Henri Nouwen: Home Tonight

Home Tonight
By Henri Nouwen
Doubleday, 2009
Softcover, 137 pages, $19.99

Reviewed by Julie Lane-Gay

I hate it when my favourite authors die. E.B. White, Walker Percy, Robertson Davies  – I miss their words, their friendship, still. Henri Nouwen died in 1996 and I still feel sad when I see his books on the shelf, reminded there will be no more.  Nouwen showed me vistas of God’s love and unpacked Christ’s mercy in ways few others ever have.

But when I came upon Nouwen’s recent posthumous publication, Home Tonight, I wasn’t sad. I was annoyed.  I feared this new book was an amalgamation of previous works, a publisher’s ploy to capitalize on success.  Why did they have to capitalize on Henri?

Henri Nouwen was a renowned Dutch Catholic priest, psychologist, professor and author of over forty books on the spiritual life. Raised in Holland, he spent the middle years of his life at Harvard and Yale, and then gave the last decade to pastor the L’Arche Daybreak community (a home for the  disabled) outside Toronto.  His writing was as simple as it was profound, heeding the wisdom that what is most personal is most universal. His books The Return of the Prodigal Son, Here and Now and In the Name of Jesus were religious best sellers; many feel Nouwen was the most influential spiritual writer of the 20th century.

Home Tonight is an edited transcript of three lectures and accompanying workshops that Nouwen offered on the parable of the Prodigal Son. Given as part of a retreat for L’Arche staff workers in 1998, the lectures are largely new to readers. (They have been available in audio form.) For those who loved The Return of the Prodigal Son, Home Tonight reads as the pre-cursor, the personal notes and honest reflection beneath that book, the evolution of his thinking.

Nouwen was specifically drawn to this parable through his passion for Rembrandt’s painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son. In the mid 1980’s Nouwen was given the privilege of visiting the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad where he spent long hours studying the masterpiece.  Rembrandt’s artistry profoundly shaped Nouwen’s understanding of the beloved parable.

In the simplest sense, Home Tonight is organized into three parts – the younger son, the older son and the father. But the lectures are crafted such that the chapters focus more intentionally on what it means to return home after hurting those you love, what it means to have stayed behind and what it means to be the home-giver, waiting to bless those who return and those who stay. While not dramatically different than his other books, Home Tonight is more direct, more didactic, more thoughts-in-progress. You know you are reading a lecture, hearing Nouwen’s passion. Each chapter has a practical component with specific suggestions for “listening, journaling and communing,” followed by a “wisdom practice for those on a spiritual journey.”  These would be suitable for an individual or a small group.

It may be my own bias, but the gems of Home Tonight are the chapters on the older son, on resentment.  Nouwen was an older brother; Nouwen chose responsibility over self-exploratory adventure; and Nouwen was intimately acquainted with the inner ravage of resentment.  He describes it as the "curse of the faithful, the virtuous, the obedient and the hardworking" and writes insightfully about how it takes hold:

[I]n our efforts to be pious, we eat up angry feelings and do not make them known, resentment begins.… With time, as unattended anger builds in a given relationship or life situation one becomes progressively more irate. The constant swallowing up of negative feelings causes them to pervade the inner universe and usurp one’s power to relate in a truly loving way. Gradually it is no longer hot anger but grows cold     and settles itself deep into the innermost heart. And over the long term, resentment becomes a way of being (pp. 59-60).

This is not the book for those first meeting Nouwen. For the unfamiliar, Home Tonight will feel more context-less and under-edited than the works published in his lifetime.  If you are new to Nouwen, start with The Return of the Prodigal Son or The Wounded Healer (ideal for pastors in particular).  Save Home Tonight for later.

The great blessing of this posthumous work is Nouwen himself, his words spoken in great love -- gentle, humble, passionately wanting you to find the rest and peace in God’s great love for you. He is as truthful and simple as ever.

Rest assured, Home Tonight is not a publisher’s ploy to capitalize (or not entirely!); it is the gift we Nouwen devotees would never have thought might come – another book of his on the shelf. Enjoy.