Jesus was the foundation of Henri's life. From an early age he experienced a deep closeness to Jesus and after his ordination celebrated the Eucharist every day of his life. I would not be over-stating it to say that the Eucharist constituted the core of his life. It is from this core that everything else stemmed, including his enormous capacity to love others.
In addition to the Eucharist and keeping Jesus at his center, Henri was a man of prayer. It is from this communion with God that he gradually came to the insight that all our struggles with intimacy are linked with what he called the relationship between the "first love" and the "second love." He writes that the first love is from God, who loved us before we were born. The second love is from our parents, brothers, sisters, and friends, and is only a reflection of that first love. In many letters, he helps people to see that sometimes we expect from the second love what only the first love can give. Then we experience anguish. Struggle happens when we expect a first love from someone who can only give a second love.
It was Henri's determination to create space for God in his life that led to active ministry. Many letters reflect on the symbiotic relationship between contemplation and action, solitude and community, self-love and love of others. Henri also speaks of the importance of solitude, silence, meditation, and spiritual reading to connect with our loving center. Henri emphasizes that is it not us who love but God who loves through us. In a letter to a theology student he writes: "The main thought I would like to give you at this point is simply that we cannot see God in others or in the world, but the God in us sees God in others and the world. The deeper our communion with God is, the more we will discover Him in all that we see. That is why Jesus says those who are happy are those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The mystery of the spiritual life is that heart speaks to heart, spirit speaks to spirit, God speaks to God, and that we are lifted up into the inner communion that takes place within God" (letter to Anna, February 22, 1990).
Does Henri speak of the challenges he faces in his life, and how will the reader encounter these?
My main objective for the book was to find Henri's most profound pastoral letters that address challenges that twenty years on from his death still confound us. However, as I went along, I realized that the book would also have to contain letters by Henri about his own struggles. He lived by two adages, after all: one, "what is most personal is most universal"; and two, "life is about laying down one's life for one's friends." For Henri, struggles were the generator. "My purpose in life," he once wrote, "is to live them."
What were Henri's struggles? Predominantly, they stemmed from a persistent question about his worthiness. He struggled with self-rejection. Loneliness, exacerbated by his celibate vocation as priest, plagued him all his life. He struggled with compulsions like busyness and striving for success and relevance. His most common emotional state was anxious and restless. Yet, it was precisely these struggles that generated his questions: Is love possible? What is central and unifying in my life? Who is God to me? Does Jesus Christ really motivate my life? What is a fruitful life? How am I called to live? What is community? How do I respond to suffering? I love this one I found in his book Genesee Diary: Is there a quiet stream underneath the fluctuating affirmations and rejections of my little world? Is there a still point where my life is anchored and from which I can reach out with hope and courage and confidence?" (p. xii).
At times, the reader is going to be faced with Henri's anguish. It is not always easy reading. It becomes especially intense in the second part of the book after he has left Harvard and moved to L'Arche Daybreak. It is here that he enters a period of intense despair after the breakdown of an important friendship. What is beautiful however, is to witness his recovery from this "dark night of the soul" and to see how he transforms the pain into insights about intimacy and identity. Self-rejection, for example, turns into a theology of accepting ourselves as we are, and perhaps most profoundly to "accept God's acceptance of us." It is only after going through his depression that he is able to claim his identity as a Beloved child of God. Suffering becomes a portal to transformation and redemption. His journey from anguish to freedom is inspiring for anyone who is suffering.
The sheer volume of Henri's correspondence, along with his other writing and his work among different communities, is astonishing. What can you glean from his counsel that might help the harried, hurried, technology-driven readers to live in more peaceful, fruitful, and generous ways?
Henri can be such a powerful guide for those who are harried, hurried, and technology driven because if he were still alive he'd be struggling with just these very things! Some words of counsel from Henri (to himself as much as to others):
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