02.07.07 Good Words: In The Name Of Jesus

In The Name Of Jesus is a tiny book I read on a car ride from some Southern state to it’s neighbor.  But it’s message will take a lifetime for me to live an adequate response to, if I ever complete the task at all.

Henri J.M. Nouwen, like most guys still using middle initials, is ridiculously well-educated and important...at least to academics like himself.  The kind of guy you’d think has arrived.  Yet he writes transparently…

After twenty-five years in the academic world as a teacher of pastoral psychology, pastoral theology, and Christian spirituality, I began to experience a deep inner threat.  As I entered my fifties and was able to realize the unlikelihood of doubling my years, I came face to face with the simple question, “Did becoming older bring me closer to Jesus?” After twenty-five years of priesthood, I found myself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied with burning issues.  Everyone was saying that I was doing really well, but something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger…

...I woke up one day with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term “burnout” was a convenient psychological translation for spiritual death.

In the midst of this I kept praying, “Lord, show me where you want me to go and I will follow you, but please be clear and unambiguous about it!” Well, God was.

What happened next is radical.  This Notre Dame and Harvard professor abandons the life he’s always known for one in which his vast knowledge of God and scripture and psychology are not needed as much as he is.

I highly recommend this book that walked me through a dark time of my own, not only for those experiencing burn-out and doubt but for the prevention of it down the road.  Nouwen, using simple language and his own story, writes about well-worn wallpaper-like topics like prayer and obeying God but in refreshingly honest and clear ways that reshaped my life in important ways.

Like I said, it’s a small book: 81 pages of large print.  But it tames big ideas like resisting the temptation to be spectacular and embracing instead a life of faithfulness, or resisting the temptation to be relevant and embracing instead a life of pray. These seem like they’d require deep scriptural unraveling to fully communicate but they don’t.  All Nouwen’s smarts somehow unfold on the page as cutting simplicity instead of a detailed exegesis of scholarly proportions.

The book is a transcription more-or-less of a speech Nouwen gave on the topic of Christian Leadership but, whether you think you’re a leader or not, this book is worth reading.  I hope it moves, provokes, and inspires you the way it has me every time I’ve read it.