Henri Nouwen in an undated photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

“What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.” 

These words by Henri Nouwen appeared in his book Adam: God’s Beloved. They were some of the final lines he put to paper, as he died in 1996 shortly before the book’s publication. Thirty years after his death, the Dutch Catholic priest and spiritual writer still reaches huge audiences via his many books, essays and devotional writings, not least because of his insights into the human condition that privileged heart over head and prized human connection above all.

Adam is not Nouwen’s most famous book—that title probably goes to The Return of the Prodigal Son or The Wounded Healer—but nowhere are those insights expressed more clearly than in that memoir about a severely disabled member of the L’Arche Daybreak community where Nouwen had lived for many years. Adam suffered from frequent seizures and was unable to speak or move without assistance; nevertheless, Nouwen wrote, he became a friend, teacher and guide. “Whoever speaks about Adam as a vegetable or animal-like creature,” he wrote, “misses the sacred mystery that Adam is fully capable of receiving and giving love.” 

Today is not Henri Nouwen’s birthday—Saturday was—but he would be 94 years old this week; every year, his birthday brings fond remembrances from his fans and new insights from those inspired by his spiritual writings. 

Nouwen published more than 40 books and hundreds of essays and articles over the course of his career, including the aforementioned titles (The Return of the Prodigal Son was chosen by the Church Times in 2014 as one of the 100 best Christian books of the century). Whether writing on Christian spirituality, faith, psychology, pastoral care or another of his many interests, Nouwen always emphasized the importance of embracing one’s own vulnerability and finding the human in the other. His writings were also prized by both Catholic and Protestant clergy, in part because he spoke eloquently and honestly about his own loneliness and longings for interpersonal connection. (“Many rectories,” Nouwen wrote in America in 1980, “house lonely bachelors.”)

Born in Nijkerk in the Netherlands in 1932, Nouwen studied at Aloysius College (a Jesuit preparatory school) in The Hague before entering the minor seminary, after which he was trained at Rijsenberg, the major seminary for the Archdiocese of Utrecht. He was ordained a priest for the archdiocese in 1957, then studied clinical psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen until 1964. 

During a two-year stint studying religion and psychiatry at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., Father Nouwen became involved in the U.S. civil rights movement and participated in the Martin Luther King Jr.-led marches from Selma to Montgomery.

Between 1966 and 1971, Nouwen taught at the University of Notre Dame and the Catholic Theological University of Utrecht, working as well at the Amsterdam Joint Pastoral Institute. In 1971, he moved to Yale Divinity School, where he would teach pastoral theology for the next decade. During those years, he also taught briefly at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., and the North American College in Rome.

After leaving Yale, Nouwen taught both at Harvard Divinity School and at theologates in Latin America, where he had spent more and more time after a 1981 trip opened his eyes to some of the realities facing Latin American communities. He wrote many times for America in the 1970s and 1980s, including a 1983 review of Gustavo Gutierrez’s We Drink from Our Own Wells, one of several pieces in which he reflected on the necessity to build connections between North and South America. 

In 1985, he spent almost a year in France with the L’Arche community after meeting Jean Vanier, the co-founder of L’Arche and a longtime advocate for the disabled and the disadvantaged. Though revelations of sexual exploitation and abuse brought Vanier to disgrace after his death in 2019, he was long revered by many as a living saint. In 1986, Nouwen moved into the L’Arche Daybreak community outside Toronto, where he lived for the last decade of his life. 

“It was the latest of many dramatic moves in his life, and there was no reason at that point to assume it would be his final stop,” wrote Robert Ellsberg of Orbis Books, which published many of Nouwen’s later books, in a 2006 essay for America. “He had always been an exceptionally restless and anxious person—struggling to find his place in the world and to discern where God was calling him. Gradually he came to realize that Daybreak, living in community with handicapped adults, was that place. There his search, his gifts and his needs—both to give and to receive love—finally came into harmonious focus.”

In a 1978 essay on “Unceasing Prayer” Nouwen noted that for many modern people, most of life’s problems stem from our habit of unceasing thinking. But such a mental rat-race could become something more:

Our thoughts are indeed the cradle where sorrow and joy are born. With an empty mind our heart cannot mourn or feast, our eyes cannot cry or laugh, our hands cannot wring or clap, our tongue cannot curse or praise. Thus, as “thinking reeds,” we are able to feel deeply and experience life to the full with all its sorrows and joys. This unceasing thinking, which lies at the core of our humanity, needs to be converted slowly but persistently into unceasing prayer.

Henri Nouwen died in the Netherlands on Sept. 21, 1996, of a heart attack. He was only 64. His funeral was held in the cathedral in Utrecht, with Vanier delivering the eulogy; a second funeral was held in Ontario a week later. Nouwen was initially buried at Sacred Heart Parish Catholic Cemetery in King City, Ontario, though 14 years later his body was moved to St. John’s Anglican Church Cemetery in Richmond Hill, near the L’Arche Daybreak community and among the graves of other L’Arche members. 

In a 2016 interview with America, Gabrielle Earnshaw of the Henri J.M. Nouwen Archives and Research Center at St. Michael’s Collection in Toronto related the experience of cataloguing Nouwen’s papers. “By the end of his life he had more than 16,000 letters in his filing cabinets! It took a decade to catalogue these letters,” she said. “As I worked through the files I learned of his enormous impact on a broad spectrum of humanity, many of whom wrote to him echoing my own experience: ‘How do you know me so well?’”

“I believe one of the reasons he is still so relevant today,” said Earnshaw, “some 20 years since his death—is that he speaks to the 21st century seeker’s soul.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “David,” by Troy Reeves. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.