What had prompted [Henri] Nouwen to embrace a spirituality and a ministry model like this one? Born in the Netherlands in 1932, Nouwen had grown up a pious, conscientious\u201d\u201dand ambitious\u201d\u201deldest child. By the time he was five years old, Nouwen had acquired specially made child-size priestly vestments so that he could say Mass at a play altar. \u201cI did all the proper things,\u201d\u009d he would later write, comparing himself to the elder brother in Jesus\u2019 parable of the prodigal son, \u201cmostly complying with the agendas set by the many parental figures in my life\u201d\u201dteachers, spiritual directors, bishops, and popes.\u201d\u009d Two decades later, having already graduated from two seminaries, Nouwen was ordained to the Catholic priesthood at Utrecht, ready to fulfill a calling\u201d\u201dan inevitability, it seemed to those who knew him best\u201d\u201dhe\u2019d sensed from boyhood. In short, a walking specimen of oozing spiritual wounds, Nouwen most certainly was not. Gregarious, theatrical, often childishly playful, his priestly work led him from strength to strength.<\/p>\n
But Nouwen\u2019s deepest self-identification was with the younger son in the parable, not in his outward behavioral choices but in what he described as an inner pain of lostness. This accounts, it would seem, for his constant talk of woundedness. His distance from God the Father\u2019s heart, as he would put it in what is probably his second most-loved book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, had to do not with public rebellion but with an acute inner sensitivity and susceptibility to feelings of rejection. At one of his life\u2019s crucial turning points, he recorded the following sentiment in his journal: \u201cWhat I am craving is not so much recognition, praise, or admiration, as simple friendship. There may be some around me, but I cannot perceive or receive it.\u201d\u009d This insensibility would dog him through his exit from the academy, through his twilight years spent as a carer in a home for disabled persons, through his quieter days of writing, until, en route to St. Petersburg for another viewing of Rembrandt\u2019s Prodigal Son which had renewed his faith years earlier, he died.<\/p>\n