Minister studies his priest-friend

Rev. Grigsby just spent three months studying Father Henri Nouwen's work through a grant from the Louisville Institute in Kentucky.

Rev. Grigsby, a United Church of Christ minister, is executive director of Schenectady Inner City Ministry (SICM), an ecumenical group of churches that serve the poor of Schenectady County. He's been interested in Father Nouwen since the two attended Yale Divinity School together in the 1970s.

Encounter

He recalled Father Nouwen's years at Yale as very difficult. The author had written several best-selling books and become famous in the process but wasn't comfortable with that fame.

The priest had to hire a staff of employees to handle the constant requests for speaking engagements, and the Masses he offered each day in a small chapel in the school's basement overflowed with supporters.

Looking deeper

Rev. Grigsby said Father Nouwen's messages are "more accessible" and understandable to the average person than those of another famous Catholic writer, Thomas Merton.

"The basic thing [Nouwen] taught is that we are loved," he explained. "Life is an interruption of eternity: We're loved before we're born, and we're loved after we die. The basic thing is to accept the fact that we're loved and live your life."

Another of Father Nouwen's key themes is that "joy emerges through sorrow;" Rev. Grigsby quoted an old saying that "resurrection is for the dead; for the living, it is much more difficult."

Research

He quoted from Father Nouwen's book "Clowning in Rome": "'When we reflect on current events, we realize that our world is in a continuous state of emergency....The relationships among the main powers of the world are deteriorating, while the chances for a universal holocaust are increasing with the buildup of nuclear arsenals....Our world is clouded with an all-pervading fear, a growing sense of despair, and a paralyzing awareness that indeed humanity has come to the verge of suicide.'"

"And that was written 20 years ago," Rev. Grigsby added.

Focus on joy

It isn't just one's personal relationship with God that matters, the minister observed, but how people treat one another in the world.

Through the curriculum that he hopes to spend the next few months writing, Rev. Grigsby wants to move people from faith to action on behalf of their suffering peers. He plans to set up reading groups to look at one of Father Nouwen's simplest books, "Letters to Marc about Jesus."

From Nouwen, the minister said, he learned that "'we're not called to be successful; we're called to be fruitful.' I'm not in this business to make social change; I'm in this business to bear witness."

In this, Rev. Grigsby has been most moved by Father Nouwen's most radical book, "Compassion." In it, the author writes: "As long as the help we offer to others is motivated primarily by the changes we may accomplish, our service cannot last long....Radical servanthood challenges us, while attempting persistently to overcome poverty, hunger, illness, and any other form of human misery, to reveal the gentle presence of our compassionate God in the midst of our broken world."

(Father Henri Nouwen (1932-'96) was a theologian in the Netherlands who came to the U.S. to continue his studies in the psychology of religion. He wrote more than three dozen books and became pastor of the L'Arche community in Toronto, a group that welcomed people with disabilities. Learn more about Father Nouwen at www.nouwen.net, or contact the Henri Nouwen Society, which publishes a newsletter on the author, at Box 230523, Ansonia Station, New York, NY 10023.)

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