Nov 2011 The Road to Daybreak A Spiritual Journey by Henri J M Nouwen

Continue from ...... The Call Yesterday was not only the day on which Peter left, but also the day on which I received a long letter from Daybreak in Canada inviting me to join their community. The fact that the letter arrived on the same day that Peter left has a great symbolic meaning for me. On August 15, Peter will conclude his work with me and begin his studies in geology; Joe Egan has invited me to begin living with the Daybreak community on August 29. Something is coming to a conclusion; something new is beginning. I realize that my Cambridge period is ending and that I am being asked to move in a new direction. Joe writes, "This letter comes to you from Daybreak Community Council and we are asking you to consider coming to live with us in our community of Daybreak ... We truly feel that you have a gift to bring us. At the same time, our sense is that Daybreak would be a good place for you, too. We would want to support you in your important vocation of writing and speaking by providing you with a home and with a community that will love you and call you to grow." I am deeply moved by this letter. It is the first time in my life that I have been explicitly called. All my work as priest since my ordination has been a result of my own initiative. My work at the Menninger Clinic, Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard and in Latin America has been work that I myself chose. It was mostly very satisfying work, but it was always my own choice. Though I was directly responsible to Cardinal Alfrink and Cardinal Willebrands, and though I am now directly responsible to Cardinal Simonis, none of them has ever called me to a specific task. They have always agreed with and supported the choices I made. But now a community is saying, "We call you to live with us; to give to us and receive from us." I know that Joe's invitation is not a job offer but a genuine call to come and live with the poor. They have no money to offer, no attractive living quarters, no prestige. This is a completely new thing. It is a concrete call to follow Christ, to leave the world of success, accomplishment, and honour, and to trust Jesus and him alone. Both the asistants and the handicapped people at Daybreak have been consulted - the call comes from the whole community. It is a call made after much prayer and thought. If I even wanted a concrete sign of Jesus' will for me, this is it. I feel many hesitations. Living with handicapped people in a new country is not immediately attractive. Still, something tells me that Joe's letter is not just another letter asking me to do something. It is a response to my prayer to Jesus, asking him where to go. So often I have prayed, "Lord, show me your will and I will do it." So here is a response, more concrete and more specific than I ever dared to hope for. The coming months will be months to grow into a faithful answer. I must speak to Cardinal Simonis in Holland and ask his permission to accept Joe's call. I must pray for the strength and courage to be truly obedient to Jesus, even if he calls me to where I would rather not go. Present to the Present Just a week after I had bought some postcards with reproductions of paintings by Cezanne, Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters on Cezanne was sent to me as a Christmas gift. It is a happy concidence. Ever since I read Letters to a Young Poet, I have felt a deep connection with Rilke. Now he will introduce me to Cezanne, whose painting I like but have not yet fully seen. Rilke will help me to see. When Rilke wrote to his wife, Clara, about Cezanne's painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire, he said, "Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly ... only a saint could be as united with his God as Cezanne was with his work." For Rilke, Cezanne was indeed a mystic who helped us to see reality in a new way. He writes about Cezanne as a painter who "so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its colour content that that reality resumed a new existence in a beyond of colour, without any previous memories." Cezanne, in Rilke's view, was able to be fully present to the present and could therefore see reality as it is. This was also Rilke's own desire. He suffered from his inability to be fully in the present and thus see clearly. He write, "One lives so badly, because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted. I cannot think back on any time I lived without loss were the ten days after Ruth's (Rilke's daughter) birth, when I fould reality as indescribable, down to its smallest details, as it surely always is." Cezanne's paintings revealed to Rilke a man able to live "without loss," totally present to the present, truly seeing. This was Rilke's own search. I am so glad for this encounter with Rilke and Cezanne because they both bring me closer to the place where true living and true seeing are one. Right Glory and Vain Glory There are many small "formation groups" at L'Arche. There are groups on peace, on conflict resolution, on medical issues. There are groups on spirituality, politics, and economics. Jean Vanier asked me to lead a group on the Gosple of John. Tonight we had our third meeting. We spoke about the word "glory". I have gradually become aware how central this word is in John's Gospel. There is God's glory, the right glory that leads to life. And there is human glory, the vain glory that leads to death. All through his Gospel John shows how we are tempted to prefer vain glory over the glory that comes from God. This idea did not affect me greatly until I realized that human glory is always connected with someform of competition. Human glory isthe result of being considered better, faster, more beautiful, more powerful, or more successful than others. Glory conferred by people is glory which results from being favourably compared to other people. The better our scores on the scoreboard of life, the more glory wer receive. This glory comes with upward mobility. The higher we climb on the ladder of success, the more glory we collect. But this same glory also creates our darkness. Human glory, based on competition, leads to rivalry; rivalry carries within it the beginning of violence; and violence is the way to death. Thus human glory proves to be vain glory, false glory, mortal glory.

- To Be Continued - © Copyright Shalom 2011. All rights reserved.