Henri Nouwen

Wise Teachers

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Christ, The Wisest Teacher of All

Today I am thinking about the desperate need for wise teachers, instead of blind preachers. Growing up in the Pentecostal movement in Norway has given me good things, but also a lot of wounds and bad things. The good thing is the focus on the Holy Spirit and joy. Bad things are a negative view on the human soul and the world. I have had to do a lot of painful relearning and reconstruction in my now soon 50 years on this Earth.

I remember one Pentecostal preacher preaching to a big congregation, we are all zeros!! But, he said, Jesus is a number one, so with him we are a million! Outrageous, I thought in my then literal thinking teenager mind, and confronted this preacher with is terrible lowlife preaching. Why do you preach so negatively about God’s beloveds I asked him. His sad, and even only answer, was, I guess that’s how I often feel, like a zero. To me this is a good example of the blind preaching I am talking about. You are zeros, because I, your pastor, feels that way. Wow!!

Instead of the message above, a wise teaching could be, Jesus is one, because he was one with God, and so are you. When you feel like a lowlife, you should know, this is not how God feels and thinks about you. He loves you, never leaves you and He/She/They lives/live within you. As the Celtics even say, our soul is not in our body, but our body is in the Soul! Amen!!

I am very thankful for the wise teachers and guides that I have met on my path and in my search in the wilderness and even despair. Henri Nouwen was one of them. I fed on his books, and remember the very small but important book, The Inner Voice of Love. Wow, what I message, what a healing! He even wrote a book called Wounded Healer, another great blessing.

I could also mention other wise guides like Michael Singer, and his The Untethered Soul, and Richard Rohr and his Everything Belongs (the title itself says it all!) and Falling Upward. In Falling Upward Rohr shares his vision in a distilled form, about the second journey in life. Also, let us not forget his important inspiration, the spiritual psychoanalyst Carl Jung.

So, instead of many more details today, I leave you with this important note: seek out some of the wise teachers with the honest, transformational message and wisdom. And step away from blind preachers that only pull you down and hurt you. Yes, step away and seek soul. You’ll truly know it when you find food freeing to your soul.

Since I believe in contemplation I also lean on grace and surrender to the mystical way. So do some reading, sit in silence and surrender to the Love and Guidance you have within. Bless you!

Wounds

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“Everybody hurts” is a well-known and popular song by REM. I guess one reason is that it resonates with most people one way or the other. We all hurt, we all have been hurt, and we also hurt other people. It is a circle where many spend much of their time and life.

We all need to experience love. And the less attention and love we were shown in our early days, the more we crave it when we’re older. No wonder the Christian focus on the Father heart of God is very popular both in preaching and reading. Most of us have been wounded by our parents slightly or deeply. And I guess very often the father is most lacking in love and acceptance. This partly because the feminine and nurturing side of men has been less embraced and therefore less developed. It’s not only the women who have suffered in a patriarchal society.

But okey, we are all wounded, so what can we do about it? I believe we need more love, acceptance and healing. If we open our eyes and realise how wound driven we are in our actions, it is possible to experience a deeper satisfaction, not only through the love of a Higher Father, but through the experience of self love. Self love has a bad reputation, and sadly, because it quiet different from self worship.

It is therefore paramount that our suffering and craving, leads us on a road through our blindness. The grass is not greener on the other side of the fence, especially when what we’re looking for is the love we lacked in our childhood.

Before we can bring the deepest and purest love and healing to others we often need to love and heal ourselves. This process consists of developing an acceptance and love for ourselves, and at the same time a realization that we are deeply loved by the Love that gave us life.

This healing I am pointing too, has no easy route. But a good way to start is to take a deep look at your wounds. Not to fall into the wounds and drown, but sense your wounds enough for you to be able to both grieve, forgive and accept them. This involves forgiving others, but very often also, since you may be quite grown up when you truly see this, it also includes forgiving yourself. I guess many we will be in this process for much of their lives, if they want to grow in love. Still, at first, it’s important to start, to embrace more and more of the pain, so you may grow through so much of it that you become free enough to be of more help to others, instead of clinging to people and things for love and acceptance. You may even become a much needed wounded healer as Henri Nouwen wisely wrote about, and the love grown out of wounds eventually becomes a gift to this often hurting world.

We need to come to our senses and to ourselves, as the prodigal son also had to do, in order to direct his life towards the great Source of Love again. And like this lost son, we often get lost in craving love from things and people, that cannot give us what we now must give ourselves, and what we also must receive from our Mother, Father God. A Divine presence that waits for and even chases us from around and from the deepest parts of our souls.

Ask yourself today, what drives your actions the most today? Is it the lack of contentment and a need for lost love, or have you walked the valley of grief and forgiveness, and come out of it, with a new or renewed selflove? At least, stop blaming and pulling yourself down. What you have not received, you cannot pass on. Those wise words I leave you with, and at last an important reminder: You are loved ❤️