In this light, it is understandable why Rembrandt’s poster hit him so hard. He was exhausted from having to prove himself in order to earn love. Seeing Rembrandt’s depiction of the father, Nouwen collided with his own unfulfilled longing. In an early draft of The Return of the Prodigal Son he gave words to this experience: “It was the gentle forgiving touch of two hands that remained with me, reminded me of a love that cannot be earned or gained, but which is there simply to be received in gratitude.”5
In 1983, the many years of being a pleaser had finally caught up with him. At Harvard, he was lonely and alienated by academic competitiveness. Earlier, as a missionary in Peru (something he tried in the 1980s), his difficulty with the Spanish language precluded deep friendships and meaningful contact. A ten-city speaking tour on a very volatile subject—American complicity in oppressive regimes in Central and Latin America—had left him completely exhausted and burned out.6 On top of all this, the “special love” of his mother had been stilled by her death in 1978.
In his “Returning” retreat, Nouwen reflected on the effect of her death on him:
Although I loved teaching in the universities I was always yearning for intimacy in my life. I found this special love to a certain degree in my relationship with my mother. She loved me in a particular way, followed my every move, faithfully corresponded with me, expressing a love that was so tangible, full and close to be being unconditional. When she died in 1978 during my time at Yale, I grieved her absence in a very profound place inside.… Her absence plunged me into a downward spiral so that my final teaching years at Harvard in the early 1980s were some of the unhappiest in my life. (Home Tonight, xvii)
Nouwen longed for more than his father could give him. He thirsted for affirmation, and at numerous points in his life he found surrogate father figures to meet this need. One example can be seen in a letter he wrote to his friend Richard, a political activist he met in Mexico in the early 1960s:
From the moment I met you in Cuernavaca I have felt a deep and strong attraction to you. It wasn’t a sexual attraction as much as an attraction to your inner strength, your ability to give me affection and care, your interest in me and your opening to me a world of feeling and thought that were very new to me. Your embrace, your touch, your smile, your strong hands, they all gave me a feeling of safety and protection. I often felt in your presence as a child who is safe because daddy’s close. Emotionally I often wanted to be loved by you as by a father.7
Years later, Nouwen was similarly drawn to John Eudes Bamberger, the abbot of the Trappist Abbey of the Genesee in upstate New York, with that similar intensity. His relationship with Jean Vanier can be seen as another example.8 Eventually, Nouwen would finally meet the father figure he needed, but it would not come in the form that he was expecting.
Fathers and Sons
To understand Nouwen’s longing for intimacy with a loving father in a more rounded way, we need to consider the context of the times in which he lived. What were the societal norms around displays of affection between fathers and sons? How did society regard men who showed their emotions or vulnerabilities? Patriarchy has historically dictated that men behave in a certain way. Society says, “Real men don’t cry” and “Act like a man!”
Perhaps not much has changed. Even today we live in a society that longs for a father’s loving touch, and we see very little of it around, particularly between fathers and sons. We are generations of children longing for a gentle father. What role models do we have today for fatherhood? Nouwen was asking similar questions in the early days of his academic career.
In 1970, Nouwen published an article called “Generation Without Fathers” in Commonweal magazine. He was teaching pastoral theology at the University of Notre Dame while holding a similar teaching position at a seminary in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The article is about Christian leadership in an era of unprecedented anti-authoritarianism in the West. Nouwen draws on psychological training he had taken after ordination to identify a new Western phenomenon—young people were no longer looking to traditional authority figures for help. They saw their parents as complicit in the atrocities of the world wars, powerless in the face of nuclear and environmental threats, and narrow in their worldviews. They were ready to abandon the Father completely and chart their own way in the world.9
Nouwen, one with this generation and also its observer, described it this way: “[There is] no desire anymore to leave the safe place and to travel to the father’s house which has so many rooms, no hope to reach the promised land or to see Him who is waiting for his prodigal son, no ambition to sit at the right or the left side of the Heavenly Throne.”10
Some two decades after he wrote this, Nouwen was still circling the question of how to reconcile with the Father, both personally and in the broader context of society. This time, twenty years older and now entering middle age, he focuses not on youthful rejection of the father but the moment we heed the call of homecoming and come face-to-face with the Father. In this sense, The Return of the Prodigal Son is the story of a generation reexamining its relationship to God and authority figures. Nouwen, using his own life as an example, shows that we can stop behaviors that keep us in perpetual distance from the Father. We can accept our sonship or daughtership without losing our freedom. And eventually, we can take our place not “at the right or the left side of the Heavenly Throne,” but as Father/Mother ourselves.
Recently, two Catholic thinkers, Laurence Freeman of the World Community of Christian Meditation, and Richard Rohr, the popular Franciscan friar and priest, used social media to remind their followers that our propensity for conflating our images of father and God comes from long-held belief in a punitive God that must be appeased with sacrifice.
Freeman wrote,
Much more often, our image of God is related not to those experiences of love, of joy, or of union, but it’s related to experiences of authority and punishment. A young child is taught to think of God as a sort of super parent. The very word we use about God, of course, Father, carries with it, in most children’s upbringing, an image of a person in the family who does the correction, who does the discipline. The idea of God as Father carries with it, therefore, this sense of control, this sense of dominance. And where there is punishment or this kind of relationship to authority, there is usually fear. We fear being punished, we fear being sent to hell.11
Rohr put it this way:
In authoritarian and patriarchal cultures, most people were fully programmed to think this way—working to appease an authority figure who was angry, punitive, and even violent in “his” reactions. Many still operate this way, especially if they had an angry, demanding, or abusive parent. People respond to this kind of God, as sick as it is, because it fits their own story line.12
As both Rohr and Freeman say, it is deep within our collective and individual psyches to think of God as a punitive parent. The Return of the Prodigal Son is so powerful because Nouwen, without speaking a word of theology or history, addresses this metanarrative with a gentle story of his own. He invites people to listen to his own experience of releasing this shaming image and to embrace an image of a feminine/masculine creator who envelops us in unearned, unconditional love. Nouwen uses the power of story to help us revise our image of God so we can allow God’s love to enter our lives with freedom and even joy.
Search for Intimacy
Nouwen sees the poster and has a visceral reaction. His body responds—his heart leaps in his