Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal, 4 December 2022
The late Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen writes:
“Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’”
I’m grateful to Shoshanna for sharing her story of the process she went through to bless a man with terminal cancer on his wedding day. Henri Nouwen would have said that it was through an awareness of her own pain that she was able to find those words of compassion that brought hope and understanding without erasing the reality of death.
In seminary, one of the first books we were required to read was The Wounded Healer, a classic book by Henri Nouwen. Written in 1972, the language can be hard to swallow today, and Nouwen’s theology is heavily Christian. He was a Catholic priest. Woundedness, for him, is the Christian story. Yet I still find myself going back, trying to make sense of what he wrote. When I translate the language, there is something that still rings true to me.
Speaking of life 50 years ago, Nouwen wrote that we were living in a time when we could see our power and our capacity for self-destruction. We could save a single life with an organ transplant, while we watched millions die from famine and starvation. We could speak of moral authority while allowing people to die through torture and senseless wars. We had the ingenuity to build bridges, skyscrapers and whole infrastructures that could be destroyed in an instant by earthquakes, hurricanes and floods.
The reality of our world sends us seeking a centre within ourselves, where the distinction between life and death can be transcended, where we can find a connection with all of nature and all of history. We are looking for something to cut through our apathy to reach a deeper connection with life. In these conditions, Nouwen said, prayer becomes the breath of human existence.
The reason ministerial students read The Wounded Healer at the beginning of their preparation for ministry was so they could hear Nouwen’s message that we have to minister through our own woundedness, to learn that what is most personal is what is most universal.
Our role is to offer people channels to find themselves, to put our own “faith and doubt, hope and despair, light and [shadows] at the disposal of others who want to find a way through their confusion and touch the solid core of life.”
If I’m honest, I feel as though I have lost my spiritual way lately. Maybe it’s because I’m dealing with my own physical woundedness. It takes a lot of energy to live with physical pain. Pain brings us closer to our own sense of mortality, even if we try not to think about it. Instead of praying, I can find myself closed up inside a smaller space.
Living through the pandemic has brought me creativity and deepened my emotional connections at home, but the isolation has also brought me a feeling of disconnection. It takes time to rebuild relationships that have been temporarily suspended.
Even if we are surrounded by others, Nouwen wrote, loneliness is at the heart of what it is to be human. Perhaps this time of pandemic has brought us all closer to that loneliness.
I’ve told you before about the year I spent as a hospital chaplain. It’s a time that I have treasured for all that I learned from patients who were in the terminal stages of their cancer. I remember one day encountering a favourite patient. She was a young Black woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She had a vibrancy that the hospital staff admired. I don’t remember her name or the cancer she had, but I remember that she had already lived through several bouts of remission and recurrence that made her a frequent and memorable patient. Much of her strength came from her faith.
One day we ran into each other outside the hospital chapel. It was clear she was having a hard day after her chemo. “Would you like to go inside?” I asked her. She agreed and we went in, turning two chairs to face each other in the empty chapel. As I searched for the right words to say, she stopped me.
“Can I pray for you?” she asked.
I hesitated. Wasn’t I the one who was supposed to be praying for her? Wasn’t that my job?
“Can I pray for you?”
I nodded and she took my hands, we closed our eyes together and she prayed for me. All her faith, her trust, her love of God and life, poured into me. I had been carrying the burden of so much pain and loss as I offered comfort, moving from one dying patient to the next. I had lost my own mother to cancer only weeks before, though that wasn’t something I would have told patients. I didn’t know how hungry I was for someone to pray for me until I heard and felt her words.
I wish I could remember her exact words. Somewhere, hidden in an old file, I must have the notes I would have been required to write about our encounter. But do the words themselves really matter? I know that she asked for me to be blessed in my ministry, and I have carried that blessing within me ever since. Even as the image of her praying for me has lived in the shadows of my memory, the spirit of that blessing has always filled my soul.
She and I were both wounded healers in that moment, both wounded, both in need of healing. The touch of her hand, the intention of her prayer were gifts I have passed on to others throughout my ministry, whether I was conscious of it or not.
To heal is a subtle practice. I think we too often mistake it for heaping on unwanted advice based on our own experience. We can assume that others need healing because we perceive that they don’t live up to our standard of perfection. When we confront someone’s suffering, whether it is mental, physical or spiritual, we fear that we are supposed to offer a solution. “Have you tried this or that?” “You should do this…” “If you hadn’t done this or that, you wouldn’t be suffering…”
Trying to fix or change someone else is not healing. Drawing from the depths of your own woundedness is different from giving advice. It’s allowing yourself to offer what Henri Nouwen called hospitality. It’s when we truly pay attention to the guest that we create the empty space where the guest can find their own soul. Hospitality is creating the space to share in the human condition of our pain, our fear and our doubts. It’s sitting in the silence. It’s waiting and listening.
“Can I pray for you?”
There was nothing prescriptive in that prayer. No advice. No desire to fix or change me. There was only an opening to the sacred, an offering of space for me to find my own soul. For a moment we were held together in our woundedness, both lost and seeking to be found.