Nouwen was attuned to art through birth and culture. He was born in the land of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, including Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer, as well as famous Dutch painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian, and M. C. Escher. Nouwen would have been immersed in these paintings as a child and young man. As an adult, he felt a particular affinity with two of these artists: “I am a Dutchman, Rembrandt is a Dutchman and van Gogh is a Dutchman.… They are confrères” (Home Tonight, 13).
An Active and Developed Imagination
As well as exposure to great art, Nouwen had an active and developed imagination. We can enjoy pondering how differently he might have seen the world, as he walked through it, from the way we do. It calls to mind the story of his fascination with the trapeze troupe the Flying Rodleighs who were mentioned earlier.
While most people who saw the Flying Rodleighs perform at a circus enjoyed a beautiful aerial dance or a daring feat of athleticism, Nouwen, with his spiritual vision, saw God, the universe, and the whole meaning of existence. The trapeze act was yet another icon—this time an icon in motion—and it caught his imagination every bit as firmly as Rembrandt’s painting. He wrote, “From the very moment they appeared, my attention was completely riveted. The selfconfident and joyful way they entered, smiled, greeted the audience and then climbed to the trapeze rigging told me that I was going to see something—better, experience something—that was going to make this evening unlike any other.”31
Nouwen first saw the Rodleighs while vacationing with his ninety-year-old father in Freiburg, Germany, in 1991. There was a peacefulness to the visit that flowed from Nouwen’s lived experience of the Rembrandt painting. Nouwen reflected, “[Our] visit had about it that wonderful quality of mutual freedom and mutual bonding that can develop when both father and son have become elders.”32
One day during the holiday, Nouwen saw a poster for the Circus Simoneit Barum. It was traveling through town, and they decided to attend a show. Sitting under the big top they enjoyed the animals and clowns, the juggling acts and tumblers, but it was the last act—that trapeze troupe called the Flying Rodleighs—that changed everything.
Nouwen was transfixed. Later, when he tried to articulate what it was that gripped him with such intensity, he had this to say: “The ten minutes that followed somehow gave me a glimpse of a world that had eluded me so far, a world of discipline and freedom, diversity and harmony, risk and safety, individuality and community, and most of all, of flying and catching.”33 He saw in this aerial dance an image that satisfied his lifelong desire to be totally free and totally safe. “I somehow caught a glimpse of … the mystery in which complete freedom and complete bonding are one and in which letting go of everything and being connected to everything no longer elude each other.”34
Nouwen’s ensuing trapeze obsession is an echo of his earlier experience with the Rembrandt painting. He asks, “Wasn’t the tenminute spectacle of these five people in mid-air like a living painting put together by great artists?” “Is this trapeze act perhaps one of the windows in the house of life that opens up a view to a totally new, enrapturing landscape?”35
Life Imitates Art
The trapeze act was such a vivid image for Nouwen in part because it resonated with his understanding of life as a vast canvas on which to draw our experiences. Like his confrère Rembrandt, who painted, etched, and drew more than ninety self-portraits in his lifetime, Nouwen wrote and rewrote his self-portrait through thousands of diary entries. He saw self-portraiture as a means to self-knowledge and a way to interpret his experiences. He made a practice of asking himself, “What did I do until now and where do I want to go?” He was always reviewing his life through the eyes of God and updating his portrait. He would encourage other people to “paint” their lives as well. Consider the phrasing he uses in a letter to a friend: “Your intuitions are so right and your basic orientation so valuable that a PhD might in the long run offer you the best frame to put your own painting in.”36
Nouwen as Artist
Nouwen was attuned to art and artists because he was one himself. Perhaps more suitable than any other definition of who he was is the term “artist.”37 He used language and images to create meaning. Moreover, he saw his life as part of a larger story—God’s story. Over and over, in his books, talks, and letters, Nouwen encouraged people to have a larger vision for their lives. In one letter to a friend he suggested the friend try to have “a Grand Canyon experience.” He was referring to a time in his own life when seeing the Grand Canyon opened him up “to the mystery in which we are part.” He said to the friend, “You too need a Grand Canyon experience.”38 We need to see our lives as part of something bigger than mere survival or worldly success.
Many of the insights in The Return of the Prodigal Son revolve around having a new vision such as this. Nouwen teaches us that when we act like the sons of the parable we cannot see properly. To clarify what I mean, let’s review the Gospel of Luke chapter 15, where the famous parable of Jesus can be found.
A father has two sons: elder and younger. The elder son remains by the father’s side, doing the work of a dutiful son, while the younger son asks for his inheritance so that he may leave; the younger son obtains the inheritance from his father and then leaves, squandering it all wastefully, eventually begging forgiveness and the ability to return to the father. When the younger son returns, the elder son questions his father, asking why he is so forgiving of the younger, wasteful one. The father replies, essentially, you have always been here with me, but he was lost and now is found.
Nouwen admitted myopia when stuck in the role of the elder son. He wrote, “When jealousy, resentment and bitterness have settled in my heart, I become unable to see what is already given to me. I am so focused on the seeming preference of God for the other that I completely lose sight of what is given to me.”39 Depression, he said, restricts vision, too: “I completely lose sight of the love that surrounds me, and no longer can see the reality as God sees it. Depression makes me see from below where I am and disables me to see from above where God is.”40
Nouwen noted that Rembrandt, seemingly aware of the potency of the eyes of his characters, “chose to portray a very still father who recognizes the son, not with eyes of a body, but with the inner eye of the heart” (Prodigal Son, 89).
The Rembrandt painting became an icon for Nouwen, a gate through which he could walk into the house of God. But he could do that only because he had been practicing that kind of seeing for a very long time already.41
Anton T. Boisen and Henri Nouwen
Seeing Anton Boisen so closely and being able to experience how a deep wound can become a source of beauty in which even the weaknesses seem to give light is a reason for thankfulness.
(Henri Nouwen)42
When Henri Nouwen was asked in 1982 which people had most influenced him, he said Vincent van Gogh, John Henry Newman, and the people he ministered to.43 He didn’t mention Anton T. Boisen. This is not surprising. Boisen, the founder of clinical pastoral education in the United States, was the subject of Nouwen’s keen interest and study for more than a decade between 1960 and 1970, but by 1982, he had moved on to other influences. Even so, it could be argued that there is no one who influenced Nouwen’s life and work more than Boisen. Boisen, in fact, is in every fiber of The Return of the Prodigal Son. Yet, by the time Nouwen was writing it, Nouwen’s use of Boisen was not conscious. He had built on Boisen’s ideas, synthesized them, and made them his own.
Nouwen was likely first introduced