July-August 1999

Compassion 101

Course Description: An intimate study of the fundamental Christian virtue we experience and share in and through Jesus.

Instructor: Dr. Henri Nouwen (1932-1996). Born in Holland and ordained there as a Catholic priest, Henri lived much of his life in the United States and Canada. He taught at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard. He spent the last decade of his life as a pastor at L'Arche Daybreak, a community for the developmentally disabled located near Toronto. Henri was the author of 40 books.

Prerequisite: A desire to see and know God.

by Steven Berry (former student)

At the age of twenty-six, having already attended one year of seminary and having served as a student pastor for two years, I entered Yale University's Divinity School. Having just come from the rural wilderness of northern Vermont, I was interested in Yale's tradition which included a degree of sensitivity toward orthodox Puritanism and a curriculum which would prepare me to better meet the challenges of late twentieth-century Christians. What I discovered at Yale was far different than I had imagined and would change my life and perspectives forever. Surprisingly, it came in the form of a Dutchman, a Roman Catholic priest named Henri Nouwen.

Protestant vs. Catholic

As a child it had been explained to me that we were not Roman Catholic because our family believed that Swiss Reformers and a man named Martin

Luther from Germany had rightly reformed the religion. I was taught that priests forced average men and women to buy indulgences in order for them and their families to receive access to heaven. I also was taught that Catholics worshiped the idol of Mary. Being Protestants, and Congregationalists, meant that we worshiped Jesus only, that we believed in the priesthood of all believers, that the Bible was the Word of God and that the true church consisted of any two or more people gathered in Jesus' name.

My Roman Catholic friends were taught that theirs was the true religion. They were instructed that Jesus said to his friend Peter that he was the rock upon which the church would be built. They were told that Protestants were rebels and outcasts from the church who separated themselves from their true home and center of worship and therefore could not have access to the one true church and its Savior, Jesus, the Christ of God.

In the America of the early 1960s most Christians viewed other Christians from these two camps to varying degrees. Deep was the divide between those of faith and their understandings and expressions.

When I entered seminary in 1976, I knew very little about Catholics and their faith. What I did know was that I was somewhat apprehensive and distrustful of them. By this time Vatican Two had had more than a decade under its belt, and there was an opening and a freshening taking place within the Roman church, a fact which was vividly brought to my attention during my first year at Yale.

Wrestling with Change

One Friday morning while I was at a service station waiting for my car to be repaired, an elderly Italian gentleman, speaking with a thick accent, began an animated conversation with me. He said, "It used to be a sin to eat meat on

Friday, and now it is no sin to eat meat on Friday." He just couldn't figure out how all of the years since he was born it had been that way, and then one day it was all changed. Even more, it was a sin to go into a Protestant church, but it wasn't a sin anymore. "What am I to think?" he asked me.

In a way, the same question and others were precisely the ones which I went to seminary to address. What am I to think? What do I believe? How am I to live? These were questions I had been seeking to sort through in my travels in foreign lands and in my life and work as a young parish pastor even before arriving at Yale. If I was to be a pastor for the rest of my life, then what did that mean in terms of my faith in God and belief in Jesus Christ?

When Henri Nouwen came to Yale in 1971, he was feeling the influences of change within the church. To be more precise, he was part of the changes as he became the first Roman Catholic ever to be appointed to the all-Protestant faculty.

Compassion 101

I had not heard of Henri before I enrolled and didn't know that he was a popular author as well as a professor. I was trying to find my way, taking necessary courses in order to fulfill my requirements when a friend suggested that I take one of Henri's classes. So I signed up for a class with the unlikely title: Compassion.

In the mid-1970s, psychology was popular on campuses of theological seminaries. Classes were offered to students to help them meet the growing demands placed upon ministers by people who were experiencing mental and emotional distress and disorder.

Henri Nouwen came to Yale with outstanding credentials in clinical psychology. He was well qualified to teach on the subject and had done so as the visiting professor at Notre Dame University. But Henri was onto something larger, something that others were overlooking. He saw the individual within a cultural context. He was viewing a society which was in need of a physician.

He quoted from an article by Peregrine Worsthorne titled, "A Universe of Hospital Patients" which was written in 1975 when Henri was preparing his Compassion lectures:

"There is a real and awful danger of people actually beginning to identify with the world of suffering.... No healthy society should see the world through the eyes of the unfortunate, since the unfortunate have no great interest in perceiving, let alone exploiting, the highest value of civilization: individual freedom. Indeed, being for the most part those who have failed to make use of freedom, either because of fate or circumstances... they are likely to be the part of society least enamored of that supremely challenging ideal and the most susceptible to all the temptations to undermine it."

Compassion or Competition?

I remember listening to that quote read by Henri and asking myself, "If that is true then why should anyone do anything for anyone else?" If it is wrong to identify with the weak and lowly when we in our secret inner selves are weak and lowly, then what is our hope? What is the promise for our lives, the lives of our loved ones, the future of the world?

Henri shared his perspectives on what it meant to be a person living in a world of competition. He told us that competition had positive aspects and that trying our best was something that was healthy for our personal lives. But Henri also reminded us that our culture, based upon competition as it is, had a way of undermining relationships and a sense of community and demeaning those who were unable to meet the criteria for success.

Henri reminded his students that from the very beginning of our lives we were always being told we were valued because of our uniqueness and our difference from others and how we measured ourselves and how we were doing against others. The competition might be with a parent or sibling. The competition might be with the pressure to prove oneself against peers or against the world. He asked, "How much of your identity is placed upon what you are accomplishing?" "How much does it matter if you are popular, if you are pretty or smart?"

Throughout that entire class I reflected upon the numerous ways in which I had been influenced by feelings of competition starting as a child both at home and at school. Now, for the first time, I saw that it wasn't only me, but that everyone was measuring everyone else in hypercritical ways. Unwittingly our own unhealthy view of ourselves as being over-and-against others had made us into a society of hospital patients, though not in the manner suggested by the author of the article which Henri had quoted.

The Compassion of Christ

Then, the most wonderful thing happened. Using the introduction and then the marvelous passage from the apostle Paul's hymn to Christ, Henri changed my understanding of the Christian faith forever.

"Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.

"Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death -- even death on a cross!

"Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:3-11).

Then Henri told us that in this Gospel passage we find the essence of the Christ and the nature of compassion. Compassion means to suffer with another. Henri's explanation of incarnational theology, where the Word became flesh to dwell among us, became alive for me as it never had before. In relating how Jesus humbled himself and took the form of a servant, he drew me into an awareness of my own vocation.

My own meager attempt to be present for another was essentially what the movement of compassion was all about. It wasn't flashy, it wasn't attention-grabbing, it was just being available to needs whenever and wherever they presented themselves. Henri described the compassionate life as a three-stage movement from solitude to displacement to discipleship. The better I understood this process, the clearer I saw how Jesus' life clearly depicted the compassion of God. The title of Henri's book, Suffering Servant, from that time on took on new meaning and significance for me as I now understood that Jesus' identity and ours were inextricably linked through our human contact at the point of need and suffering.

Boundary Lines that Divide

Henri's gift was to articulate an intimate knowledge that everyone, however separated by time and space, is bound together by the same human condition. He knew this because he knew Jesus. So issues, of Protestant and Catholic for example, really weren't points over which we should be divided.

Henri wrote that we are recognized, despised, honored or rejected based upon our differences.

"It does not take much to realize that in all family conflicts, race conflicts, national and international conflicts the consciousness of human sameness has been replaced by the awareness of dividing lines. Indeed, we invest much if not most of our human energy in defending the differences between people and groups of people and therefore, in maintaining definitions of ourselves that allow us to keep distance from each other. We are all very protective of our real or imaginary trophies."

The message which Henri spoke years ago needs to be heard today. Christians from around the world need to place aside their differences. The "grand errand" for today is the ancient urgent plea for unity which Paul called the Philippians to when he asked them to have the mind of Christ.

Every human attempt to be compassionate is dependent upon a relationship with Jesus Christ. Jesus came to earth from heaven and suffered with us, revealing a model of compassion which we are to follow so we can live together in a world where people respect and care for each other.

Henri Nouwen died in 1996, in his 64th year. He left behind thousands of friends and admirers the world over who, like myself, were comforted by his words and his insights. The theme of compassion was interwoven in the fabric of his life.

If you want to learn more about the love of God and how God comes to us, I recommend that you read any of Henri's forty books. A good place to begin might be his introduction to the spiritual life titled, Making All Things New. 

Steven Berry is the pastor of First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, California.

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