Something that I like about Christianity is that it turns people's priorities upside down. From John Ortberg's great book, Me, becoming God's best version of you, here's info about Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen:
"Henri Nouwen, a priest and teacher who moved in the exalted circles of Harvard and Yale and Notre Dame, came to believe that those settings did not--for him--call forth the person God intended him to be. So this famous writer spent the last decade of his life caring for physically and mentally challenged residents of a small community called L'Arche."
Very cool (and much easier to appreciate in abstract than to do something like that myself).
8 comments:
very interesting.
related and tangential, but curious as to your thoughts... Nouwen seems to be a bit of a cult hero for Catholics and increasingly evangelicals. What do conservative Christians do about the revelation in his autobiography that he was gay?
thanks.
I Googled to find an autobiography by Nouwen and didn't find one. All I found was a biography written by someone after he died.
According to Wikipedia, he acknowledged his sexual orientation to his friends, but he remained celibate his whole life. Does this fit with what you have read?
Yes, that is my understanding from reading the biography about him (which is a great book).
Henri Nouwen's Road to Daybreak kept me company during my dark journey through faith and doubt in college. Gay, straight, Catholic, evangelical... it didn't matter, Nouwen offered an intimate and authentic take on God that I found sorely lacking in most of ingenuous crap assigned in our Christian life coursework.
but my question is still, how do evangelicals remedy his homosexuality with how much they like him?
So he was celibate, but still gay (which evangelicals say is wrong and evil). And if wasn't celibate his whole life, would evangelicals then discount his writings?
Just to clarify, the Bible doesn't state that "being gay" is sinful and evil, but that sexual activity between two persons of the same sex is sinful.
That's an important and usually overlooked distinction Dave. Thank you.
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