He taught at the University of Notre Dame, Yale Divinity School, and Harvard Divinity School.
He marched to Selma with Martin Luther King, Jr.
He traveled to Lima, Peru, and worked alongside Maryknoll priests in a poor barrio.
He spent a long period of time with the Trappist monks at the Abbey of the Genesee in New York State, where he baked bread, did physical labor, and spent long hours in prayer.
He spent the last ten years of his life, at the height of his celebrity, at L'Arche Daybreak, near Toronto, Canada, where he bathed, fed, and clothed severely developmentally disabled residents.
During these busy years, he still found time to author several articles and thirty-nine books, which have been published in thirty languages and read by over seven million people. Although a brilliant intellectual, his books have an endearingly simple, confessional style. Nouwen never preached from a position of powerful perfection. He shared his life from a fallible, broken heart which had been healed by God. He also shared his life and struggles in thousands of letters to public figures, friends, and strangers, many of them depressed and broken-hearted.
To be like Jesus, he taught, we must never have calloused hearts that run from the pain that comes when we love another. Pain is the price of love. Suffering is the price we pay to have hearts broken open for compassion. Jesus' own heart was broken so love could flow from his wounds over a wounded world.
To heal another, he believed, took speaking from a wounded heart, because our struggles and pains are universal. "In our own woundedness," he said, "we can become sources of life for others."
Henri Nouwen never hid the fact that he suffered from crippling loneliness and a sense of isolation, feelings of inadequacy and emotional neediness, depression which became clinically severe at times, even a nervous breakdown. What healed him over and over was his all-consuming love relationship with God Who loved him unconditionally and called Henri "Beloved." Believing that God calls all of us "Beloved," he wrote:
"I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved. Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence."
Nouwen wrote from his own experience with depression to a friend who was in a spiritual abyss:
"A simple-minded, simple-eyed, commitment to God is all that counts. We will never overcome the demons by analyzing them but only by forgetting them in an all-consuming love for God. God is simple, demons are complex. Demons like to be analyzed, because that keeps our attention directed to them. God wants to be loved."
Although Nouwen struggled with celibacy and desires for physical and emotional intimacy, he never broke his vow of celibacy. However he did hide his gay sexual orientation from the public, and only shared knowledge of this aspect of his life with his closest friends. Nouwen's friends believed that Nouwen struggled with accepting himself as being gay almost his entire life, until a few years before he died, and that this struggle deeply affected his self-esteem and caused his feelings of self-rejection. For he lived in an era in which the sciences were still trying to understand sexual orientation, and some scientists erroneously thought that to have a gay, lesbian, or bisexual psyche was to have a psychological aberration.
The pressures of his complicated psychological and spiritual life literally drove Henri Nouwen to prayer, where God met him and miraculously called him good. Realizing that we all struggle with feelings of self-rejection, that we all question our self-worth, he wrote about the necessity of prayer:
"The real work of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me. To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing - that demands real effort."
How wonderful and poignant it is that Henri Nouwen believed and knew to the depths of his being that only God can heal our broken hearts. And that we need to have wounded but joyous hearts in order to be able to heal others! He said "We need to be angels for each other, to give each other strength and consolation. Because only when we fully realize that the cup of life is not only a cup of sorrow but also a cup of joy will we be able to drink it."
Fr. Henri Nouwen's sensitive, honest words and example have healed me in more ways then I can count. So often, like him, I have been so depressed from grief that I have hardly been able to get out of bed. So often, like him, I have been overly sensitive and deeply wounded by something someone has said, and questioned my self-worth. So often, like him, I have spoken the truth and then shivered with fear that the hearers would hate me.
Knowing how fragile this good man was, how he fought to stay psychologically and spiritually stable, yet how he shone with titanic strength because he stayed in relationship with God, I treasure these words of his, and hope that you will too:
"Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: 'These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief.'"