Beauty of the Beloved – a Henri Nouwen Anthology, edited by Robert A. Jonas, DLT, 1999. £8.95 Wounded Prophet: a Portrait of Henri Nouwen, by Michael Ford, DLT, 1999, £9.95

Two books on Nouwen from the same publisher in less than half a year! The selection of Nouwen’s writings has an introduction – a third of the book – in which Jonas giyes a sympathetic personal account of the friend who seemed to make God present when he presided at the eucharist. He engages with the extraordinary contradictions of the man: a depressive with a gift for celebration who showered his friends with gifts; the preacher and writer who inspired thousands but could never himself live the life he described so eloquently; the would-be solitary who felt bereft when his friends did not need him.

Examples of his writings show how Nouwen perceived the love of God, in Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son, and in the catcher to whom the trapeze flier trusts himself absolutely. He stresses the importance of gratitude, silence, and solitude, cited surprisingly as the best gift a parent can give to a child. He sees our whole life as an image of the eucharist, as we are broken and given for others. He grieves that he always dcmands ftom others more than friendship can give.

The journalist Michael Ford based this, his first book, on research and interviews with people who knew Nouwen. It is a fuller and darker account. He paints a critical portrait of the ‘professional intimate’, the sympathetic listener who could give his whole attention to a stranger, yet could be curiously insensitive to his effect on communities he was staying with when he invited his own friends and laid on lavish entertainments. Ford points to Nouwen’s affinity with his tormented compatriot van Gogh, and describes the complete nervous breakdown which resulted from the painful ending of a particular friendship.

Nouwen’s homosexual orientation caused him terrible anguish and inner conflict. He could bring himself to confide this side of his nature only to certain friends, and never ‘came out’ publicly, which is probably why Jonas never mentions it.

Ford traces the passage of this contemplative who was incapable of sitting still, from theology to clinical psychology, from prestigious American Universities to the Cistercian Abbey of the Genesee and to Latin America and finally to a L’Arche community, where the disabilities of the core members mirrored his own brokenness.

Josephine Way