Writing
Nouwen's books are still being read today. His books include The Wounded Healer, In the Name of Jesus, Clowning in Rome, The Life of the Beloved and The Way of the Heart. After nearly two decades of teaching at the Menninger Foundation Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and at the University of Notre Dame, Yale University and Harvard University, he went to work with mentally challenged people at the L'Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto, Canada.
While visiting the community, he saw a photograph of Rembrandt's "The return of the prodigal son", that caused him a deep impression. He decided to see the painting personally and traveled to Saint Petersburg (Leningrad at those times) to visit the Hermitage Museum where it is kept. This resulted in a several day contemplation of the painting, and the book of the same name, probably his most famous.
After a long period of declining energy, which he chronicled in his final book, Sabbatical Journey, he died in September 1996 from a sudden heart attack.
His spirituality was influenced notably by his friendship with Jean Vanier. At the invitation of Vanier, Nouwen visited L'Arche in France, the first of over 130 communities around the world where people with developmental disabilities live with those who care for them. In 1986 Nouwen accepted the position of pastor for a L'Arche community called "Daybreak" in Canada, near Toronto. Nouwen wrote about his relationship with Adam, a core member at L'Arche Daybreak with profound developmental disabilities, in a book titled Adam: God's Beloved. Father Nouwen was a good friend of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.
The results of a Christian Century magazine survey conducted in 2003 indicate that Nouwen's work was a first choice of authors for Catholic and mainline Protestant clergy.
One of his most famous works is Inner Voice of Love, his diary from December 1987 to June 1988 during one of his most serious bouts with clinical depression.
Prior to his death in 1996, Nouwen entrusted Sue Mosteller with his estate, making her the literary executrix of his works.
Read more about this topic: Henri Nouwen
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“I have a vast deal to say, and shall give all this morning to my pen. As to my plan of writing every evening the adventures of the day, I find it impracticable; for the diversions here are so very late, that if I begin my letters after them, I could not go to bed at all.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer’s life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)
“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)