasn’t in order to receive the love and belonging I had long needed and craved, but to courageously be who I really was and to vulnerably make my whole self available to love.

I still wondered, however, if psychological and spiritual wholeness required a “movement from the moral to the mystical”— then what do we do with “morality?”

Does "living mystically” mean abandoning “morality” — abandoning a moral life?

After all, that 13-year-old kid who waged war on himself so long ago did so because, in principle, he wanted “to be good.”

Henri addressed this when he said:

Christian morality in no way advocates the denial of feelings but only a responsible way of relating to them. Man becomes a moral man only when he is able to face his own real condition and make his decision from there.^[8]

If my morality requires me to deny the truth of my own reality in order to meet its demands, then it undermines the very efficacy of my agency to act ethically in reality.

In this way, it would be more immoral for me not to accept my queerness than it would be for me to accept it. Only by accepting it could I then make an informed moral decision based in reality about how to live and organize my life.

By the end of my thesis, it was clear to me that if I wanted any chance at psychological and spiritual wholeness, not to mention the possibility of leading a realistically moral life that was fully engaged in the world around me, I had to relinquish my weapons of self-rejection just as Henri did.

Thankfully, Nouwen’s life was a testimony to the fruit that comes from the efforts of such a lifelong relinquishing.

As one close friend of his, Robert Jonas, observed:

Henri Nouwen remained a complex person to the end, but it is also true that in his final years, many friends felt graced to see him grow in self-acceptance and inner peace - the fruit of his lifelong intention to receive God’s love fully. ^[9]

Despite my profound disillusionment, having left my fundamentalist construction of faith and the cosmos, my study of Nouwen helped me discover some kind of “reorder.”

Henri’s life helped me finally understand that my suffering had less to do with my faith or my queerness, per se - and much more to do with the estrangement I had to myself.

He helped me see the deep irony that, in my great moralistic effort to avoid “going to hell,” I had created one, as indeed, those years of violent self-rejection were simply a self-inflicted hell.

By introducing me to a more mystical and contemplative Christianity, Nouwen helped me discover a form of faith that doesn’t react to modern pluralism with a fearful grasp at certainty (such as with fundamentalism) but rather can authentically acknowledge the unavoidable mystery of our collective human existence and approach such mystery with humility, curiosity, creativity, and reverence.

Nouwen helped me understand that any faith that is not contemplative or mystical in nature will always get in its own way in terms of being a vehicle for God’s transformative love in the world. Rohr speaks to this idea when he said:

When religion does not move people to the mystical or the non-dual level of consciousness, it is more a part of the problem than the solution whatsoever. It solidifies angers, creates enemies, and is almost always exclusionary of the most recent definition of sinner. At this level, it is largely incapable of its supreme task of healing, reconciling, forgiving, and peacemaking.^[10]

Nouwen helped me see that without a contemplative love, our love will always be exclusive, conditional, self-referential and dualistic. Only the contemplative path of faith frees us from such limited self-referential love and frees us to love others in a capacity that actually liberates people to belong as they are, rather than just subjugate them to the boundaries of our own narrow dogmas, moral anxieties, inherited wounds and repressed fears.

I still remember the profound sense of peace I felt in this newfound place of reorder, as for the first time in as long as I could remember, I actually felt safe in my body, in the world, and in my relationship with the Mystery — and I could finally begin to trust in my belonging to it all.

I thought back to that cup of coffee I shared with Henri’s younger brother, Laurent, on is his balcony in Rotterdam. I thought about the words he expressed to me on Henri’s behalf concerning what Henri’s wish might be for this research project.

I wondered, in coming to this conclusion, if perhaps I had fulfilled Henri’s (postulated) wish after all then — making sense of my own life by studying his.

This Song's Post: To Be Loved by Day Blue

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Read the next part:

Part 10: Theologian Turned Timothy

I crawled out the window and ran into the woods. I had to make up all the words myself. The way they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled around for awhile, and stumbled back out. I made this place

Yielding to YesTim Jurgensen