Four Lessons from Henri Nouwen’s School of Wisdom
Life includes a series of passages we must navigate throughout life. I’ve had several passages in my life and I know you have had them as well. How we respond to our passages can make a profound difference.
Let Henri Nouwen be your teacher and help you choose well when facing your passages.
“You live all these passages* in an environment where you are constantly tempted to be destroyed by resentment, by anger, and by a feeling of being put down. The losses remind you constantly that all isn’t perfect and it doesn’t always happen for you the way you expected; that perhaps you had hoped events would not have been so painful, but they were; or that you expected something from certain relationships that never materialized. You find yourself disillusioned with the irrevocable personal losses: your health, your lover, your job, your hope, your dream. Your whole life is filled with losses, endless losses. And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom.”** — Henri Nouwen
Four Lessons Learned from Henri Nouwen’s School of Wisdom
As I reflect on Henri’s words, I pull out four lessons. Let me encourage you to look for lessons that connect with your experience. You and I have little control over much of what happens to us but what we do control is our response to what happens to us.
1. Life will not always go the way you expect it to.
Instead of expecting things to always go according to your plan, keep the door open for things to change and pivot.
2. How you manage expectations matters.
Whether you expect a certain level of pain from a certain kind of hurt or certain friendship to develop, keeping your expectations at reasonable levels is important. Tempered optimism is one approach — be optimistic about the outcome but deal with setbacks as they come.
3. Feeling disillusioned with life when irrevocable losses occur doesn’t need to be the end of the story.
It’s normal to feel a great deal of wild and crazy emotions, thoughts, and reactions when a loss occurs. What doesn’t have to be normal is for the negative emotions and thought patterns (anger, blame, hatred depression, resentment) to take root in your heart and mind.
4. If you choose to let your losses serve as a passage to something new, wider and deeper — healing and hope can result.
It’s not easy to make this choice in the early days after a loss but with the right support from empathetic people, healthy habits, and new ideas for navigating your passages, it is possible to find freedom and life.
Reflection Questions
Where do you tend to get stuck after experiencing a debilitating loss?
What have you found helps you navigate the passages in your life in a healthy way?
*The passages Henri Nouwen is referring to are the many changes we experience in life that disrupt our status quo and are not what we expected. Changes or passages include having children who no longer speak to you, losing your job, experiencing a health crisis, losing a dream, or losing a loved one to death.]
**The Heart of Henri Nouwen, edited by Laird and Christensen
