Learning to Pray His Way #9: The Three Moves of the Spiritual Life

Henri Nouwen suggests three areas are the most critical in our spiritual lives and that they are the three areas which Jesus’ spiritual life point us toward. 

Nouwen was a Dutch-born Catholic priest and author.  He taught at the University of Notre Dame, Yale University and Harvard University, and spent his life’s final season serving the mentally handicapped at the L’Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto, Canada.  Nouwen died in 1986. 

Surveying the life of Jesus, Nouwen discovered a pattern.  He suggested that Jesus’ spiritual life revealed a three-fold movement necessary if we wish to experience life as Jesus experienced it.[i]

• First, there is needed an inward movement from loneliness to solitude.  Many of us know the pain and isolation of loneliness.  But Jesus demonstrated the joy and fulfillment which only come from genuine solitude in which we truly come to know ourselves and our God.
• Second, there is needed an upward movement from illusion to prayer.  Many of us know the “endless illusions which make us act as if we are masters of our own fate.”[ii]  But Jesus demonstrated the truth that through prayer we allow God to be the master of our fate.
• Finally, there is needed an outward movement from hostility to hospitality.  Many of us experience hostility which we direct toward others and which others direct toward us.  But Jesus modeled hospitality toward others, even toward those who where hostile to him.

In general, Nouwen believed the example of Jesus, including the prayer-life of Jesus, leads us to deal more appropriately with the inward matters of the heart, the upward matters of faith in God, and the outward matters of how we respond to people, especially to those who make our lives difficult.  Jesus was the master of the spiritual life because he had mastered these three components of life.

 

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[i] Henri J. M. Nouwen , Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (Doubleday & Company, 1975).

[ii] Nouwen, 11.