Monthly Archive for April, 2007

In the latest journal entry I was reading Henri was talking about how a fragmented life leads him to anxiety. A fragmented life is one where we come to see that different areas of our lives require us to be different people. For me it would be as if I believed the husband, the friend, the leader, the foreigner-Parisian, the follower of Jesus, and the dad all had to be different people…to wear different hats. Henri says that the reason that he lived this way because he had a desire to be the best Henri he could be in all of his different roles…and in the end he found himself serving his own identity and reputation more than anything else.

The more I find myself doing this same thing, the more I realize that I am going against what Jesus taught and knew was best for me. Jesus said that one cannot serve both God and the things of this world…we have to be single-minded in our devotion to God. We have to stop wearing all the different hats that we think we have to wear in order to please everybody and only put on the ‘hat’ of being a learner and follower of Jesus.

Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Jesus only asks me to wear one yoke…yet I find ways to wear many.

Jesus says that His yoke is gentle…yet the many I try to put on are often brutal

Jesus says that His yoke is easy…but when I try to wear all the yokes I think I need, life ends up hard.

Jesus says that His burden is light…the burden of wearing the yoke that is trying to carry my own agenda for my life is often very heavy.

I want my soul to find rest…I think that I just need to slow down and trust that wearing the yoke Jesus, being solely fixed to Him, will be more than adequate to bear the load of all that life has brought my way.

The Genesee Diary is a collection of Henri Nouwen’s journal entries when he went and lived at the Genesee Trappist Monastery. I’ve been reading through this so my Nouwen thoughts will be coming from this book for now.

In one of the entries he begins to talk about ‘differentness’. I wish I could just paste the whole entry here, but I’ll give you the highlights.

Thinking about this desire and how it has functioned in my life, I am more and more aware of the way my life-style became part of our contemporary desire for “stardom.” I wanted to say, write or do something “different” or “special” that would be noticed and talked about. For a person with a rich fantasy life, this is not too difficult and easily leads to the desired “success.” You can teach in such a way that it differs enough from the traditional way to be noticed; you can write sentences, pages, and even books that are considered original and new; you can even preach the Gospel in such a way that people are made to believe that nobody had thought of that before. In all these situations you end up with applause because you did something sensational, because you were “different.”

Being different or unique has always been a goal of mine. Whether it was in the clothes I wore, the music I listened to, or the things I created…I wanted to be different. At the core of wanting to be different I would say that there was a part of me that needed to be known as special and unique. The quest for ‘being different’ became an idol…a way to give myself worth.

Henri (first name basis now) goes on to say:

When we have given up the desire to be different and experienced ourselves as sinners without any right to special attention, only then is there space to encounter our God who calls us by our own name and invites us into His intimacy.

Jesus, the only son of the Father, emptied himself “being as we are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. But God raised him high and gave him the name which is above all other names (Phil 2:7-9). Only through ultimate sameness was Jesus given his unique name. When St. Paul calls us to have the mind of Jesus Christ, he invites us to that same humility through which we can become brothers of the Lord and sons of the heavenly Father.

The irony is that in my quest to be different I got less and less the feeling of being valuable. But more and more the feeling that no matter how hard I worshipped the idol of being unique…I was never going to be that unique…and this was just depressing. When other people did or had things that were similar to me I couldn’t rejoice for them or me…because it was all about me being different.

I love how Henri brings it back to Jesus…Who had the unique distinction of being the ONLY son of God yet gave up all of that and became like one of us. And it was in His surrender to God that Jesus was given the name above all other names. It will only be in giving up my pursuit of differentness that I will find who I really am in Christ…and it will only be through Jesus that I will be able to hear the name that God has given me…not the one that I want to give myself. Creating our own name leads us to having more work of maintaining the reputation of the name we have created. In God alone do we find our true name and He has already done all the work to give it to us.