Nouwen on Success

From Nouwen's, The Wounded Healer via Readings for Reflection in A Guide to Prayer:

…promises, not concrete successes, are the basis of Christian leadership. Many ministers, priests and Christian laymen have become disillusioned, bitter and even hostile when years of hard work bear no fruit, when little change is accomplished. Building a vocation on the expectations of concrete results, however conceived, is like building a house on sand instead of on solid rock, and even takes away the ability to accept successes as free gifts. 

Another hard thing for the likes of me, serving in a declining denomination with the annual meeting looming, to embrace.

And along with this today, 1 Corinthians 1.26-31, on not many of us called being wise or powerful but rather foolish and weak by worldly standards. Nouwen makes it sound like concrete results and success are the exception rather than the rule. When they do happen, there is an implicit challenge to discern very carefully whether it is a free gift or something we've wrought by our own strength.

More Uncomfortable Nouwen: Creating a Free and Fearless Place for the Unexpected Visitor

Further to my last post on the move from "easy support system to risky surrender" in prayer. More Nouwen, from The Wounded Healer this time via A Guide to Prayer.

Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger…Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes closed-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.

…

What does hospitality as a healing power require? It requires first of all that the host feel at home in his own house, and secondly that he create a free and fearless place for the unexpected visitor.

Anxious Disciples

Risky surrender, indeed. I've got the first part down. I do feel very much at home in my own house, but my introverted self wants to use my home as a hiding place. I find it very difficult to open it up to strangers.

Congregations in their anxious discipleship and suspicious ownership can have a hard time opening their church buildings to be free and fearless places for the unexpected visitor.

An Invitation from Jesus

I think Jesus was speaking about how to create that "free and fearless place" in today's passage when he said:

Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 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. (Mt 11.28-30 ESV)

If his yoke isn't easy for me, I must have made it that way. If is burden is feels heavy, I must have made it, too, that way by, among other things, my anxious discipleship and suspicious ownership.

Lord, have mercy.

From Two Giants: Nouwen and Lewis

This is today's meditation from Henri Nouwen:

Jesus Is Persecuted

Jesus, the favorite Child of God, is persecuted. He who is poor, gentle, mourning; he who hungers and thirsts for uprightness; is merciful, pure of heart and a peacemaker is not welcome in this world. The Blessed One of God is a threat to the established order and a source of constant irritation to those who consider themselves the rulers of this world. Without his accusing anyone he is considered an accuser, without his condemning anyone he makes people feel guilty and ashamed, without his judging anyone those who see him feel judged. In their eyes, he cannot be tolerated and needs to be destroyed, because letting him be seems like a confession of guilt.

When we want to become like Jesus, we cannot expect always to be liked and admired. We have to be prepared to be rejected.

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And some vintage St Clive for today from The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings, (Fount, 1984), ed. Walter Hooper, quoting The Great Divorce, chapter 8:

Two Kinds of People in the End

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done', and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

There is very definitely an edge to this Christianity business. There are choices to made moment by moment, there is mercy, there is judgement, there is Hell, there is Heaven and, above all, there is Jesus.