How do I even begin? This book exceeded my expectations. Nouwen’s words spoke to me with more clarity, conviction and authenticity than any Christian book has in a while. Henri Nouwen is a Catholic priest with a fervid desire to serve God, but more importantly, to know Him well. His time at the Monastery in Upstate New York was a seven-month furlough from his studying and lecturing at a theological seminary. In this diary he was refreshingly vulnerable about his struggles to seek the Lord, to desire prayer and to pursue a humble and simple lifestyle.
I was first surprised by his candidness regarding his insecurities. The daily life of a Trappist monk consists of corporate prayer, mass, manual labor of various assigned duties, and free time for silent prayer and study. The only contact available with the outside world is through letters and newspapers, so one can easily become discouraged if his fulfillment usually derives from relationships outside the abbey or a specific job skill or hobby. Nouwen writes about his confrontation with these emotions, as he was continually dissatisfied with manual labor and consequently the lack of time available to write and study – the things he was used to doing. His friend John Eudes, whose wise counsel is included in much of the book, helped him identify the feelings of dissatisfaction, frustration and anger. Often they resulted from a lack of praise and affirmation from others, a perception of neglect when no letters arrived for him or a sense of uselessness due to tedious work. Nouwen says of the abbey:
…when you keep having hidden desires to be an exceptional person in this community…when you keep looking for special attention from the abbot or any one of the monks; when you keep looking for more interesting work and more stimulating events – then you know that you haven’t even started to create a little place for God in you heart…When nobody writes anymore…When you are just one of the brothers doing the same things as they are doing, not better or worse; when you are forgotten by people – maybe then your heart and mind have become empty enough to give God a real chance to let His presence be known to you.
One of Nouwen’s jobs at the Monastery was to make sure no stones remained in the raisins used in the bread at their bakery. What could be more tedious and mindless? But still, he reluctantly did this for hours a day. One of the men he admired would say how they were saving some old lady’s tooth as well as a lawsuit by taking out every last stone. Do we ever look at life like this – as if every detail matters because it matters to someone, even if not ourselves? How often I avoid seemingly meaningless work out of my need to be constantly amused, rather than picking the stones out of the raisins in my own life.
Uninteresting work confronts a monk with his unrelatedness, and it is in this confrontation that prayer can develop…Manual work indeed unmasks my illusions, It shows how I am constantly looking for interesting, exciting, distracting activities to keep my mind busy and way from the confrontation of my nakedness, powerlessness, morality, and weakness. Dull work at least opens up my basic defenselessness and makes me more vulnerable.
The desire of sameness that prevails in the monastic life is a new and challenging concept to me. Nouwen, like most of us, aspired to contribute something new and original, but realized that to achieve true asceticism, he must do just the opposite: He must become like every other monk, realizing that he is not more special, but that by unifying in fellowship and humility he could more purely seek God and His gifts.
The mystery of God’s love is that in this sameness we discover our uniqueness. That uniqueness has nothing to do with the “specialties” we have to offer that glitter like the artificial silver balls on a Christmas tree, but has everything to do with our most personal and most intimate relationship with God.
The topic of prayer is obviously prevalent in the diary of a [temporary] monk; however, he did not go on about prayer as I would have assumed. To a monk prayer is not merely sitting in silence or repeating words. It is not all about isolation.
Yesterday and today the idea occurred to me that instead of excluding I could include all my thoughts, ideas, plans, projects, worries, and concerns and make them into prayer. Instead of directing my attention only to God, I might direct my attention to all my attachments and lead them into the all-embracing arms of God.
Likewise he refers to prayer as a lifestyle in which I think the best example of single-mindedness lies: When manual work and spiritual reading are no longer prayer but only a way to earn money or to be intellectually stimulated, we lose purity of heart; we become divided and are no longer single-eyed and single-minded.
My overall response to Nouwen’s account is, in short, that Jordan has been my monastery. Last January I left The States, along with my busy American lifestyle, to move to Jordan. Life here has been much quieter. I study Arabic. Period. I have applied for and pursued numerous “more exciting” opportunities here, all of which have fallen through. I finally realized that maybe God didn’t want my life to be as full or as busy as it was before. Maybe there was something new I could learn without really doing anything. As I grew frustrated with the mundane-ness
of language learning, I started to realize how attached I was to those feelings of accomplishment, contribution, and being needed. Could I see my worth with no activity to prove it?
Nouwen’s words echo so many of the thoughts I have not been able to verbalize in the past few months. I am slowly growing thankful of this quiet season in my life where I have time to pursue prayer and extra-curricular reading without great sacrifice, where I can pursue relationships without the association of a job or club, and where I can make serving the body of believers a priority and not a burden. I’m actually living life with people outside of a schedule. I’m seeing myself beyond work and achievements, and as it turns out, I can see others that way too. After all, the point of a monastery is to make more space for God in your heart.
My opinion of the monastic life in general has definitely changed. Like many others I assumed that shutting oneself off from the world physically was also to do so spiritually. A few monks in this book, however, make quite a different point (quoted from Merton’s Conjecture’s of a Guilty Bystander):
…though ‘out of the world’ [monks] are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media…and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it and a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better than others? The whole idea is preposterous… I have immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God himself became incarnate. But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
My solitude…is not my own, for I see how much it belongs to them – and that I have a responsibility in their regard, not just my own. It is because I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not a ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers!
Nouwen speaks of this passage: I am becoming more and more aware that solitude indeed makes you more sensitive to the good in people and even enables you to bring it to the foreground.
I will close by quoting a thought of Nouwen’s that I currently echo:
Well, I prayed more this week than before, but also discovered that I have not learned yet to make the work of my hands into a prayer.
The Bohemian Dispatch 