Nouwen, H. (1981). The way of the heart: Desert spirituality and contemporary ministry. Seabury Press.

OVERVIEW

Christian spirituality is grounded in Jewish piety, the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, and the desert Fathers. After The Way of the Pilgrim, Nouwen's The Way of the Heart and Thomas Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert are among the finest introductions to this seminal period of spiritual life.

Always relevant to contemporary moods and times, Nouwen is able to touch where it hurts, catch an ancient balm and suggest appropriate applications:

 

The basic question is whether we ministers of Jesus Christ have not already been so deeply molded by the seductive powers of our dark world that we have become blind to our own and other people's fatal state and have lost the power and motivation to swim for our lives.

 

Just look for a moment at our daily routine. In general we are very busy people. We have many meetings to attend, many visits to make, many services to lead. Our calendars are filled with appointments, and our days and weeks filled with engagements, and our years filled with plans and projects. There is seldom a period in which we do not know what to do, and we move through life in such a distracted way that we do not even take the time and rest to wonder if any of the things we think, say or do are 'worth' thinking, saying, or doing. We simply go along with the many 'musts' and 'oughts' that have been handed on to us, and we live with them as if they were authentic translations of the Gospel of our Lord...All this is simply to suggest how horrendously secular our ministerial lives tend to be.

Nouwen quotes Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert:

'Society...was regarded (by the Desert Fathers) as a shipwreck from which each single individual had to swim for his life...These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.'

To structure his book, Nouwen tells a story about Abba Arsenius. Arsenius was an educated tutor of princes in the palace of Emperor Theodosius. When he prayed, "Lord, lead me in the way of salvation," he heard a voice: "Arsenius, flee from the world and you will be saved." After a long trip from Rome to the desert outside Alexandria, he prayed the same prayer to the Lord from his solitude. Again the voice said, "Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, for these are the sources of sinlessness." Nouwen resolves: "The words 'flee,' 'be silent' and 'pray' summarize the spirituality of the desert. They declare the three ways of preventing the world from shaping us in its image and are thus the three ways to life in the Spirit."

"Even when we are not called to the monastic life, or do not have the physical constitution to survive the rigors of the desert, we are still responsible for our own solitude...Without such a desert we will lose our own soul while preaching the Gospel to others."

In this beautiful little book readers learn desert lessons of solitude, silence, and prayer. The book is Christ-centered and filled with the Spirit.

Dean Borgman cCYS