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Henri's Bookshelf | Following Jesus: Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety | Transcript
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Welcome friends to a new episode of Henri’s Bookshelf, produced by the Henri Nouwen Society. Today we’re discussing Following Jesus, and the subtitle for this very important book is Finding Our Way Home in An Age of Anxiety. It was published in 2019, and Gabrielle Earnshaw was the editor. She’s currently working on the official biography of Henri Nouwen, which we’re all very excited about. But part of the reason I’m having this conversation today is that this has been rereleased with this beautiful new cover. But you know, as nice as a new cover is, it actually also has a new study guide at the back with wonderful reflective questions to really invite you to not just read with your mind, but to read with your heart, and to really incorporate this into your life. This book was based on lectures that Henri gave in 1985 at a church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now what better conversation to have than with Robert Jonas, who met Henri in 1983 and was deep, deep soul friends with Henri Nouwen. And welcome, Jonas, welcome. We’re thrilled to have you in this conversation.
Robert Jonas: Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Tell us about your meeting Henri, and how that friendship developed.
Robert Jonas: Okay, thank you. I was in the middle of a doctoral program at Harvard in psychology and education. And I heard about Henri preaching at the Harvard Divinity School. I had gone through a divorce and had just met Margaret, and Margaret was a Christian Episcopal, and so we marched over to Harvard Divinity School and we heard Henri speak. And it changed both of us because Henri was, his presence filled the hall really and you couldn’t, I almost couldn’t think on my own. It was like he was speaking to my soul, and my soul was speaking. And so that was the, and I guess that was 82 or 83. I honestly, I can’t remember. But that was the beginning of something extraordinary. And then I met Henri soon after that at St. Paul’s Church in Cambridge. And we went there for a talk and about 300 people were there. And it was, you know, again, extraordinary. It was so much energy in the room, in the basement of this big Catholic church. So I went up to Henri after. Well, he ended his talk, and I was so enthralled with him that I went up to him, first person in a line, and I said, “Will you be my spiritual director?” <laugh> So kind of taken aback and he said, “I don’t know, but let’s have lunch.” And so we had lunch in Harvard Square, and that was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until he died, really. And he lived with us the last year of his life, I mean, 1995. So, yeah, it was, it’s a very, it was a very dear friendship. Because my doctorate was in object relations psychotherapy. He could talk to me about his family and some of his anxieties and so on. And because he was really my spiritual director, I could speak to him about the damage I experienced growing up in an alcoholic home and being into trouble with the law when I was young. I was arrested for breaking and entering when I was 11. And so I had a lot of work ahead of me to do, and so that Henri and I could talk. And he could talk to me about being gay. And I had never had a gay friend, male friend before. So that relationship really opened up my world that I, the screen that I grew up in Wisconsin when I was growing up there, the screen really obfuscated the gay community altogether. And so he introduced me to another whole possibility of being a human being. And so yeah, that’s a, it’s a little overview.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Yes, I know we could spend the whole podcast simply talking about the richness of that friendship. I’ll maybe do that another time. <laugh>. Now, as I mentioned already, the subtitle for this book is, is just <laugh>. I actually read an excerpt of it this morning at, at another event and said, based on the subtitle alone, it should be a bestseller, <laugh> Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety. Well, post Covid, we’re just, anxiety is everywhere. Can you tell us a little bit about how you experienced Henri’s approach to responding to anxiety, recognizing that that was a reality for himself as well, and with his classic vulnerability and authenticity in much of his writing, he’s very honest about that. Tell us about that. But Henri was this mix also of psychology and spirituality, and so how did you encounter him and this topic, this huge topic of anxiety?
Robert Jonas: Thank you. Uncertainty is a big word that now, of course in this culture that we’re in, things are changing so fast. The internet means that things are out of date five minutes after we just learn about them. That’s an extraordinary challenge, and it does bring anxiety. So I’m, this is a subtopic, but I’ve been very interested in what the internet is doing to our awareness for that reason and our understanding of what time is Henri in his life and me now, I’m 77, have lived in a time when there was a certain predictability and rhythmic understanding of what time is and where time is going. We used to have seasons, for example, but in Wisconsin where I grew up the snow came in early October, and it didn’t leave, and it would be this high, and it wouldn’t leave until, you know, April or so.
Robert Jonas: And now last winter, they had to postpone all the snowmobile races in northern Wisconsin because there was no snow. It was all slush. So that uncertainty brings anxiety. And I’ve done, I mentioned to you earlier that I’ve done a lot of environmental work. I’ve been on the boards of land trusts and saving land I live I as much as I can, I live in nature. We have land in Western Massachusetts, and I am developing an understanding of Henri’s insight about belovedness in a way that includes nature and includes the birds and the deer and the bear that are here in the bobcats, and even the beavers, which I don’t necessarily appreciate because they, they eat trees that I plant. So it’s sometimes a bit of a battle <laugh>. But there is that sense of beloved means that… and I guess I’ve gone a little bit beyond Henri in that sense.
Robert Jonas: I mentioned to you earlier that I did a video of Henri on creation, and that’s just extremely important for me, that belovedness is not just about people. It’s about the whole of creation and including people, of course, people we love, people we maybe hate. But all of us are involved here. And we’re living in an interdependent universe in an uncertain time. And so I try to live that way with people and with nature. I actually save land in perpetuity here in Massachusetts. You can do that. And this is maybe just a sidelight, but when I visited Henri so often in Richmond Hill and I would stay in the little retreat center and there’d be a bedroom nearby. I watched tremendous number, hundreds and hundreds of houses gradually coming in and destroying all the surrounding nature of the, especially there were hundreds of acres of apple trees that were gradually destroyed over the 1980s, 1990s when I would visit. Extraordinary pain for me to see that, and the farmers having to move out and everything.
Robert Jonas: So the belovedness, his central message for me, has just expanded beyond people. And I actually put a, I made a video of Henri speaking on creation. I found when I was writing my two books on Henri I found 17 pretty good quotes about Christ in Nature and the communion between people and creatures, non-human creatures.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Yes. So to the anxious person, what did Henri say? As someone who was often anxious himself.
Robert Jonas: As you mentioned Henri lived in the psychospiritual world or the spirit psycho world, whatever. And so he was very mindful of personal interpersonal anxiety. And he was at the Menninger Institute, I think is where he was. And so this interpersonal anxiety. He connected from his, for example, from his father to Father God. If we’re talking about Father for Christians, it’s difficult for me a little bit because I saw my father beat up my mother when I was a kid, and then he left home altogether. So father has always, I’ve always been uneasy with God as Father. So Henri actually, I felt that in the end I saw Henri three months before he died, I visited him and he was at a different retreat center. And he seemed incredibly anxious. And I could hug Henri as a heterosexual man with a gay man. We were comfortable hugging. So I remember sitting on a couch with him somewhere in Connecticut. And he was so anxious, he was almost shaking. And this was just a couple months before he died, three months maybe. So I hugged him and I just listened to him. And he did talk about his father, but I didn’t, because I had just been trained in psychotherapy, my ear was attuned to, “What about your father?” And he told me that his father piled all his books in a corner of his room, his bedroom, and hadn’t read any of them. And, but he also, at the same time, he said his father was very dear to him, and he would visit his father once a year. And I once went with Henri to the retreat center where Henri used to sometimes stay with his father. But I always felt honestly Wendy, that he was from a psychotherapeutic point of view, that there was more work to be done, and that his anxiety was about being unacceptable, not just culturally but very deeply interpersonal connection with his dad. I felt that there was a deep wound there. And him being a gay man too and the Catholic church was telling him that he’s disordered. So his message of belovedness was just an arrow right in his, into his heart right there. That’s what he needed to hear. But that arrow of belovedness that, you know, there’s so many images from the Catholic tradition of the arrow and the heart. That woundedness the best he could do was the spiritual understanding of it, of that ultimately, God is for me, God loves me no matter what, and I’m the beloved, and I am listening to that every moment in my life.
Robert Jonas: And then there’s that happening at the same time as him feeling he’s not, he’ll never be good enough. And his father didn’t completely, didn’t understand him. And so both are true. He felt completely healed and yet there was this anxiety that was not healed at least the few, couple months before he died.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: I’d like to share a, a quote from the book Following Jesus that speaks exactly to what Jonas was just telling us. Henri says this, “The first love says this, ‘I loved you before you could love anyone, or before you could receive love from anyone, I have accepted you. You are accepted. You are loved. No matter what mother, father, brother, sister, school, church, society does, you are born out of my love. I have breathed you out of my love. I have spoken you out of my love. You are the incarnation of my love. And in me, there is no hatred. There is no revenge. There is no resentment. There is nothing that wants to reject you. I love you. Can you trust that love? The original love is the original blessing. The original love is the original acceptance. Long before we talk about original sin or original rejection, we should speak about God’s original love.’”
Wendy VanderWal Martin: One of my professors used to say, preachers must always preach larger than their own lives. And it seems to me that Henri spoke larger than his own life. He wrote larger than his own life. And so many of us have found this profound gift of healing through Henri’s words. And yet as you’ve described, there was this push/pull for Henri to experientially know that in a sustainable and consistent way.
Robert Jonas: Yes. I think eventually, can I add something here? That’s a great quote. I love it. And it’s true. The first love, original love those phrases and where they’re pointing in me were, have been, were transformative when I was with him. Absolutely. And still, you know, I’m like, Henri have these two things are going on where I’m completely acceptable, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And yet there’s these anxieties that arise out of the past, out of the basement of the unconscious. Things I didn’t, I was not aware of some of the damage I experienced in my childhood. I didn’t become aware of until my fifties, sixties with a fair amount of psychotherapy around along the way, you know, so I’ve really needed to hear not only I heard those words from Henri directly to me.
Robert Jonas: I’ll give you one example. In 1993 Margaret and I were really hoping we could have another child. We had had one child, Sam, who’s now 35 years old. But so we went through IVF stuff and we went through all the possibilities to make another child possible. And then we finally had, Rebecca came to us in Boston at a hospital there. And Rebecca was born early two months, or maybe even three months early, not sure. And she died in my arms while Margaret was recovering. And I think, no, they brought Margaret in from the operating. So we went home devastated. And I called Henri. Henri was in England. He was giving a talk. And, I told him what had happened, and he said, “I’m coming.” He said, “I’ll be there.”
Robert Jonas: And he was, and he landed at Logan Airport, and I picked him up, and he came to our house, and he spent, I think a couple days at our house, and as I spoke about losing Rebecca and he listened and we, the key thing he said was, “You know, Jonas,” and he called me Jonas, “Jesus lost Rebecca too.” And I felt like that was another one of those arrows, the divine arrows into my heart, that of Jesus on the cross. He connected Jesus on the cross to the experience, the deep grief that I was experiencing. That I’m participating in Christ’s life and death. It’s not just my experience. And that was another, that was another way that he could not bypass the ego work that we have to do, but to to merge them in a way to that, yes, that deep personal loss is, is just personal in this linear time world, but there’s also an infinite dimension, which is Christ on the cross. So that ever since that time that happened in the early nineties, whenever I’m in deep anxiety or loss or self, disregard, whatever, I come to that image of Christ on the cross. And Henri being with me saying, “Jesus lost Rebecca, too.”
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Hmm. Thank you for sharing such a precious story. What a what a profoundly painful deposit of what is deeply true.
Robert Jonas: Yeah. Yeah.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Now, I have read your words saying that Henri reintroduced you to Jesus. And you had a, one might say, a bit of an eclectic spiritual journey.
Robert Jonas: Yeah.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Tell us about re-encountering Jesus as you met Henri.
Robert Jonas: Okay. So my grandparents took me and my two siblings in when my parents became too alcoholic do a good job of parenting. And my grandparents, the Reddens family were German Lutheran, and they would go to church in a German speaking church Lutheran church. And grandma had images of Jesus all over the house that I didn’t know at the time, but I don’t have one with me, but they were painted by Warner Solomon. They were painted in the thirties and forties by Warner Solomon. But when I was young, these images of Jesus were like heaven on earth. They were like photographs. I thought, oh, that’s actually how Jesus looks. You know? I mean, I didn’t think that, but that this is the Jesus who’s with me, even when there’s violence in the home, even when there’s alcoholism.
Robert Jonas: And I’m in trouble with the law, whatever, Jesus is always with me. But then I found in my twenties, I found out that Warner Solomon painted those images. And he was a businessman, you know, an artist businessman. So I like, oh, that’s not what Jesus looks like. So then that in my twenties, that became a, an how can I say, an invitation to see what is the world like without Jesus. Okay. So then I was introduced to Buddhism. I was an undergraduate. I, well, I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, and Dartmouth is not a especially religious place to be as a very secular college. So I lost touch with Jesus and I stopped going to church. And but in my reading on the side, I found Thomas Merton – Roman Catholic, not Lutheran.
Robert Jonas: So that was a new world. But I had been at Dartmouth, I was learning karate from a chan master, which is a Chinese Zen Buddhism. And so Thomas Merton is saying, oh, no worries. You could, you can learn from Buddhism and still be deep, deeply living a deep life with Jesus. So I read a lot of Merton’s books. And then in the nineties these are transformations of Jesus, you know, these, it is like Jesus changes form over the years for me. So there was the original Lutheran Jesus Warner Sallman, and then there’s Thomas Merton’s Jesus. And then I was divorced once, my first wife was Roman Catholic. And so, and in the marriage I decided I’m going to go to a Roman Catholic church. I did, and I enjoyed it. And then I went to a monastery, and I became a third order Carmelite.
Robert Jonas: So then was St. John of the Cross, and St. John of the Cross was, a margin, not marginalizing. He was a boundary figure. Because for me, because with Christianity and Buddhism, because he was both in the I/thou dimension of Jesus, which I knew about, I experienced, but he was also into letting everything go. Even images of Jesus, whether it’s in Warner Sallman image, or a Catholic image, or a Lutheran image, that Jesus is not the image. Jesus is at a deeper level of experience. And so as a Carmelite and third order Carmelite, I read all of St. John the cross’ works and got totally into him. And then and then I couldn’t support my family as a farmer. I was a farmer and back to land farmer. So I applied to, and was accepted at Harvard.
Robert Jonas: And that’s where I met Henri. So, and there’s Henri’s Jesus <laugh>, you know, which I like very much. The beloved one, who was here before I was born. So that Jesus, you know, it was just like these changing forms of Jesus over the years. And I think that a lot of people must experience that, you know, as we age our sensibilities change or, or receptors change spiritual receptors, psychological receptors who really is a transformative presence, and that’s what I’m most, most interested in. And yeah, Henri bumped me across to another dimension, <laugh> another Jesus.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: And I will say, if you like Jonas, have some evolving transfigurations of Jesus, Henri might leave you surprised in his book Following Jesus, that there is both this deep Christ-centeredness and this generous space in which to encounter your belovedness. Now, how, how is it that you think Henri’s message, given, that he was a lover of Jesus <laugh>, you know, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Yeah. And yet I know so often we hear his heart to speak to people beyond religion and the restrictions perhaps of religion. And so what of Henri’s message do you think speaks to spiritual seekers, perhaps even those who’ve experienced some trauma by institutions, but in the name of Jesus?
Robert Jonas: Mm, yes. Right. And I guess we’d have to include Henri in that category, some trauma from the institution, because he was very aware of this word disordered because he was gay, coming out of the Vatican, he told me that he was never invited by the Vatican to anything. So he had no connection to the power center of the church. He was marginalized by his own church.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Jonas, you might, as a sidebar, you might get a chuckle out of this, but in April, I went to the Vatican. And there in the bookstore, Henri Nouwen, and it’s a tiny little bookstore. It’s not very big. And I thought, wow. Henri has a clear place, a clear name in the Vatican bookstore.
Robert Jonas: <laugh>, yes. <laugh> hoorah, we say My dad was a Marine hoorah. Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah. Well, now, it’s beautiful. I’m glad.
Robert Jonas: I’m glad to hear that. Yeah, it’s beautiful. Well, he, yes, he loved the liturgies and he did such an incredible job of presencing Jesus in the liturgy, in the communion service. And you know, having folks from the L’Arche community be at the table, so, and folks of color being at the table with folks of white, white folks. So yeah, there was a sense of boundarylessness about the love that I think he did manifest. And then his, he had a, you know, a sort of a very short relationship with Eknath Easwaran a Hindu meditation teacher. And I think it says in the introduction to this book that Henri suggested that Richard Rohr visit Easwaran. And that’s just another example of he’s out of this, he’s out of the box.
Robert Jonas: Henri’s out of the box, and he’s looking for connections. But there’s the one thing that he would never agree to in my conversations with him, because I, there were periods in our friendship when I was very Buddhist and I thought, wow, this is amazing just to be able to dwell in silence and let, when we’re speaking about anxiety, let anxiety arise, let fear arise, let love arise, and hope, let everything arise. Don’t say no to anything. That really helped me instead of, like, I think what I was doing previously before I encountered Buddhism was I’d say, oh, that’s wrong to feel that, or that’s not as good as this or that, I’d have preferences to what I felt and what I thought. But Buddhism cured me of that. Well, almost, I’m not cured <laugh>, but I mean, I’m doing better to allow things to arise without judgment.
Robert Jonas: And Henri was that way too. But, but there was more for him, and this is something Buddhism doesn’t do very well, which is the I/thou dimension. I mentioned the second person of the Trinity in this, in this book, I have to show this book, <laugh>. Sorry. Yeah. This, so I just finished this book now two years ago, but it’s, it locates Henri within the Trinity as the spokesperson in my life for the second person in the Trinity, which is the I/thou dimension. Now in Buddhism, you don’t have so much of the I/thou. It’s quite in a sense, impersonal, because everything is arising and disappearing. Impermanence is one of the basic teachings. And so that’s a beautiful thing. But I need to love and I need to be loved <laugh>. And they don’t do that in Burma or India a little bit.
Robert Jonas: Not so much in Korea or, or in Japan. But I discovered Japanese flute when I went, I left my doctoral program at Harvard. I mean, I completed it, but then a few years later, after doing psychotherapy, I went to Western Jesuit School of Theology for a postdoc masters. And while I was there, a teaching fellow got up and he played the Kochi Japanese bamboo flute. And so I started playing for, for about a dozen or 12 years, I play the Kochi and I did three albums, and I would introduce the Japanese Zen tradition. But I’d always say, there’s one thing you’re not going to find in Zen Buddhism, which is this, I/thou love and the beloved, and this love that Henri, which gave us, I mean, re-gave us after Jesus. So these two dimensions of east west spirituality, Henri if he had lived longer, he and I, you know, I missed the conversations….
Robert Jonas: I think we would’ve had some really great conversations about this, this first person divine openness and the love, the original love, the first love the different words we can use for all this. But I would say in, you know, for all the folks listening in, like be patient as you grow in Christ, because different teachers will show up and insights will deepen And get diverted off some other way. But if you’re patient Christ will never, will never disappear and will always change. Don’t worry about changing the form. But the love is the same love. It’s the original love. Thank you, Henri
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Jonas, I can’t help but think of Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase, which Henri wouldn’t have read because Eugene finished it after Henri’s death. But normally we would know this as, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And Eugene Peterson says, “The word took on flesh and moved into the neighborhood” <laugh>. And so, you know, in this book where Henri’s speaking about following Jesus, it’s a very embodied relational presenct connection. Yes. With the love that makes us the beloved. And so, yes.
Robert Jonas: We’re all incarnations in that sense.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Yes. Later on in the book, Henri is sharing about a time when he was extremely depressed, and he happened to be in Flagstaff, Arizona, and he decided to go and visit the Grand Canyon. And this is how he described it, “Looking at the Grand Canyon, at that enormous abyss of beauty, the strange depression fell away. I felt the silence. In the face of this natural wonder, I thought, what are you worrying about as if you are carrying the burden of the world, a world that survived before you and is something that will go on a long time after you. Why don’t you just enjoy your life and really live it? This image of the Grand Canyon stayed with me for a long time. God is like the Grand Canyon. Oh, God suffered the wound, the wound of all humanity. And if I enter in the presence of that wound, my wound becomes a light burden or a light pain. Not because it is not there, but because it has been embraced by love. I can live my pain and not be destroyed by it. I can acknowledge my pain and not be paralyzed by it. The Grand Canyon invited me to enter an abyss of divine love and to experience that I am immensely loved and cared for. I was invited to enter life with a new heart. With God’s heart.”
Robert Jonas: Mm. Beautiful. Beautiful.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: Now, Henri had this amazing mystical capacity to see. Through his writing, we see how art captivated him. We see at times he was just completely blown away by things in the natural world. How did Henri understand that gift in himself? Did he view himself as a mystic, or did he see that he was called to be more of a pastor or a teacher/writer? How did he connect to his own – the gift of his own mysticism?
Robert Jonas: I don’t think I ever heard him use that word mystic or mysticism. It’s, which could be valuable that he didn’t, or maybe not. I’m not sure, because it’s a misunderstood word. People don’t think, you know, if you’re mystic, that means you’re special in some way. You’re not an ordinary person anymore. But I guess I would describe me as a mystic because I believe that this invisible presence is holding up my life. It’s where I come from, and it’s who I am. And so mystic is okay with me, but Henri didn’t, he wrote over and over, I was just looking at this book this morning, and he wrote over and over again about how he wasn’t special, and it was a temptation to be special in some way. And so he just wanted to tell the truth, but it turns out his truth is not an everyday truth, you know?
Robert Jonas: And some people would put that in the mystical dimension because it’s an invisible transformative truth, that we’re never alone. We’re always in this presence. And even so, I mean, there are, I just want to bring out the human side of Henri just a bit here because I’ve been hosting a contemplative retreat center for 30 years. Started in 1994 in Cambridge area, Massachusetts. And when Henri would come to visit us, he would sometimes come to the Sunday morning empty bell contemplative group, where we start with 20 minutes of silence, then we read the scriptures for the day, and then we have sharing and so on. And one of the things I noticed is that Henri was very, almost always uneasy in the silence, you know, sitting on a cushion, doing nothing.
Robert Jonas: I could feel like he was, you know, there this energy wanted to come out and he’d rather preach than sit in silence. But the, the weird thing is that he said such extraordinary beautiful things about silence, <laugh> and yet it was difficult for him. So he was a, a normal person in the sense that he was complicated and we’re all complicated <laugh>. So but he was also, I would say, yeah, he was definitely a mystic, because there’s a deeper dimension here that is invisible to ordinary eye, invisible to our sensitivity, to our, our living in linear time. There’s another time. And the time that I, when I lead retreats, I borrow from the Catholic tradition to make the sign of the cross that we’re living in this dimension and we’re also living in this dimension. This dimension is eternal. This dimension is linear time we’re born and we die. And that, that was the, you probably remember when he went to the Crystal Cathedral and he spoke in the Crystal Cathedral, he talked about that, that we’re living in these two dimensions. And that is, that is really a transformative sermon to see. And it’s out there on YouTube.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: It’s on the Henri Nouwen website.
Robert Jonas: Yeah. Oh, good. Yes. Uh,
Wendy VanderWal Martin: On our YouTube channel.
Robert Jonas: Oh, that’s great. When Henri gave that talk, I think it was 1980, let me think, 1993, and he was one of the few Catholic preachers at this very famous crystal cathedral. But he was loved by the people. And I watch that video probably once a year, ever since 1996, ever since he died. And I show it to everybody as an introduction to what the Christian faith is all about this eternal and linear, and we’re in both worlds. We’re in both worlds, always.
Wendy VanderWal Martin: It is such a gift to be able to speak with you, who knew Henri so well. In these podcasts, I try to give Henri the last word,
Robert Jonas: Good
Wendy VanderWal Martin: From the book that we’re featuring. And I chose this portion to end with today. Henri Nouwen says, “Following Jesus means following the risen Lord. Following Jesus means following the Lord who is the Lord of history, the Lord who is with us now. And here at this moment. It’s not a sentimental memory. It’s not a pious feeling about somebody we hardly know. No. It is being guided by the one who is with us here and now. It is being led by the one who is really present among us as the Lord who rose from the dead and became the Lord who embraces all people in all times, and is therefore the Lord of the now, the present, the here. Henri Nouwen, Following Jesus. Robert Jonas, it’s been a delight. We are going to have all of your contact information, websites, videos in the show notes of this podcast episode, and to you, our listeners, thank you so very much for being with us and never, ever forget that you are the beloved of God.
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