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Henri's Bookshelf | Flying, Falling, Catching: An Unlikely Story of Finding Freedom
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Welcome to a new episode of Henri’s Bookshelf. Today we are going to have a wonderful conversation about Flying, Falling, Catching: an unlikely story of finding freedom. Now, this book was published in 2022 by Harper Collins, and the good news is there’s a new release coming in November of a paperback edition. And I understand there’s also a wonderful audio book if that’s your thing. So if you have not read Flying, Falling, Catching, this is a wonderful opportunity to pick it up, give it as a Christmas gift, but rediscover a part of Henri Nouwen that perhaps you haven’t really thought of, or heard about before. Now, the author is Carolyn Whitney Brown, and I am thrilled to have her as a guest today on this episode. Carolyn, welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: Thank you. So delighted to be here.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Now, Carolyn was at L’Arche Daybreak with Henri. She and her family lived there and got to know Henri very well. But one of the reasons she connected with Henri so deeply was around the love of writing. Carolyn holds a PhD in literature and has brought a deft pen to an unfinished project of Henri’s, but I’ll let her tell you more about that. So, Carolyn, why don’t you begin by telling us about how you met Henri and a bit about your friendship, relationship with Henri Nouwen
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: So I started reading Henri’s work in my teens in Sojourner’s Magazine in the late 1970s. And I hadn’t heard people writing about solitude And the inner life in that way. So I was quite fascinated by that and read his books for years. So it was quite a treat when my husband Jeff and I moved to L’Arche Daybreak in 1990 to actually share life and community with Henri. And we had just finished our Ivy League PhDs and we were, I think quite like Henri looking for a kind of education of the heart with our overdeveloped brains. So we bonded quite easily in some ways. And we became real friends. He would come for dinner. He loved our kids. In 1984, he invited us, when we were in Europe to come and meet him in Rotterdam and spend time with his brother Laurent and his family.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: So we really did become friends. We also, I should always say that to be a friend of Henri’s, you had to learn how to say no. Henri always had many good ideas of how his friends could do things. And he didn’t always have a real strong sense of how busy people with three small children were. So we would have to say no. And he would sometimes take that badly, but the friction wouldn’t last long. And, we just really enjoyed each other. It was good to know Henri at Daybreak.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Wonderful. Well, in the prologue to the book, you write this, that you remembered many conversations with Henri about writing and about the Flying Rodleighs, which of course is the trapeze group around much of which this book is about. But then you said <laugh>, “but the trapeze imagery never grabbed my imagination. I don’t like heights.” <laugh>, and that is true of me as well. And so I just thought that was so interesting that even though you had had conversations with Henri about his, you know, fascination with this, it was like you were intrigued by a couple of things. You wrote, one, just how captivated Henri was with this group, the Flying Rodleighs, and then also your curiosity about why he didn’t actually finish the project, that he had met the Flying Rodleighs five years before his death, 1991. He often talked about wanting to finish this project and didn’t finish it, published other books in the meantime. And so I wonder how you think about those questions today. I mean, after spending all the time in this material And being the author of this book, gathering many of his reflections and thoughts, why do you think Henri was so captivate captivated by this trapeze troupe?
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: In his lifetime, he talked about them. He was traveling with them. We, at the community thought this was hilarious. But I think I didn’t really take seriously how profound the experience was for him. And when I, when the Nouwen Legacy Trust asked me to more than 20 years after his death, if I could do something creative, was the request with Henri’s unpublished trapeze material. And I was quite interested, because I thought there was a whole unpublished manuscript. And when I looked at it, there wasn’t. There were, there was a tape of kind of babbling enthusiasm that was transcribed. There were two chapters that he’d written of a potential book, but they only covered the first few days when he met them. There were some diary on the road when he traveled with them, but that had already been published.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: So I’d already read those in his lifetime. And then I had to scrounge to see what else there was. There were some interviews, there was a film called Angels Over the Nets, that we watched in his lifetime also. So there were, there were bits and pieces, and what interested me, I guess as a literary scholar was why did he go directly from 10 years of being immersed in Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal son, and then Rembrandt’s depiction of that in a painting. And he went from 10 years of that, he finished that project, the book was in press, and he saw the Flying Rodleighs, and it was really his next big image, his next big piece of art that mesmerized him. And I thought, how, why there was something about? I think that it was collective not individual, that it was artistry by a group of people together, that it was in motion, that it was always renewing, that it was always changing, that every performance was different. That there was something about just the sheer dynamic moving beauty of it that really, really grabbed him.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: And to me, one of the things that interested me is I thought, you know, with the prodigal son, the son comes home and repents, the brother is annoyed and has to kind of re-find his own place in the family. The father welcomes them both. Henri talks about how our own journey is to also become the father and how everyone comes around the table. But in a way, the book doesn’t say, what do you do next? Once you’re all sitting around the table, what do you do? You’re not in a hierarchy of father, son or parent, child. What do you actually do next? And I think the trapeze gave him an image of, what do you do next? You do something with discipline, with freedom, something of great beauty, something that is beyond yourself, something that brings people together. But like, I think he saw it as a whole image for our work together in the world. And that started to really interest me. I wasn’t interested in heights, but boy, I was interested in that.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Yes. Well, and so then the second question, my sense as I was reading was that it was like a birthing process for Henri, and there were times that he went to it and tried to bring this project to life, and yet he didn’t, he died with it being unfinished. Why do you think it wasn’t the right time for him to finish it?
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: I think a lot had to do with the, the physicality of the experience, and that it put him in touch with deep questions about his own body, both the yearning he had for a more free bodily life. The questions of how do you live in a body with yearnings and desires and hungers as he puts it. When he watched them the last time he saw them fly, he, he talked about that he found himself in tears again five years later. And that it was the emotion he says, coming from the experience of an enfleshed spirituality. And I just, this haunts me. It fascinates me. What is the, not just what’s an enfleshed spirituality, but what’s the experience of an enfleshed spirituality? And I think that was where it put him in touch as a gay man, as a physical person, as someone who’d never been athletic, and yet who also was very embodied. His talks were dynamic. He leapt, he moved his hands. He was so present with people, so attentive, so alive that it’s not like he was a disembodied guy in any way, but there was something about trying to think about the body that that was going deeper and deeper, and he didn’t get there.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: I found myself blown away by the intensity of Henri’s reflection on his first encounter. And this of course, is captured in the book, but let me read it for our listeners. “It was a kind of, wow, you know, and I must confess that when I saw them, they seemed to be, in a way like gods so far that I wouldn’t even dare to come close to them. I had this emotional response that these people are really so far above me in their talent or in their giftedness. They’re such great artists. Who am I, a little tiny guy wanting to get to know them. It seemed to be impossible for me to even imagine myself knowing these people personally. I realized how strong that feeling was. It was like, awesome, awesome. And there was something in me more than just a feeling of a fan who admires a musician or artist. It was as if these guys are indeed living in heaven. They’re living in the air, and I am living on the ground. And so, I’m not allowed to talk to them being so far from each other.” And I’m not sure that my reading does it justice, but in my head, because I’m of Dutch descent, I could hear Henri’s Dutch accent and this enthusiastic quickness of the words kind of tumbling out. And it seems like Henri, in encountering them the first time, accesses a very childlike part of himself that, you know, almost has a crush. Right. Or, just a fixation on, I want to know them. And you know, the interesting thing is that for many children that fantasy ends there, they never meet their heroes. And yet Henri’s an adult and he has some autonomy, and he has a bit of power as someone who’s was famous in his own right. And so he does meet them. And yet it seemed that over the five years of developing a friendship with them, in his mind, they were still always the famous ones. And so, do you feel like having been a friend of Henri’s yourself, that his friendship with the Flying Rodleighs was completely unique to other relationships he had? Or did you experience similar sides to Henri, kind of that larger-than-life enthusiasm, and childlike, you know, wonder and energy?
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: Well, I think first I’d like to question was Henri’s response childlike? Because I don’t think it is, he describes it as, as an adolescent response. Because it takes him back to being a 16-year-old. And there’s a difference being a, being a child and adolescent. We all know that the being an adolescent is about the awakening of desires and yearning, and this kind of emotional chaos of inner feelings. And that’s very different than childlike. And he’s very specific in how he names it. It takes him back to this earlier self. He says, there’s these inarticulate yearnings to be part of a transcendent community that wouldn’t be ordinary, he says. So he is very intentional in describing it as that stage of life. And I love the way he reflects on it with that very endearing Henri combination of earnestness and self-deprecation and humor to name himself as this, you know, adolescent infatuated in love, emotional weepy kid, but not a child.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: And then his response to them is quite adult. He goes and he decides to meet them. He introduces himself, he gets to know them. They actually become real friends. And he experiences, as he says, a burning hunger to know more about their lives, to find out how do they live in community, how do they travel, what are their relationships like? How do they keep this act going? How do they live community on the road together? Henri always loved new friendships. He got so excited about new friendships and new people. He was so interested in their lives. Interestingly, the American writer, psychologist, Sam Keane discovered the trapeze the same year as Henri at almost the same age. And he’s written a book about it too. And, but Sam Keane saw a trapeze troop and thought, I want to learn how to do that. He learned how to fly. He opened a trapeze school. Henri didn’t want to learn how to fly. He wanted to know these particular artists. He was interested in their artistry. He wanted to learn about their particular lives. And that was very Henri, that the particularity of people’s own experience in their lives really excited him and motivated him.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Can I just say how wonderful it is to be speaking with someone who knew Henri so well? So thank you again for being with us. I can only imagine as you tried to pull this material together, which on one hand wasn’t perhaps as copious as you initially thought it was and from five years worth of conversation and friendship, and Henri changed during that time too. And yet you were able to identify four overarching experiences that you were able to also identify as having a real shaping function in the final season of Henri’s life. And I’m just going to list them: Reflections on beauty and artistry. We’ve heard that already in some of the things that you’ve said. Welcoming, embodiment, and the spiritual story that the body tells. And you’ve referred to that also. The transformation that comes through immersion in communities and perhaps especially marginalized communities. You’ve referred to that too already. And then the embrace of lightness, humor, relaxation, and delight, which as a sidebar, there’s a part where you speak about Rodleigh going to the Dutch funeral for Henri, and how people had described him as anguished. And, I don’t know whether Rodleigh told you this or whether this was your imaginative writing that you added, but you said he sort of gripped the pew to keep from running up to the front and saying, “That’s not the Henri we knew.” And that Henri seemed to be sort of a lighter, freer person when he was around the Rodleighs. And so how do you think those four experiences both fueled Henri’s desire to write about the Flying Rodleighs and in some ways made it difficult for him to write about them?
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: Well, first Rodleigh’s experience is in something he wrote himself after Henri died. He wrote, his own memoir called What A Friend We Had in Henri. And it is totally great. And he starts out by describing exactly that, that he went to the funeral and Henri is being described as anguished and wounded and, suffering. And, so tormented. And Rodleigh does exactly say that, that he had to hold himself back to keep from rushing to the front and interrupting and saying, “But that’s not the Henri we knew.” And I, for me, that was a huge moment when I thought, I can write this book, because that for me, said something I thought might be lost over time about Henri. That was, that’s really important. And, you know, since Henri’s death, a lot of really good attention had been paid to things that couldn’t be said so openly in his lifetime around his anguish, around his sexuality, around the kinds of struggles that he had in his particular historical moment.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: So like Michael Higgins and Kevin Burns, you know, award winning series, Genius Born of Anguish, Michael Ford’s great books, Wounded Prophet and Lonely Mystic. Like, these were, these are so important and they’re so smart and so good. And yet there was something in me as somebody who knew Henri that I hadn’t quite identified, but that this lonely, wounded, anguished kind of version of Henri that kind of dominated for almost 20 years. When I read Rodleigh, I was like, yes, that’s it, Henri was also fun. Henri was hilarious. Henri’s books have this just kind of self-deprecating, buoyant humor in them. Also, the even, you know, alongside everything else, there’s a lightness in Henri often, and I didn’t want that to get lost. So when I read Rodleigh’s response, that that really touched something in me, and I thought, that is so important that we not lose track of this fullness of Henri.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: He was a delight. He was fun to be with. So, and clearly something about the trapeze released something for him, helped him not have to be famous Henri. He didn’t have to be the writer in the same way that at Daybreak, he didn’t have to be a professor. He could be Henri in his house, with people who weren’t reading his books. With the trapeze, he didn’t have to be anything except their friend Henri, and just pay attention to them. And there was something really freeing about that for him. And I think that was very important because in those last five years, his reputation was just skyrocketing and the weight of that reputation could be quite heavy at times.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: So that’s kind of the fourth thing. And the other thing I think I’ve already said to some degree, but just that, the physicality of the trapeze troop, the fact that it was about bodies, that, he begins to discover the body in a different way in performance, in the trapeze performances. And as he says himself in an interview, that he is starting to explore how quote the body tells a spiritual story. And again, that’s just fascinating. How does the body in motion interacting responsive to, you know, slight changes if the flyer goes earlier late, it all changes. So how does that responsiveness, that collective quality of being physically together, speak to our lives, and how is it speaking to Henri? And as he said in 1994 to an HIV AIDS ministry conference, he said, now I want to talk about the body. And that’s kind of a scary thing for me. It was a scary thing for him, but he launched into it with a whole lot of courage, I think, in part because getting to know the Flying Rodleighs and their courage and performance and always changing up their performance and trying new challenges, made him feel much more brave and free about his own life.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Perhaps it should be said that Henri did actually try the trapeze, though. And I loved that part of the book of kind of following along as he, he made this climb up the rope ladder and, you know, actually did some swings.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: And there’s something really important about that actually.
That if you think about it, he climbs up onto a pedestal. And when I said that in the last five years, his life, his reputation was really taking off, there’s a lot of discussion of, “Is Henri on a pedestal?” And since he died, you know, whether, whether it’s right to put anybody on a pedestal by which people mean an isolated place alone of adulation. And Henri’s friends, the Gavigans were quick to say that a pedestal was not a healthy place for Henri to be, and he knew it. And so, if you think about him going up to the trapeze pedestal, it’s a whole different, like, it’s a radically different image of what a pedestal is. A pedestal is a place where you’re never alone, and it’s a place to launch off from. You don’t stand there preening alone. In fact, like when he experienced it, Rodleigh grabbed, you know, got Henri and his harness and all Henri grabbed the trapeze, and then Rodleigh grabbed him by the waist and flung him straight off the pedestal that, you know, your friends will throw you off if you’re, if you’re paralyzed and stuck on your pedestal, it’s not a place to stay.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: So, pedestals are not a place to be alone. And I found that a great kind of counter image for what, what does it mean to have someone on a pedestal?
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Well, in the irony, of course, that Henri’s known for spiritual wisdom about downward mobility, and yet his fame did continue to rise. And that’s a difficult conundrum to, on one hand, be saying this is an essential and life-giving part of an authentic and deep spirituality, and yet I’m becoming famous saying it <laugh>. So yeah.
Switching gears just a little bit. I think one of the, one of the, the ways in which you knit this together as an author is this internal dialogue you create that Henri has as he’s being rescued really, and brought out of a hotel window to the hospital in the Netherlands after the first of two heart attacks, the second one being fatal the next morning, but this one not being quite as serious. And, you sort of imagine that he’s lucid in his mind and having flashbacks and internal dialogue. And I was curious as I was reading it, you know, did that come easily to you once you had the idea? Or did you write and rewrite and, you know, how much of it kind of came from knowing Henri, or how much of it came of trying to knit the story together? I just was fascinated with that as a, a literary device.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: It certainly helped that I knew Henri. I don’t think I would’ve had the audacity to write something like this if I didn’t feel like I had a bit of a sense of his energy, of his internal dynamic. I’m not saying I was one of his best friends, but I knew Henri. And I think that helped. And another thing early on that I think helped was that I made a decision right away that I would not try to write in Henri’s voice, that his writing would stay distinct from my writing. As a literary scholar, I realized that mattered to me. I wanted Henri’s writing to be intact and clearly his own voice. Sometimes I condensed it or edited it just to be shorter. But I never changed the writing. And in the book, it’s in two type faces, so it’s actually very clear. Henri’s voice is Henri’s and mine is mine. And so that gave me a certain amount of freedom to create this character, Henri <laugh> having this heart attack. And of course it’s true. He had a heart attack. He called down to the front desk of his hotel. He had to be taken out through a window.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: And that story had always intrigued me. And so when I started working on this project, I was thinking his life was always stranger than fiction. Like, of course, Henri Nouwen would get taken out through a window, not just any normal way. He would fly out through a window, like how scary and hilarious is this. But I also wanted to figure out how do they do this? I mean, how do you take what someone out through a window and not give them a heart attack? <laugh> and I actually found on LinkedIn a guy named Denny in the Netherlands, who at that exact time was training people in that kind of rescue, which was unusual in Hilson where Henri was. And so I wrote to him, he speaks English, and he actually did a research project for me.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: He sent me pictures of what they would’ve been wearing. He sent me a photograph of what the actual piece of equipment that picked Henri up would’ve been, because there only was one in Hilson. That was it. He sent me the whole protocol of what questions they would’ve asked, what they would’ve done, what their equipment was, what medication they would’ve given him, how, how everything worked. And that allowed me to create the scene in my head. And what I wanted was for Henri to ask himself the question I was asking, why didn’t I write that book five years? I could have written it. Why didn’t I write it? And so that’s where I invented it. But it wasn’t swift to write because it took quite a lot of reflection on Henri’s life of what I knew about it and other research, trying to think, well, what in Henri’s life connected, what would’ve led him to this point?
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: What things interconnect here in interesting ways? So I did rearrange it, go back and forth. It did take quite a while, but it was really fun to do <laugh>. It was fascinating. Henri’s life is so interesting to weave in, to see that, I think his experience in marching in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr’s enormous, gathering. And going to King’s Funeral were hugely influential in his peacemaking and his understanding of community and his articulation of what he was looking for in a community that’s on the move that’s in motion together. Things that deepen in L’Arche and that he sees some kind of wild image for all this in the trapeze.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: It’s wonderfully crafted. And I haven’t said it yet, but Carolyn, I truly loved this book. I read it quickly, but I’m a bit of a voracious reader anyway, and I just, as I finished it, there was a certain sadness that it was done. But also, it was very energizing for me read. And of course, one might say, well, Wendy, you work for the Henri Nouwen Society. And so, you know, Henri takes up a lot of your <laugh> bandwidth these days. But, you know, I’ve been fascinated with Henri Nouwen for a long time, and this really was a wonderful invitation. I kept thinking, as I was reading, Carolyn has given us such a wonderful invitation to be reflective with Henri about this thing that he was trying to birth in this last season of his life. So, I’m so grateful for the work that you put into it, to not try to finish his project for him, but to make it accessible and available to the rest of us. So thank you.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: Oh, thanks for saying that. And I like that word invitation because that was one of the challenges for me as a literary scholar. I wanted to analyze, I wanted to explain, I wanted to interpret it. I wanted to, it was very hard sometimes to hold myself back and just tell the story and let the reader draw their own conclusions. Like for listeners who know Saint Ignatius’s spiritual exercises, Saint Ignatius says that the person accompanying the retreatant, you know, can give them a scripture passage to pray with, but not say why they’re suggesting that. One, because Ignatius says the retreatant will experience greater relish if they discover that for themselves. So, the greater relish principle. I knew that I needed to just tell the story and let a reader have the greater relish of discovering the story for themselves and finding their own meaning in it. So, I like that you hear the book as an invitation because I want it to be very readable. I want it to tell a compelling story. I wanted to honor Henri’s desire to write something very different that would be really read like a piece of fiction. I wanted to honor that hope of Henri’s, and also really try to not over interpret it, just put it out there. Put something out there for a reader.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Well, and at the risk of us now trying to interpret in this very podcast conversation, one of the things that comes up in the book is Henri talking to the Gavigans who are in the UK. And he’s really wanting to, in some ways, pitch isn’t the right word, but he’s sharing the idea about wanting to write about the Rodleighs. And he says this, “I feel like I am now at a crucial crossroads as a writer. I want to write for a secular audience this time. I have never before attempted a book like this, but I believe this could be the most important thing I ever write.” Do you have a sense of why it felt so important to Henri?
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: I think he thought that this image that had grabbed him, this experience that had grabbed him of the trapeze, was not, in a way, was not over interpreted. It wasn’t in any religious tradition. It wasn’t in any tradition. It was something that was so profound and it gripped him, but wasn’t kind of out there in the culture. And I think he felt like that would make it really accessible to anybody. And he wanted to write a book that would be about the life of the spirit, about how the body tells a spiritual story, but not limiting. And I think he was really realizing that if he could write it as a story, that anybody who likes a good story would read, whether they would read, you know, a spiritual book or not. But everyone loves a good story. And if he could tell a good story, that would reach a whole different audience, a much bigger audience, potentially, I think that’s what he wanted. And he also got stuck on it, you know, that he’d never tried to write anything like that. He bought two books about how to write creative nonfiction, and they’re actually on the shelf behind you. I think I found them in his, when I started the project, I went and looked for the two books, and there they were just on the shelf. And I could see what he’d underlined. I could see what he’d written in the margins. You know, I could really try get a feeling for what was gripping him and what he was trying to accomplish.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Yes. Well, and as someone who has been in ministry all my life, I love the wideness of Henri’s vision. That this wasn’t about the parameters of religion and spirituality within religion, but this overwhelming, passionate desire to connect to God’s love for us, and then our love for God. Henri just truly wanted to share that with the entire world. And to me that that was something that resonated when I read that piece, that he so deeply wanted to find a way to reach beyond just religious folks or people of a particular expression of faith and really, you know, light that fire for the world at large. That there really is good news about the ways in which we are spiritual beings. And I’m reminded, the ancient paths of the Celts, for instance, you know, a very embodied spirituality. And now I would say some of the new wine skins too are, are exploring somatic energy and wanting to return to a more embodied spirituality.
For some that’s perhaps a bit of a recovery from an uber charismatic experience. But to me, that part of it were the seeds of a prophetic glimpse that Henri was having and wanting to speak to that, you know, in a new way. The fact that it’s unfinished and this book offers it unfinished, not trying to finish it, I think is this beautiful, as I’ll say again, invitation into the power and the mystery of that. What is it that is the gift to the world? What is this? You know? And one might say, well, Henri was, this was the next big metaphor for Henri right after the return of the prodigal son. Well, yes, and maybe more. And the fact that it’s unfinished means that we get to imagine more and we get to listen to God for what the more might be. And so I think the book draws us into that. Is your vision too small? Is there more? And its unfinishedness, perhaps is part of the gift today. At least it was for me when I was reading.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: There is an invitation, I think, to anybody to look at what I know, to reconnect with your younger self, to reconnect with creative desires you haven’t thought about for years. To trust the catcher, as Henri says, in a different way, to launch out with confidence for something you haven’t tried before. It is full of all sorts of kind of interesting invitations for all of us, I suppose.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Now, I’m not sure an author wants to talk about this, but early on, I think it’s in the prologue, you hint at the fact that we may stumble upon some insights. And as we’ve just been talking, those insights are irreducible in the context of a really good metaphor. But what were some of the insights that you walked away with just personally as you worked on this project and just said, ah, you know, I’m tucking that in my toolbox, that’s really going to serve me well and accompany me well.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: Ah, well, you know, that question of fun, I’m going to come back to it because fun is a word Henri used a lot around the Flying Rodleighs. That he talks about the way they smiled at each other, that they were really having fun and his awareness, they had to be well together. And that stays with me. That if whatever work we’re doing in the world, whether it’s artistic work, whether it’s entertaining work, whether it’s social justice, whether it’s peacemaking on some level, we have to smile at each other, have fun doing it, or, or we will burn out. We won’t be able to sustain it if we don’t, on some level have this excitement and enthusiasm about it, that’s contagious, that’s shared. And so that’s part of it. Another thing that stays with me is, again, when Henri sees the second time he sees them perform, one of the performers, Carlene, falls, messes up, a thing is caught, falls into the net. And she just jumps up and climbs the ladder, and they carry on with the performance.
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: But Henri is in absolute agony. He says he’s so kind of overcome with humiliation and shame and embarrassment that he can hardly watch the performance. She’s not experiencing that. But he is. And I keep thinking of that too, of the way that I think that’s one of the many things Henri learned in those last years of his life. Was a little bit more of letting go of such heavy self-judgment, of just letting it go, trusting each other, trusting ourselves, forgiving ourselves, not humiliating our own selves, but just carry on with trust, with our best efforts. And, you know, I love the artistry of this whole thing. That Henri loved the arts. He loved; he was fascinated by artists. He was always fascinated by people who did anything well. But something about art, the arts really grabbed him. And in the book he talks about, he wonders whether Jesus was perhaps the greatest entertainer. He’s thinking about entertainment not as being superficial, but as he says, holding between things. That entertainment holds a kind of creative space. So, I don’t know if these are exactly lessons, but the kind of energy of the book is around kind of creative dynamic in motion, always changing, openness to openness with discipline, freedom with structure.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: And we are just finishing up a meditation series, and Carolyn Aarons has been our, our host, talking about a beautiful adventure, the gift of the arts in spiritual formation. And in session three, she talks about the power of metaphor. And that, you know, you can’t reduce it to one thing, that the metaphor is the gift that keeps on giving in a way. And so, I think it is part of the gift of this book is that you can return to it and return to it. Part of it being the unfinished project, I think is, is a bit of a seed of that. But, but also just that this fruitfulness, right? Henri spoke so much about being fruitful after you die, and his life certainly has been fruitful after his death. And now this project is another part of that fruitfulness in ways that people will imagine new things or hear God in new ways or wonder about new ideas. And so, I want to bring our conversation perhaps in for a landing soon with this quote of what Henri said about the trapeze act. He said, “It’s, it’s not just to distract people, but to give them a glimpse of the beauty of life, not only artistic beauty, but a beautiful vision of humanity in harmony, where it is possible for people to feel safe with one another. And so then, speaking of the Rodleighs, they offered a vision of amazement, joy, rapture, beauty, elegance.” And then for him, as an audience member, “I am not simply forgetting my trouble, but I see who I am, who I can be, and who I want to be. The trapeze act is for others.” And so, this generative, you know, ever expanding welcome and invitation to find that one thing, that we are beloved and to offer our love in return. And so, what do you most hope people will walk away from the experience of reading this book with?
Carolyn Whitney-Brown: You know, another day I might say something different, but today I’m thinking, don’t underestimate the power of the arts. Hmm. To open our imaginations. Our imaginations get so stuck. And our, our creativity gets absolutely squashed in a world where it’s rather easy to lose hope right now, with so many things, feeling like they’re at a crisis point. But if we lose our creativity, if we lose our energy, if our imaginations get stuck, then, then we become hopeless. And I think the arts are, are, are just really essential to keeping our hearts open. As Henri said to that 1994 HIV/AIDS ministry conference, he talks about how his heart is expanding and expanding, and there’s no limits to that expansion. And somehow, I think we need to find the things that expand our hearts and let our hearts keep expanding. And I’m hoping this book will help people. I think his experience with the Flying Rodleighs did that for Henri, was doing it for Henri.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: <laugh>. Well, certainly, I think one thing that I take away is don’t rush. Henri knew the Flying Rodleighs for five years, and he was so enamored, and yet it took time of deep contemplative reflection for him to continue to say, “How now do I bring this gift to the world?” And so in the hopefulness that comes through the arts, don’t rush. Allow yourself the time for God to birth something new in you. Carolyn Whitney Brown, it’s been a pleasure. I love the book. And folks, if you haven’t read it, get it, pick it up. Maybe go to your local bookstore, <laugh> instead of online, but nonetheless, Flying, Falling, Catching an unlikely story of finding freedom. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for being with me. And friends, never ever forget you are the beloved of God.
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