Showing results by author "Henri J.M. Nouwen" in All Categories

Love, Henri consists of over 100 letters that stretch from the earliest years of Henri's career up through his last 10 years at L'Arche Daybreak. Rich in spiritual insights, the letters highlight a number themes that emerged in both Henri's work over the years, including vocation, solitude, prayer, suffering, and perseverance in difficult times. These deeply spiritual letters, sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, ulimately demonstrate the rich value of communicating with God through others.

During the last five years of his life, best-selling spiritual author Henri J. M. Nouwen became close to The Flying Rodleighs, a trapeze troupe in a traveling circus. Like Nouwen’s own life, a trapeze act is full of artistry, exhilarating successes, crushing failures and continual forgiveness. He wrote about his experience in a genre new to him: creative non-fiction. In Flying, Falling, Catching, Nouwen's colleague and friend Carolyn Whitney-Brown presents his unpublished trapeze writings framed by the true story of his rescue through a hotel window by paramedics during his first heart attack.

Perhaps no 20th-century spiritual thinker so profoundly captured the human experience as this Catholic priest and psychologist. Now, in this moving audio program, you have the rare opportunity to listen to Nouwen's voice. He powerfully draws upon his own struggles to show you how to move from loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality, and from illusion to prayer.

Find hope in suffering in this lecture set by Henri Nouwen, one of the 20th century's great spiritual masters, as your guide. In our society, we learn to hide our grief, to suppress our joy, to fight darkness with darkness. We are like Jesus' generation, to whom he says, "We played the pipe for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not cry" (Luke 7:32). Now, the spiritual master Henri Nouwen helps you practice healing through both suffering and joy.

Do you serve on your church's stewardship committee or need to raise money for a mission trip or some other faith-based cause? Perhaps the thought of asking people for money intimidates you. It's time to change the way you think about fundraising. "Fundraising is, first and foremost, a ministry," best-selling author and renowned spiritual teacher Henri Nouwen writes. "It's a way of announcing our vision and inviting other people into our mission."

In this hope-filled book, Nouwen offers a fresh interpretation of modern ministry. Here he offers inspiration to men and women who want to be of service in their Church or community but who have found the traditional ways of ministry alienating and ineffective. According to Nouwen, "the minister is called to recognize the sufferings of his time in his own heart and make that recognition the starting point of his service."

We lead our spiritual lives in relationship with others. A faithful community gives us opportunities for worship, sharing burdens, confessing faults, offering forgiveness, and celebrating life. Wherever he went, Henri Nouwen created such communities, and within them, he offered spiritual direction. Available as an audiobook for the first time ever, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith is part of “The Nouwen Trilogy.” These convenient audio sessions let you adopt Nouwen as your personal spiritual director.

Available as an audiobook for the first time ever, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life invites you to adopt Nouwen as your personal spiritual guide. Each session was carefully prepared by Dr. Michael Christensen, an award-winning professor of Christian ministry and practice, and Dr. Rebecca Laird, who was Nouwen’s student at Yale Divinity School. Like other volumes in The Nouwen Trilogy, this audiobook collects Nouwen’s unpublished homilies, interviews, classes, and speeches, as well as excerpts from his published writings.

At one of the lowest points in Henri Nouwen’s life, he gave a series of lectures on the importance of following Jesus in an age of anxiety. Drawn from those talks, this new work reveals what sustained Nouwen to remain faithful to the teachings of Jesus and led him to become an icon of compassion and vulnerability. Here, he writes eloquently about calling and purpose, fear and hope. And he explains why - with so many choices available to the 21st-century seeker - the greatest reward for those looking for spiritual direction is rediscovering Jesus’ teaching on love.

This powerful meditation illuminates the parable of the prodigal son found in Luke's Gospel. Nouwen discovers anew the reality that God's love is unconditional and shares his own spiritual journey with us. In this audiobook, Nouwen shares his own experience as the wayward son as well as the vengeful older brother and the compassionate father.

How does one live a spiritual life in a secular world? Henri Nouwen responds from the depths of his heart to this dilemna posed by his friend Fred Bratman. Nouwen's own interpretive reading of the text lends a sense of immediacy to the audiobook.

"This book is my secret journal," Nouwen wrote. At first he had no intention of sharing this personal diary of the difficult months when he felt all meaning in his life was missing and all ahead seemed a dark, bottomless abyss. In spite of his inner turmoil, Nouwen recorded the descent into his heart in these 63 journal entries. Friends persuaded him that sharing his painful soul-searching might help others who also struggle to embrace life with joy.

Masterminded by Michael Christensen, PhD, and Rebecca Laird, MA, DMin, The Nouwen Trilogy compiles Nouwen’s unpublished homilies, interviews, classes, and speeches, as well as excerpts from his published writings. Available as an audiobook for the first time ever, Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit is part of this trilogy. These convenient audio sessions move you through the five classical stages of spiritual development: Awakening, Purgation, Illumination, Dark Night, and Unification.

The spiritual life is not a life then and there, but a life here and now. It is a life in which the spirit of God is revealed in the ordinary enccounters of every day. With a smile and a tear, Nouwen looks at the day-to-day events of our lives and discovers there places where God chooses to dwell and call us.

Nouwen uses the cup as a metaphor to articulate the basic postures of the spiritual life: holding, lifting and drinking. The cup is a powerful image in our human experience. We use cups in our celebrations of a variety of events. Nouwen reminds us that we also use the cup as a symbolic vessel—for sorrow, joy, blessings, salvation.

Society teaches us to define ourselves by the things we have: belongings, education, experiences. Our inner worth depends on our surroundings, and, as the Gospels say, we "belong to the world." Spiritual master Henri Nouwen teaches you how to move beyond such traps and achieve a deeper sense of self. Nouwen draws upon his own experience of leaving a Harvard professorship to work with the disabled.

From the heart of Henri Nouwen comes wisdom for the caregiver about the transformational power of relationship in the unique bond between caregiver and care receiver. Interlacing stories from his own life and the lives of friends, Nouwen communicates warmth and compassion as he shares insights on what it means to be a caregiver and to be cared for.

In Lifesigns, Nouwen explores three elements of what he considered the call of all people: Intimacy - the gospel invitation to communion with God and relationship with others; Fecundity - the exhortation to be open to a fruitful life of both growth and change; Ecstasy - the Gospel wish and promise of Jesus that "your joy may be complete". Nouwen shows how these elements are essential to our movement from the "house of fear" to the "house of love".