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Doing pastoral care and spiritual direction over the past 30 years has shown me the paradoxical challenge of sharing stories of my own shadow out loud. Within well-defined and appropriate boundaries, I discovered that in private chats, a little bit of shadow went a long way: it confirmed my all-too-human nature, created islands of trust in a sea of anxiety, opened hearts and minds to time-tested practices for creatively engaging the shadow, highlighted the vitality of vulnerability in our shared spiritualities, and clarified the role of a wounded healer. Discretely and humbly, short stories about my spiritual descent and renewal often corroborated the ambiguities of the spiritual life and deepened our work together. Two caveats were sacrosanct: 

+ First, intimate details of my encounters with the sacred light and darkness could never be exercised to evoke emotional or spiritual manipulation. These conversations, while confidential, were constructed upon a public relationship of my careful listening to the still small voice of the holy within the humanity of the other. Any deviation from this dynamic was forbidden.  

+ Second, the time we shared was NEVER about my personal therapeutic work. On my own time and on my own dime, I went to my own therapist to do my own work. That may seem obvious, but I have experienced in worship as well as spiritual direction times when clergy have used the encounter to address their own issues. Worship, spiritual direction, and pastoral care as personal therapy is always selfish, inappropriate, and destructive.

Two other insights are worth noting, too: sermons can be strengthened when a personal experience is articulated, but they are best kept short, more broad then intimate, and they can never be stories where we symbolically assume the role of God or Jesus. My mentor in ministry, the late Ray Swartzback, used to tell me: "I love it when you share examples from your life - just make sure not to portray yourself as Jesus - all wise and all loving, ok?" He hit a home run with that advice. The other is that writing in a confessional style is a better place to express our shadow dancing than in public worship. Suffice it to say, that the intended audience for our written reflections needs to know this in advance. No sneak attacks.

The late Henri Nouwen is a case in point. I have always been blessed by his writing. Nouwen and his editors were masters at crafting sentences that sang: some were of light, others of darkness; poetry, wisdom, and musicality were woven throughout them all. At the same time, for years Nouwen maintained a certain emotional aloofness in his writing. His guarded vulnerability suggested a soul in search of a sustaining intimacy. Yet his well-rehearsed public and professional persona told a different story wherein he spoke as a spiritual master. Richard Rohr described this contradiction in his old friend in the introduction to Following Jesus: Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety: 

Starting in the mid-1970s, we were often speakers at the same conferences. Soon he visited me several times at the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, where he told me how he longed for community and intimate relationships. I could tell it was a passionate need. We would go for walks from time to time in the working class neighborhood where the community settled. He would invariably entertain me (I do not know what other word to use) with his endless spiritual curiosity, his extreme vulnerability, and his humble concern for people. Henri longed for in-depth relationship, and I think relationship was, in fact, his real genius. He could spot the authentic from the inauthentic, and longed to be a healer... which is exactly how he served us so well. (p. 8)

This tension inevitably led to Nouwen's emotional collapse while living at L'Arche Daybreak: his aching for intimacy combined with his studied public reserve could not be sustained. For almost two years he was separated from community under the care of a therapist and spiritual director. During that time, as was his regular practice, Nouwen maintained a journal. Eight years after his break-down, those closest to him succeeded in helping Henri publish this journal. He had resisted, believing it was too raw. There were no distinctions between master and subject. They had been demolished. The book that became The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom erased all false notions between Nouwen the priest and Henri the broken hearted man of middle age. In this, he allowed his true self to be shared as a tender, hurting man of faith who found a new/old way to follow Jesus late in life. (NOTE: I remember my own spiritual director at the time, Fr. Jim O'Donnell in Cleveland, telling me at breakfast that Nouwen's new book was his best. "He's speaking the truth from his shattered heart," he said, "and all aloofness is gone.")

When I was active in parish ministry, I practiced Nouwen's divided loyalties: both discretion and self-care required that I subdue most of my sacred ups and downs as a matter of healthy boundaries. Now that I am no longer serving God in that context, while discretion is still wise, my writing can be more candid. I am currently reading devotionally Nouwen's recently published lecture notes, Following Jesus, as my Advent prayer. Like him I have known ecstatic highs and exasperating lows. In fact, much like brother Henri, I have been more of a wanderer than a follower. He writes:

Often, we are more wanderers than followers. I am speaking of myself as much as of you. We are people who run around a lot, do many things, meet many people, attend many events, read many books. We are very involved. We experience life as many, many things. We go here, we go there, we do this, we do that, we speak to him, we speak to her, we have this to do and that to do. Sometimes we wonder how we can do it all. If we sit down and think about it, we are often running from one emergency to another. We are so busy and so involved. Yet, if we are asked what we are so busy we, we don't really know. People who wander from one thing to another, feeling that they are lived more than they live, are very tired. Deeply tired.

Since the start of autumn, after most of my outdoor work ended, that's how I have been feeling. Tired. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketchum have noted that in the beginning religion and spirituality was all about awe and wonder rather than ritual and shame. Looking backwards, being inside more than out, cut off one of my connections to holy awe in nature. Without the wind in my face, the dirt of the garden on my hands, and the sweat of hauling wood on my back, I felt something start to shut down. I felt tired. Disconnected. Uncertain and bored. To which Jesus whispered: "Are you tired? Worn-out? Burned out yet again? Come unto me, follow me, and I shall give you rest." Or, to use the great poem from Eugene Peterson's The Message: "Stay with me and walk with me and I will show you the unforced rhythms of grace." (Matthew 11) Being sick these past few weeks - and then hurting my back - gave me time to feel the tiredness. It also created the space where I couldn't avoid feeling what it has meant to hide and fill my time with distractions rather than silence. My heart was warmed this morning when I read another favorite passage of Scripture that Nouwen used in his simple introduction:

There is a beautiful story in the Old Testament where the prophet stands at the mouth of a cave and the Lord is passing. There is thunder, and the Lord is not in the thunder. There is an earthquake, and the Lord is not in the earthquake. There is fire, and the Lord is not in the fire. Then there is a still, small voice, and the Lord is there, in that voice... That voice is very sensitive. It can be very quiet. It is sometimes hard to hear. But the voice of love is already in you. You may have already heard it. Start trying to hear that voice: get quiet and spend some time trying to hear it.

And so I shall as Advent ripens.
(pictures from my IPhone this morning)