Following Jesus

by Henri J. M. Nouwen

  When the Spirit did come, everything changed because they saw and they understood. They realized that they had been a part of something special. Suddenly they could start living an interior life, a life in Christ. They might have traveled with Christ, but before the Spirit came they could not travel in Christ. Before Jesus died they could not say, “Not I live, but Christ lives in me.” They couldn’t say that.

  They could say that only when the Spirit had come and the breath of Christ, the Spirit of Christ, had come into them. They could say, “I am the living Christ.” “Not I live, but Christ lives in me.” They became other Christs, they became living presences of God.

  As soon as they discovered they had the life of Christ within them all boundaries broke open and they went all over the world. The great mystery of the Holy Spirit is that Christ is Christ-with-us through the ages. Christ is Christ-within-us in the most intimate way. We can say that it is God-with-us but also Christ-with-us who sends us out to the whole world and to all the countries, nations, and peoples.

  We don’t have to be limited to one country or another, because in Christ-in-the-Spirit all places are ours. All the world is ours to travel, because we are already home. We are already in God. We have already found a communion and we don’t have to limit that to any family, any country, or any circumstance.

  I hope this starts to make sense to you. It is hard to say it well. It is the great mystery. We can live a spiritual life, a life in which the Spirit of Christ dwells in us. We can live a life in which the Spirit sets us free of limitations. The Spirit frees us to be home wherever we are sent.

  And this happens in absence, in the absence of Jesus, who says, “I send you out until I come again.”

  Presence revealing the future

  “The Spirit will tell you of the things to come.”

  For us the future is often a source of anxiety and fear. We have all kinds of questions: What if my children get sick, I lose my job, my wife or husband leaves me, or a war breaks out? Our fears pull us away from the present and extinguish the Spirit in us.

  When we believe that God is with us always through the Spirit, we can let the future emerge out of the present. When we really believe that God is with us and that we are already now breathing his Spirit, we don’t have to worry about the future. We don’t have to worry about what might happen next. We can start trusting that if we fully live the life in the Spirit, the future will unfold from the present as we travel through life.

  One of the greatest temptations of our lives is to live ahead of ourselves and not believe that something is happening here and now. The world in which we live makes us believe that the real thing is happening next week, next month, or next year. As Christians, we are challenged to believe that what is happening is always happening here and now. At this moment. Now. If we live the now, the present, to the full, the future will grow. It will reveal itself to us because we have already received the Spirit. We have already received the beginning of the eternal life. We are already in the House of God. We are already breathing God’s breath. Let’s stay there and listen carefully.

  There is this wonderful word in the Gospel and it is “patience.” In the Gospel to have patience means to stay fully where you are, to live the moment to the full, to trust that all that you need is where you are. An impatient person is always saying, “This is not a good place to be. I want to be somewhere else.” “This moment is empty.” “This moment doesn’t hold anything for me. I want to be there.” “Tomorrow, next year, later, when I grow old, when I get a career, when I get rich,” or whatever.

  We are always looking ahead. We are in grade school to go to high school. We are in high school to go to college. We are in college to get our little job. We are in our little job to get our big job. We are in our big job to retire. We retire…but the real thing is always ahead of us. A lot of us live ahead of ourselves and therefore are not tasting the truth that the Spirit of God is with us now, here, at this moment.

  Jesus says, “Be patient.” Patience means to remain close to the moment and to fully taste where you are so that the seeds that are sown in the moment can grow and lead you to the future. The future is hidden in the present as a seed in fertile ground. By nurturing and tending the soil in which we stand we come in touch with the promise.

  Don’t be impatient. Don’t go back and pull out the seed to see if it is growing. It will not grow if you do that. Trust that a promise is given to you and that it is hidden in the soil on which you stand. It will grow into a strong tree but you have to give it time. It will reveal the future to you and it will grow right where you are. Trust that that is what the Spirit does.

  The good news is that our present moment is not empty but full. In the fullness of time God came to us. Our time has become full time because the Spirit has been sent to us, because the Lord is with us, and this is all that we ever wanted—to live with the Lord, to live with God. If that is our deepest desire why then, when God sends us his Spirit, and sends us his breath, isn’t that enough? I ask you now, can you be fully present to the moment where you are breathing?

  We have to learn to live fully in the present, because God is always the God of now, of here. The day in which we live is the day of the Lord. If anything is happening that is spiritually valid, it is happening here and now, at this moment. As you sit here. As you pray. It is always here. The great art of spiritual living is to pay attention to the breathing of the Spirit right where you are and to trust that there will be breathing of new life. The Spirit will reveal itself to you as you move on. That is the beauty of the spiritual life. You can be where you are. You don’t have to be anywhere else. You can be fully present to the moment and trust that even in the midst of your pain, in the midst of your struggle, something of God is at work in you and wants to reveal itself to you.

  Be here.

  Be quiet.

  Listen.

  Practicing Presence

  How do we practice the presence of God? Through prayer and service.

  Prayer

  Prayer is entering into the presence of God here and now. Prayer is the way in which we become present to the moment and listen to God who is with us. God is always where we are. God is with us until the end of time. We have to be here. We have to listen. We have to be attentive. Prayer is the discipline of attentiveness, of being here.

  I really want to ask you to practice prayer as a practice of the presence of God. You don’t have to say many words. You don’t have to have deep thoughts. You don’t have to worry about how to think. You can just be where you are and say, “I love you. I love you. I know you love me and I love you. I don’t have any big things to say. I don’t have any profound words to express, but I am here and I want you to be with me and I want to be with you.” It is that simple. It is a very simple thing. Prayer is not complicated. It is not difficult. If people ask you how you pray just tell them, “Sit down and say, ‘Lord, here I am.’ ”

  Distractions mean that we are being pulled into the past or into the future. That is what a distraction is. We start thinking about what happened yesterday or what is happening tomorrow. Distractions mean we are not yet fully here. We are not fully present yet. That is okay. You have to smile to yourself and say, “I am distracted. I am not fully here. I am not fully trusting. I am still all over the place. I want to pray, but I am still thinking about this person who got to me yesterday and I wish I could give her a little talk,” or “Tomorrow, I have to go to work and my son has to go to the hospital, and I have to see this person tomorrow to discuss a promotion.” Sure, that is us—we are never totally here. If we were totally here we would be in heaven so we are never totally here. We are a little bit in the past, a little bit in the future, and all over the place, actually.

  But even so, it is very important to say, “I want to be more here because I know that you, God, are here. I know you love me. I
know that all I need is here and therefore I am going to sit here for a moment and say thank you for being a faithful God, thank you for your name I AM. Thank you for your Son, Jesus, who came to be with us. Thank you for the Spirit, who dwells in me so deeply that I don’t even feel it all the time or experience it, but I know it. I know, just as I know that I am breathing without feeling that breath all the time, so I know that you, God, are with me even if I don’t feel it all the time.”

  Prayer is that simple presence that we have to practice. I promise you, if you practice prayer you will be fully rewarded. God does not wait long to tell you how close he is to you. A lot of struggles you have about the past or the future might become less painful or less dominating or less imprisoning. They will always be there—you will always be distracted and always be worrying—but you have a place in yourself that is rather free of it. You have your fears, your anxieties, and they are all around you, but in the center of all the storms there is this quiet place where you can say, “I love you. You love me. It is here and now. It is good to be here. It is good to be in your presence, Lord. I don’t need anything else.”

  Service

  Service is being involved in something that is for the people of God.

  At times, we might be involved in larger things—clothing the naked, sheltering the poor, helping the refugees, visiting the sick or imprisoned, but it is always small to begin with. It begins with small gestures. Being kind to your family and the people you work with, saying a patient word, writing a card, sending a flower.

  Be attentive. Be attentive. Be attentive.

  When we pray frequently and know that God is in us here and now, we are very attentive to others because we are less preoccupied with ourselves. We are less worried about ourselves and if we are not very worried about ourselves we see other people more clearly. We see their struggle. We see their beauty. We see their kindness. We see that they are not trying to hurt us but that they have their own problems. We are much gentler, because we are in the presence of the Spirit. We realize these people are also struggling.

  This is one of the greatest and first rewards of following Jesus. Suddenly, the Spirit in you sees the Spirit in them. The Christ in you sees the Christ in them. The heart of God in you sees the heart of God in them. Spirit speaks to Spirit, heart speaks to heart, and Christ speaks to Christ. You cannot see Christ in the world, but the Christ in you can see Christ in the world. You cannot see God in the world, but God in you can see God in the world. The spiritual life is the recognition of the Spirit, in the Spirit, for the Spirit. It is the mutuality of the Spirit seeing the Spirit. It is the mutuality of God praising God.

  We begin to see how good people are underneath all their violence, their hatred, their revenge, their illusions, and their aspirations. We realize they are people of God and that the Spirit of God also blows through them and breathes in them. We realize that people are wonderful, that they are beautiful, that they are persons sounding through the love of God. We see it and are glad. We can say, “It is good to be with you, because you remind me even more of God’s love.” Community starts forming. New life starts taking place.

  We do not do service to earn anything. It is not an anxious need to save the world. We don’t act on the condition that change will take place. No. You can see how intense that might become. If our only concern is “I better help him or her,” or to do things to change a person or the world, or the country, or the politics, or the social condition—if change is the condition of service—we are going to be very bitter and very soon. But if service is an expression of gratitude for the love we have already experienced then we can be free and engage in change without trying so hard. Service is an expression of the gift you have within you that you want to share with others.

  In a way, service is an act of gratitude. We are so full of God’s presence, we are so aware of God’s promise, that we don’t want to hold it back. We want to share it. The disciples went around the world to announce that God is with us and that we can already now enjoy his presence. The disciples’ concern for the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the dying was an expression of a deep faith in God’s presence. “What you do for the least of mine, you do for me” (Matthew 25:40).

  When you practice the presence of God, you will find yourself drawn to the poor, to people who are struggling, to places where people are in pain. You want other people to realize that God is with them. Service means to simply bear witness to that new life in you.

  The Spirit in you will draw you closer to those who suffer or to those in pain, because you will see there the presence of God. We want to be there with the people and reveal to them that God has not left them alone. We want to tell the world that something great is happening and that the Spirit is not just for us but for them too. We want to call forth. We want to say, “Trust that the Spirit of God is within you and live according to that Spirit. It will make all things new.

  “You will have more energy than you thought. You thought you were broken, and you are, but in the midst of your brokenness and poverty there is something in you. You have a gift. Let that gift come to fruition in you.”

  All the little actions that you do are actions of gratitude. Human service, action for your neighbor, whether it is small or large, whether it involves individuals, communities, or countries, actions of service are to be done out of gratitude.

  They have to be acts of eukharistia (eucharist, gratitude).

  Acts of service have to be an expression of the fact that God has come to us and dwells in us, and that God has already given us a life eternal because he has already given us his breath. We are already in God. We have already overcome in principle death and evil, and therefore can be free to live gratefully and to manifest our gratitude through our care for the neighbor, the people of God, and for the world. It is very freeing to know that the presence of God is practiced by acts of grateful service. It makes all the difference. Prayer and service are what life is about. It is how the Spirit of God reveals God to you. Prayer and service are at the heart of following Jesus.

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  WE HAVE COME to the end of what I wanted to share with you about following Jesus. May my words be little seeds planted in your heart. Don’t worry now what it was all worth, but trust that a seed has been planted. Maybe it is next week or next year that you say, “Something happened by reading that book that is now coming to fruition.” Trust it. It may be a new idea. It may not be very specific. You have to believe that God came to you in this book and that one day you will be able to say to yourself, “I never realized it, but something started in me of which I now can see the fruits.” You may not know it yet, but you can trust, it will be revealed to you one day. God has given you the promise.

  Dear Lord,

  Speak gently in my silence.

  When the loud outer noises of my surroundings and the loud inner noises of my fears keep pulling me away from you, help me to trust that you are still there even when I am unable to hear you. Give me ears to listen to your small, soft voice saying: “Come to me, you who are overburdened, and I will give you rest…for I am gentle and humble of heart.” Let that loving voice be my guide.

  AMEN

  (from With Open Hands)

  Editor’s Note

  This book is based on six talks by Henri Nouwen delivered over Lent at St. Paul Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985. It was an uncertain time in Nouwen’s life. Two years earlier, after a long and painful discernment, he had returned from a missionary effort in Peru. Feelings of isolation and restlessness followed him from South America to Harvard Divinity School, where he took a prestigious teaching position. But the competitive and ambitious atmosphere of the university only added to his already pervasive feelings of loneliness and unease. These talks—about how to live in anxious times—are so vibrant with energy because the topic was not theoret
ical to Henri Nouwen; it was his reality. The question of how to follow Jesus was his question. Less than four months later, he would leave his tenured position at Harvard, move to Toronto, and become the pastor for L’Arche Daybreak, one of a network of communities founded by Jean Vanier for and with people with intellectual disabilities. By articulating his vision for what it meant to be a follower of Jesus for these talks, Nouwen clarified his own vocational path.

  The original content of Nouwen’s talks was preserved on audiotapes of poor sound quality, from which I made transcriptions. Two other sources were used to ensure accuracy: handwritten, point-form notes that Nouwen prepared for himself in advance of the Harvard meditations, and tapes of a talk, on the same theme, that Nouwen gave in Cork, Ireland, the following year. All of this source material is from the Henri J. M. Nouwen Archives and Research Collection at the University of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.

  When I listened to the tapes for the first time, I felt Nouwen speak to me directly, intent that I grasp what he had discovered and desiring passionately that I “get” it. I wanted to preserve this feeling and have tried to capture, as much as possible, the experience you or I would have had attending one of his talks.

  Try to reserve judgment on whether you agree or disagree with this or that point in these talks; ask instead whether the issues Nouwen brings up connect with your own experience. If so, how? Nouwen does not strive to be right or win an argument. Rather, he seeks to be a channel for your own self-discovery.

  My hope is that Nouwen’s words take root in your innermost being and that you get what you need in order to find your way home.