Keep Preaching

There was a gap between what he [Henri Nouwen] spoke about and what he was actually able to live, and I found that a bit maddening at times. When I traveled with him, he would give stunning lectures about the spiritual life, then get offstage and collapse from exhaustion or be snarly and irritable. I found that quite difficult to take. Eventually I recognized that my own expectation of Henri being able to live absolutely all of what he talked about so compellingly was quite unfair and unrealistic. Once, when I was preparing to give a reflection on the Gospel, I talked to Henri about my own difficulty in preaching something that I myself could not live very well. Henri encouraged me to do what the Desert Fathers had done, "to keep preaching that I might be converted by my own word." The fact that Henri could not live every moment of life in the spirit of his preaching did not take away from the fundamental truth of his message. And, in the end, his own humanity was part of what made his spirituality so accessible and real (Michael Ford, Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri J. M. Nouwen, Doubleday, 1999).