Book Review
	The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen
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	by Jane McCafferty, April 25, 2007
	I first encountered Henri Nouwen in his book, The Inner Voice of Love, written as notes to himself during the darkest days of his life, when he’d been sent reeling after a good friend rejected him. The friendship had been intense for Nouwen; though celibate, it had all the riveting emotion we usually associate with grand, doomed love affairs. The man he’d befriended had become absolutely and obsessively central in Nouwen’s life, replacing the centrality of God, whom he’d been trying to know, serve and honor his entire life, starting at age seven when he played priest in the “chapel” attic of his house. He’d gone onto study as a Catholic seminarian, and then as a university scholar of psychology, where he became intrigued by the intersections he saw between theology and modern psychology. He wrote in The Wounded Healer, “Making one’s wounds a source of healing, therefore, calls not for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one’s own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the universal human condition.” This he applied not only to his teaching and counseling work, and later to his work with mentally disabled people, but to his writing. In The Inner Voice of Love, you’re invited to see both the depth of his suffering, and the way language enables him to name it, shape it, and point to ways suffering can be transformed. It’s a deeply sympathetic and brave voice that arises out of his own darkness like a lit candle held in a small fist. Like all his work, it’s almost shockingly vulnerable. He was a Catholic priest and a Harvard professor for many years, but there’s never any sign that he used these positions of considerable cultural authority to convince us of his own superiority; rather than use prestige to distance us from a sense of his interior life, he went all out to remind us, as readers, again and again, that he was indeed a wounded healer, and that he was not interested in service that took place in traditional ways. “Medicine, psychiatry, and social work all offer us models in which service takes place in a one-way direction. Someone serves, someone else is being served, and be sure not to mix up the roles! The world in which we live has no models to offer to those who want to be shepherds in the way Jesus was a shepherd.” In his many books you can hear someone strenuously attempting to reveal all the ways that he was as needy as those he was helping, and perhaps this is voiced most urgently in The Return of The Prodigal Son. The book’s inception came when Nouwen was struck by an image in a Rembrandt reproduction, part of his late-life painting “Prodigal Son.” Nouwen had been traveling for six weeks, giving talks to large audiences in protest of U.S. policies in Central America. He’d returned from this journey feeling “anxious, lonely, restless, and very needy, like a vulnerable little child who wanted to crawl onto its mother’s lap and cry.” I was struck by this; it’s this deep state of vulnerability that allows him to really see the power of the painting. We don’t like to be in these exhausted, needy, vulnerable states--but sometimes they’re what afford us vision we couldn’t have if we were more self-contained and satisfied. What compels him in particular are the father’s hands as they embrace the son upon his return. The painting communicates a powerful sense of home-coming and home, and inspires the deepest of longings. Soon he makes a trip to Russia where he visits the real painting in Saint Petersburg, spends hours with it, watching it change in the light, observing how different figures appear according to how the sun hits it, and proceeds to use the painting as a window into his own soul, which he discovers contains both the prodigal son, the dutiful son who stays home, and the welcoming Father, who immediately calls for the big celebration, the infamous fatted calf. Of course Nouwen is suggesting that the human soul — not just his own — contains these archetypes, and before my feminist friends get upset, let me assure you that as a feminist myself I was relieved when Nouwen reads “the father” in the painting as both “father and mother,” and reveals that Rembrandt gave “the father” two different hands—one traditionally masculine, and one traditionally feminine. Nouwen writes about the Divine Mother being present in the parable. And the archetypes he discusses are reflections of something so deep I’d argue they’re not arrested by gender categories. This is a tough parable, for most people, as is the one in the vineyard where the guys who show up late and do an hour or two of work make the same wage (or more) than the people who have toiled all day, sweating in the heat. Where’s the justice in that? And why shouldn’t the older brother be mad that the prodigal gets treated like a veritable king when all he’s done is squander his money and enjoy a lot of drugs, sex, and alcohol? (Probably some version of rock’n’roll, too.)The older brother’s a classic good guy on the surface. He’s obeyed all the laws, he’s stood by his father, he’s said the right prayers, he’s worked his proverbial ass off. These are all the conventional, deeply human objections that are commonly raised by these difficult, but in my mind, most crucial of parables. Jesus is trying to teach us about the nature of God, after all. God doesn’t love you more when you’re well behaved. Hindu saints tell us this same thing, by the way, as do most of the mystics in Christianity and Sufism.) The criminal our society thinks nothing of executing? God loves him or her just as much as the Pope. (Jesus as far as we can tell, would choose to have dinner with that death-row inmate over the Pope, given a chance.) And yet, as a child, when I learned about the Prodigal son, what the nuns and priests emphasized was how nice it was how that lustful sinner of a young man managed to repent. He finally realized he’d been going down the wrong track, and now he was back home. As for the older son, we didn’t much talk about him, except to emphasize that he was loved by his father and invited to the celebration. I think the parable is often shrunken down to palatable size because it really does interfere with our sense of earthly justice, in particular the idea that we are somehow in a position where by being “good” or even “better than most” we can earn favor with God. Think of the all the damage religion has done operating under this system—all the exclusive churches of self-righteousness that seem more interested in condemnation than love. Condemnation allows the condemning to feel good, after all. But Nouwen, in looking hard at this painting and this parable, reminds us that we’re never as far from God as when we’re condemning someone else. As he dwells with this painting, first he identifies strongly with the prodigal son himself. That young man kneels before his father, and his father lays his hands on him. The father and son are both illumined by the painter’s light. Nouwen remembers the friendship he’d had a few years earlier where “I found myself squandering all I had been given by God to keep the friendship alive. I couldn’t pray, I had lost interest in my work and found it increasingly hard to pay attention to other people’s concerns.” The point being, you don’t have to down your Southern Comfort and hang out with some version of Girls Gone Wild to identify with the prodigal son. We’re “prodigal” when we turn away from our spiritual home, to some worldly attachment that takes the place of our peace. (This probably means most of us have prodigal moments several hundred times a day.) But Nouwen points out that the prodigal son in the parable never despairs, never loses faith in his innate goodness, because if he lost all faith he could have never returned. He returns feeling unworthy, but is promptly robed in finery and taken back as a beloved son when he would have been grateful to have been treated as a servant. And he accepts this embrace. The days of lust are over now, at least for a while, and maybe forever; we don’t know, because the parable’s open-ended. We don’t even know if the older brother manages to enjoy the party. But we can call to light, with Rembrandt’s help, that part of our self that is longing, always, to go home. This, like all deep spiritual truth (in my mind) transcends individual religions. And the point of the parable and the painting: we can go home in an instant, no questions asked. I suppose churches feel (or certainly have felt) that it’s dangerous to emphasize this radical, unearned love as being always at our disposal, for obvious reasons. If people don’t feel guilty, ashamed, humiliated, judged, afraid of being turned away, how will they be controlled? If they’re not invited to constantly compare themselves with others, as if church is just another reflection of the dominant culture, how on earth can they know and measure themselves? We’re also, all of us, the son who stayed home. This is the tougher character, finally. Nouwen has a friend who told him early on in the writing of this book, “Henri, I think you’re more like the older son.” This utterly shocked him; he’d spent so much time thinking of the prodigal parts of himself, he’d neglected to realize that ostensibly, he had far more in common with the brother who stayed home. Nouwen, after all, was an oldest son raised Catholic, and stayed Catholic, becoming a priest, walking that walk without much deviation, even as he’d gone through lots of internal strife. He was always working over-time to prove his goodness. He felt a deep sense of inadequacy that drove him to work this hard, and when he stopped to consider it, he realized that he’d experienced bitterness and jealousy of other people countless times. Why did they have it so easy? Why didn’t they have to work as hard? Why did he himself feel so compelled to be good, and ultimately so constrained by it, so that there were times when it seemed he was frozen, joyless, a spectator, a person who can’t have any fun. Nouwen’s read of the supposedly good brother is ultimately sympathetic, but it also invites us to see how he’s in a much more treacherous place, spiritually. He’s so well-behaved, and thinks he loves God through his obedience, but what he doesn’t do is allow God to love him. And so he’s jealous, resentful, when this philandering party boy comes home and gets all the fanfare. Jealous of his father’s love. But the father is quick to come out and tell him he wants him at the celebration. The one’s son return has not obliterated the father’s concern for the other. It’s not a contest. (But there should be another parable, I think, where the jealous brother gets his own party—maybe a week after his own spiritual homecoming, which would entail him joining in with the festivities of his younger brother’s party, letting go of his resentment, his envy and jealousy, and receiving for the first time, unconditional love.) Rembrandt, according to Nouwen, captures the isolation of the older son beautifully; his resentment leaves him out of the light. He stands frozen in his judgment, a perfect example of sin as its own punishment. Finally, each of us contains “the father” who can welcome others home, with love and forgiveness. It hadn’t occurred to Nouwen to consider this until once again a friend interceded. He was working, at this point, at Daybreak, a community that serves mentally disabled people, and his friend tells him he is needed as a father now. Nouwen starts to consider this role, again through the painting. He identifies resistance in himself, and in the Church. “Isn’t there a subtle pressure in both the Church and society to remain a dependent child? Hasn’t the Church in the past stressed obedience in a fashion that made it hard to claim spiritual fatherhood, and hasn’t our consumer society encouraged us to indulge in childish self-gratification?” But Jesus said, “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.” The whole time I read this book, I remembered that what I most liked about Nouwen—his vulnerability and readiness to share it-- was also what made me wish someone had introduced him to Buddhism. Had he studied not modern psychology, but Buddhism—with its emphasis on controlling the mind, taming the inner voices into silence, using mantra repetition to achieve a sanctified (and quiet) inner world, I think he would have suffered less. Or even had he been able to use the Desert Father’s Jesus prayer, “Jesus Christ Have Mercy on Me” as a mantra. But the Christianity he inherited, the Catholicism he was steeped in, offered little in the way of discipline for the mind, at least compared to the jewels of the East. Early on in this book he concedes that the way into the “inner sanctuary where God dwells is through “unceasing prayer.” That’s a very Eastern idea, one that is not emphasized in modern-day Christianity. It’s perhaps Nouwen’s ultimate sacrifice, however, that he dwelled so much in the world, among hundreds of people, many of them becoming friends who would wound him (in ordinary ways, as people will) that he really couldn’t pray without ceasing. He was too engaged in the moments of his life. It all mattered so much to him. Still, I believe so many Catholics and Christians like Nouwen would have benefited from Thomas Merton’s idea that West could learn so much from East. (Rather than subjugate Merton to radical lefty monk status, what would have happened if the church had recognized his saintliness, or at the very least, his brilliant idea that religions needed each other?) Henri Nouwen, like so many of us, was haunted by his internal voices of doubt and self-contempt. His devotion to God and Catholicism did not save him from this, or even mitigate this along the way. I’d argue that Christianity has been used to stimulate these voices, to keep people fearful and easier to control. In some branches of Hinduism, saints warn people to never, ever consider themselves as unworthy. (I have a friend who says at mass, Lord I am worthy to receive you not as a protest but as a reflection, I think, of his encounters with Hindu saints.) Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han had never even heard of the concept of self hatred; it made no sense to him. Nouwen, as beautiful as he was in the world, reveals in this book and in most of his other books, that he suffered terribly from a life-long wrestling match with shame and self-contempt, and that he had always felt it virtuous to have low-self esteem. It was important for him to write this book, not just as a gift to others, but to remind himself that all his various selves are ultimately not only acceptable, but loved. I’m fairly certain that many readers will love this writer, who devoted the last decades of his life to tending to severely disabled people. They, more than anyone or anything, taught him about love, he said, and helped him a lot more than he ever helped them. But that’s a whole other book. ____________________________ We post new reviews and essays every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. During 2007, we will be donating 100 percent of our referral fees from Amazon to the Uncle Grumps Education Initiative. So, please click through us first when shopping at Amazon. 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