Anchoring Ourselves as God's Beloved: Spiritual Reading with Henri Nouwen

There is so much in our society that tells us we are not good enough, smart enough, rich enough, etc.  Henri Nouwen, a priest-psychologist from Holland, goes so far as to suggest that this is the single most debilitating aspect of many of our lives.  He writes:

“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection…When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solution.” (Life of the Beloved)

The trouble is, if we aren’t what we do, what we have, or what people say about us, then who are we?  

Henri Nouwen, no stranger to the siren’s call of success and popularity, turned to the Biblical account of Jesus’ baptism for guidance. The words that Jesus heard reverberated in Nouwen’s soul: “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17)

At first, Nouwen could not claim that these words applied to him, but gradually they started to take root and anchor his life.  He writes:

“My tendencies toward self-rejection and self-deprecation make it hard to hear these words truly and let them descend into the center of my heart. But once I have received these words fully, I am set free from my compulsion to prove myself to the world and can live in it without belonging to it. Once I have accepted the truth that I am God's beloved child, unconditionally loved, I can be sent into the world to speak and to act as Jesus did." (Beyond the Mirror).

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There are many of us who will relate to Henri Nouwen’s tendencies.  Like him, we have suffered from low-self esteem and even at times, crippling self-doubt.  

Can we claim our belovedness like he did?

As Henri Nouwen knew firsthand – there is much in society that makes claiming this identity difficult.  He would be the first to say that in order to do so, you need a spiritual discipline that grounds you.  Setting aside time each day for speaking and listening to God is one kind of discipline. Another is spiritual reading.

Nouwen writes: “Spiritual reading is reading with an inner attentiveness to the movement of God’s Spirit in our outer and inner lives.  With that attentiveness we will allow God to read us and to explain what we are truly about.” (Here and Now)

Daily devotionals or daily meditation books can be an excellent way to integrate spiritual reading in your life. Recently, I compiled and edited a book of meditations by Henri Nouwen.  I reread each of his thirty-nine books on the spiritual life, and selected meditations to empower readers to claim their own central identity as the Beloved of God and to live that truth in their daily lives.

It is my hope that if readers dedicate themselves to spending the year with Henri Nouwen, one meditation at a time, they will come to the conviction that it is only by claiming our Belovedness as our true spiritual identity that we can live in the world without being defined by it.  

To know that we are the Beloved takes a huge amount of pressure off. We no longer need to work to improve ourselves to be worthy of love.  We can say to ourselves: “I do not need to earn love.  I can just be myself.” Anchoring ourselves in the knowledge that we are God’s Beloved frees us up for gratitude, even joy, and for service in the spirit of Jesus.  Rather than needing to work on ourselves and practice self-improvement, we can instead claim the perfection of who we are already, and from there look out to the world with eyes of compassion and love.

Gabrielle Earnshaw

Gabrielle Earnshaw is an author, speaker and Henri Nouwen scholar.  She is the editor of three books on Nouwen including Turning the Wheel: Henri Nouwen and Our Search for God (co-edited with Jonathan Bengtson, 2008), Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life (2016) and most recently You Are The Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living (October 2017). For sixteen years she was the founding archivist of the Henri J.M. Nouwen Archives and Research Collection.  She lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband Don.