Reaching Out

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Well, welcome friends to a new episode of Henri’s bookshelf, produced by the Henri Nouwen Society. My name is Wendy VanderWal Martin, and I’m grateful to be your host and grateful to have our guest with us today. We are looking at a book that Henri Nouwen wrote in 1975. Now with the lighting, maybe you don’t see it, called Reaching Out. This is one of the canon of Henri. Now in that sort of a staple, it’s right in there with the must reads that people have maybe long time memories of reading. I read it again just this week in preparation for this conversation and was just stunned again at how timeless Henri’s words are. You know, I’m tempted to call Henri relevant, but he said a lot about not being relevant <laugh>, but the prophetic witness of Henri Nouwen in this book, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life are astounding. And I’m thrilled to have a conversation about the book with the Reverend Kyle Norman, who is an Anglican priest in Kamloops, BC at the St. Paul’s Cathedral. So, Kyle, welcome, thrilled to have you here.

Kyle Norman: Well, the thrill is all mine. As I said before when we were just chatting, I’ve been a follower of the Henri  Nouwen Society for years, and so I am just very excited to be talking with you, Wendy, and on this podcast.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Well, welcome. Tell us how you encountered Henri. Now, that’s always a great place to begin. How did you find yourself interacting?

Kyle Norman: There’s really two stories about that, you know. So I’ve been ordained for around 22 years, and when I was in seminary, I entered seminary, it was 2000, and I didn’t know anything about Henri Nouwen at all.   But I would see some of my classmates just carrying around some of his books. And so I thought, okay, this is somebody I should read. And so, I picked up a Return of the Prodigal Son and, and honestly read the first chapter and thought and put it down and left it for probably about 15 years. And never really engaged it. I just kind of thought, okay, whatever. Fast forward 15 years and my ministry kind of evolved and I grew and really found myself ministering in the field of spiritual formation. And in that growth was reintroduced to Henri Nouwen, and one of the first things that I read was Reaching Out and it just kind of peeled back the layers of everything that I was trying to figure out and trying to preach and teach about, but sometimes lacked the words to describe. And now it just does a wonderful job of doing that plainly and succinctly. And so, that just really began my journey with Henri Nouwen, and I’ve just been a reader of his, an advocate of his, a follower of his since that, since that time.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: That’s fantastic. Now I understand that you’re offering a course on spirituality that has a significant focus on Reaching Out. Do you want to tell us a bit about that?

Kyle Norman: Absolutely, absolutely. So, Kamloops is situated right by the Shoe Swap Lakes and there is a retreat center and a camp there called the Sorento Center. And, my diocese has a lot to do with that center, and I was talking to the executive director and he said, you know, we’d love to have you come out and offer something. And we were talking and we got onto the topic of Henri Nouwen, and I just said, you know, I just wonder if, something like the spirituality of Henri Nouwen would be of interest. And he just kind of lit up and said, “That would be amazing.” And so we kind of booked that. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, Reaching Out came to the fore. And so, I’m basing this course as a spirituality of Henri Nouwen.

Kyle Norman: I’m calling it the Four Ways to Be God’s beloved. And so it’s really based on Reaching Out, the inward, outward, and upward movements to that. I’m adding a downward movement because following this, Henri Nouwen really talks a lot about downward mobility, which doesn’t necessarily show up all that often in Reaching Out, but becomes a pretty significant thing for Nouwen. And, so I wanted to include that, but 90% of what we’re going to be talking about is kind of, is taken from Reaching Out to three movements of the spiritual life which is just a wonderful way to articulate what we can think about when we want to live the spiritual life more intentionally and authentically.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Henri wrote Reaching Out in 1975, so downward mobility perhaps wasn’t really part of his motif at that time, but we know, of course, he spent the last 10 years of his life at L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, and that was very much the embodied incarnation – expression of that idea of downward mobility. So we will put information about Kyle’s course in the show notes.

Kyle Norman: Lovely.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: And I think that sounds like an exciting journey for people to go inward, to go outward, to go upward, and then also to take the go down path of descent some of the ancient fathers taught us. Well, we’re going to dive right into talking about Reaching Out. As I’ve said already, it was 1975. I don’t know how old you were, Kyle, but you know, I…

Kyle Norman: I was not even thought of in 1974.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: No <laugh>. I was the ripe old age of five years old. And Henri wrote this, “The contemporary society in which we find ourselves makes us acutely aware of our loneliness. We become increasingly aware that we are living in a world where even the most intimate relationships have become part of competition and rivalry. Our culture has become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain, not only our physical pain, but our emotional and mental pain as well. We have become so used to this state of anesthesia that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us.” And, you know, Henri wrote this before a 24-hour news cycle or smartphones at our fingertips, or even having multiple screens going on at the same time. How critical is it that we hear Henri’s words related to loneliness, the way we try to avoid pain? And he talks about it as a suffocating loneliness that becomes a significant barrier in our spiritual life.

Kyle Norman: Oh, absolutely. And, I think you, previously you used the word prophetic, and I think that’s what we really need to recognize. Nouwen was so prophetic, and how he was able to understand the movements of life and this sense of loneliness and preoccupation and busyness, that was present in 1975, but has just been ramped to the re in 2025 <laugh>. And because of that, his words describing the effect that it has on our souls, on our spiritual lives can just, it just rings so true. I was thinking the other day, like, I wonder what would Henri Nouwen have done with text messages? It was just, you know, this kind of constant availability, which sometimes he found himself in the trap of, you know, he would call up his friends at all hours of the evening when he wanted to connect.

Kyle Norman: But he also recognized the danger of that. And so when we are wanting to recognize how we take a further step in our spiritual life, that has to impact how we address the things of the world and how we navigate the things of the world like preoccupation, like busyness, like the constant distractions that are always around us, that deafen us to the movements of the spirit and the presence of God within us. And so, I think returning in some sense to Henri Nouwen, and even in 1975, Henri Nouwen is a great place to start because he’s able, in such a prophetic way, just put his finger on what is the heart of the issue that we need to recognize, which is, well, he says this movement from a loneliness to solitude.

Wendy VanderWal Martin:  You know, it’s hard to believe that Lent is around the corner as we’re recording this. I’m not sure when it will be released, but I know more and more people who are fasting from social media or texting or screens or, you know, media that comes through screens as a way of saying, for my spiritual health as a discipline in the season of Lent, I am going to set those things aside. And we know that people are more connected and have more online friends than ever, but are more desperately lonely and feeling a deep disconnection in that intimate place within themselves that really matters. And this movement that Henri’s speaking about, this movement inwards reaching to ourselves, our truest self, that the many distractions actually keep us from the kind of examine that would understand our deep self. How do you see that as a parish priest, as someone who’s serving a congregation of people, how do you see people grappling and struggling with that, knowing that these things make us more lonely, and yet we’re still drawn into them?

Kyle Norman: Absolutely. It’s such a trap, you know, and I often see people and they’ll give up, you know, social media or they’ll give up tv. One of the things that Nouwen talks about, is that we don’t respond loneliness to loneliness. Right? Like, so if solitude isn’t just stepping away from the bells and whistles, and just thinking, if I turn everything off, then that’s going to be okay. You can still be lonely and just be silent. Right? Like, that doesn’t actually address the inward things. Nouwen talks about solitude as kind of a stepping into. You step into yourselves, but you also step into this place where this, he talks about holy ground. You create this holy ground where you can receive God and the voice of God that calls you the beloved.

Kyle Norman: And that’s how we return to ourselves. And so we have to understand, you know, Lenten disciplines are fabulous, and turning off social media is wonderful, but if we’re not using that as a way to step into and open up ourselves to the presence of God that declares who we fundamentally are as the beloved children of God, then we might just continually rest in this loneliness, which leads to, you know, he talks about spastic reactions and always the attempt to try to fill that loneliness rather than recognizing that our life is already filled with the affirmations and the presence of God with us.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: He says it so beautifully in Reaching Out, “A man or woman who has developed this solitude of heart is no longer pulled apart by the most divergent stimuli of the surrounding world, but is able to perceive and understand this world from a quiet inner center.” And so it’s not just about being quiet, as you say. It’s not just about being in solitude, the way we might think about pulling away and alone, but it is this deep inner quiet that is grounded in our belovedness, that is nourished in that deep place.

Kyle Norman: And you can have that surrounded by people, and you can surround, you can have that in the mall or at your work and all that stuff, but it, it becomes the basis from which you live and you take that inner quietness with you, that solitude with you into the world. And then that anesthesia, that busyness, that distraction, those begin to lessen as we begin to live our lives from the standpoint of the solitude of the spiritual life.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Now, Kyle, you and I are both preachers and so is Henri, and we know that we often preach larger than our own lives. And Henri himself certainly taught larger than his life, and he speaks about that in the forward to this book, you know, and yet feeling deeply that he was to offer this gift. And so how do you, as someone who’s I’m sure in a very busy parish, the demands on the life of a parish priest are extraordinary in these days. How are you living into solitude yourself? And how do you help the very busy people in your parish make that movement in just really concrete and practical ways, recognizing that we don’t get it perfect. We don’t have it, you know, settled and we’ve arrived.

Kyle Norman: Sure. Absolutely. One of the things I try to remind myself of, and remind other people of, that when we think about any spiritual discipline, solitude or prayer or whatever it is, that we do the disciplines as we can, not as we can’t. Right. And so, by that I mean, like, if we think, “Okay, like, I’m just going to, every day I need to have 20 minutes of solitude, and that’s going to be my special time.” And well, we’re going to work ourselves into condemnation, right? Because all, you know, the 10 minutes of solitude that we spend is only going to testify to the 20 minutes that we didn’t spend in solitude and, and all that stuff. And so it’s easy to kind of take that condemnation upon yourself. And so I try to remind myself that, you know, in my life and in my work and in the business of whatever I have to deal with as life today, how do I take that right now in this place and recognize that I am called to be nobody else than who I am in this moment, and I’m called to be nowhere else, than where I am in this moment, and I am not alone because God is with me.

Kyle Norman: And if I can just quiet myself down enough, even in that place, even just take a couple moments of breath, then I’m able to hopefully reframe that freneticness that sometimes I so often can feel, and I think other people feel.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: I think Henri often also talked about we want our practice to feel successful. So, we want this experience of, you know, connecting to our inner most self, or in the third movement, Henri will speak about prayer, and yet a lot of spiritual practice is waiting. It is, or as Henri would say, wasting time with God.   And the actual journey of sort of the absence of God or the absence of connecting to my inner most self and yet waiting nonetheless strengthens some muscles in us that, you know, we may be surprised down the road at the ways it bears spiritual fruit. When it felt like we were doing it wrong or <laugh>, you know, it wasn’t having the results that we had hoped it would, that the persistence in waiting in and of itself does bear fruit.

Kyle Norman: Absolutely. And he talks a lot about we’re not called to be successful – we’re called to be fruitful. Right. We’re called to enter into something that produces life. And waiting can be active. It can be something that, it’s something that we do, which produces a richer life. But our identity and our rootedness in our spiritual life, isn’t based on what we do. It doesn’t, it’s not based on if people speak well of us, it’s not based on what we have. Like he talks about so many different places, and so if we are able just to stop the doing <laugh> right , and receive, it does reframe us, right? It does help us move inward, and then as we move inward, we naturally begin to move outward and upward.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Indeed. And so the book Reaching Out is about three movements of the spiritual life. The first is from loneliness to solitude. And then Henri moves us to go from hostility to hospitality. And this is how he describes it, “The movement by which our hostilities can be converted into hospitality. It is there that our changing relationship to ourself where we’ve reached into that innermost part of our being can be brought to fruition (or as Henri would say, fruition, fruition) in an ever-changing relationship to our fellow human beings. It’s there that our reaching out to our innermost being can lead to a reaching out to the many strangers whom we meet on our way through life.” Now, he unpacks it not only in the sense of strangers, as in someone we don’t even know, but he speaks about some very key relationships: children and parents, students and teachers, and patients and helpers – those in the helping and caring profession. Now, how do you think that hostility is manifesting today? And in what ways do you most see that hospitality being embodied by people who are following these movements of spirituality?

Kyle Norman: You know, hostility is such a really, I think a good word, because sometimes we don’t recognize the hostilities, or we just think, oh, no, we just like things our way. Like he talks about one of the things about when we welcome the strangers, that we welcome them on their terms, not on ours. So, we don’t say, “You know, as long as you believe the way that I believe, as long as you think the way that I think, as long as you do what I, well, then I will receive you.” But so often that can be like… he would say that’s hostile. And that’s so often the way that things can work. I, you know, I’m in a church and I think everybody who works in a church, probably, you know, we use pews in our church, but everybody probably knows the scenario of asking a visitor to move seat, because that’s my pew <laugh>.

Kyle Norman: Right? And like, I think Nouwen would say that’s hostile, right? That’s not about receiving the person on their terms. What you’re saying is, “Well, you can come as long as you recognize that I have to sit where I want to sit, or I have to sing the songs that I want to sing” and all this kind of stuff. And so, you know, in so many subtle ways, like wanting to always sit in the same spot, <laugh>, you know, that can kind of drive people away. But when we are rooted in ourselves, in our belovedness, which comes from the recognition of Jesus and Jesus welcoming the stranger and loving the enemy and blessing the persecutor, then we naturally find kind of a deep reservoir within ourselves to move in that direction and to maybe sit in a different spot, <laugh>, right? Like, as ludicrous as that might sound. But I think these are some of the ways that it practically works out in our lives. It can work out in big ways like mission trips, and Henri went on a mission trip and these big movements, but it can also work out in these small movements of just embracing a visitor or a stranger or a loved one. Not for what they bring into our lives, not for how they bolster us up, but for who they are and as a way to bless and love them.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: I think this is a time that there’s a lot of  turmoil and even chaos  culturally, politically. We are Canadians. And, currently there’s a lot of talk about, you know, becoming a 51st state. I live in a border town and literally look out my window as I’m recording this out at the country of which some people would want to take Canada for their own. So, I kind of want to slow down the conversation for a moment, because I think we can think about an example like, you know, I should give up my preferred place in church, or we can talk about issues of privilege. And many of us are, are learning and growing and catching up with some of that. But I think many of us are also faced with ideologies and actions that are really frightening.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Or threatening. And the work, Henri doesn’t use nonviolence particularly in Reaching Out, although he makes reference to Martin Luther King and others who embodied a very different way. And the reality is there aren’t simple answers to how to embody hospitality and relinquish our hostility when we perhaps are feeling threatened in a way we haven’t felt threatened before. I’m not only speaking of Canadians, but there are powers in the world today, over which we may deeply disagree with people who have been long time friends or family members. And we’re trying to find a way to make this shift from hostility to hospitality. And again, Henri’s prophetic witness is so significant, but Henri also says, we don’t always get it. We aspire. We are reminded. We are called to this prophetic witness. But I think we need to acknowledge in this conversation, Kyle, how difficult it is, how painful it is, how hard it is to go from an understanding in our head of moving from the house of fear to the house of love, and then actually doing it in the face of  situations that overwhelm us, that are far too big for us to fix or to solve.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: And embracing pain is part of these movements that Henri’s speaking about.

Kyle Norman: Well, and one of the things that I love that Henri Nouwen does here, and reaching out, like talking about hospitality, talking about embracing others, you know, moving from hostility, like it’s not a Pollyanna kind of thing. Nor is it this kind of, this heightened mystical thing that lacks any sort of relevance to our world. No one’s not talking about kind of giving ourselves away. One of the things that I love that he talks about, where he’s talking about reaching out to others, he talks about the power of confrontation.   Right. And so, one of the things that he says is when we want to be really hospitable, we not only have to receive strangers, but also to confront them by an unambiguous presence. Not hiding ourselves behind neutrality, but showing our ideas, opinions, and lifestyle clearly and distinctly.

Kyle Norman: And so this call to love, this call to move outwards, this call to embrace, we don’t lose ourselves in it. It has to be rooted in who we are, and that this is where, you know, the pain can come from. And this is where I think, sometimes the deaths come from. Right. Where we recognize that no… I, you know, receiving another doesn’t mean that, he says in the Inner Voice of Love that we just don’t become public property. Like we have to, we own ourselves, and we are rooted in who we are, and that’s part of the strength of reaching inward, so that we can then bear those confrontations, lovingly <laugh> and peacefully and nonviolently. But we do stand strong in who we are. And I think that has to be an important, and I love that he brings that in there because it can so easy be swept into, “Oh, just love one another, and everything will work out.”

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Well, and the extraordinary courage that it takes to enact what Henri writes about. That, you know, we deal with matters bigger than ourselves. We feel inadequate. We have traumas we deal with. And so, this movement first in this reaching inward, then reaching outward  it’s so crucial that  we keep moving as Henri takes us. But before we get to the third movement, I wanted to come to this particular paradoxical statement that Henri makes, which is that “Poverty makes a good host.” And he goes on to unpack it as a poverty of the mind and a poverty of the heart. Now none of us want to be poor, let’s just face it. None of us want to be powerless. You know, we don’t want to be weak. We don’t want to feel like we’re beholden to others. And so unpack that for us a little bit, Kyle, what is Henri actually saying when he says poverty makes a great host, that poverty of mind and poverty of heart?

Kyle Norman: That would be one thing that I never fully would’ve gotten,until I walked through a really difficult time. So, and I write about this in A Life Loved and Free, but, you know, there was this moment where I was really struggling in my parish. My wife was going through a cancer journey, and like in my spiritual life just turned, turned upside down. And I had developed this sense of, I need to have everything in control, right? Because I’m the priest, right? Like, you know, what are people going to think of me if I don’t have the answers? And if I’m struggling and if I’m having a hard time praying and all this kind of stuff…. And one of the gifts, you know, we reach out to the community, but the community also reaches out to us.

Kyle Norman: And, you know, I got really good at saying fine to everybody who said, you know, how are you doing? I’m fine. But when somebody kind of pushed past that, I got to this moment where I had to, I just had to trust that if somebody wanted to help and were asking me how am I doing that, I just have, I have to trust that they really want to know and they really want to help. And so I just, so poverty in that way, for me, means about just dropping my bravado, dropping my, my ego, and being willing to receive the gift of the other people, right. And to being willing to receive the gift of this community member who asked to help in, in, in a certain way. And so, you know, and I think, you know, that makes me a better priest, that makes me a better husband, and it makes me a better father.

Kyle Norman: It makes me a better Christian, right? So when we are able to recognize that, you know what, it’s not all about, I don’t have to have everything myself, and maybe what God wants to do in me is actually coming through you. And if I am able just to, you know, release my hands and just drop my stuff so that I can receive what is coming to me, then I move deeper into my life with God, then I receive the gift that God’s there, that God’s giving me through you. And as Henri said, that’s what it means to be a good host, <laugh>, right. Not to call the shots and demand everything around me.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Yes. Thank you. I think we all have our own journey to discover what our own poverty of the heart and poverty of the mind is, but it is this openness, this ability to be receptive, even across difference, and not lose ourselves, but be alert to the gift that might surprise us.

Kyle Norman: Absolutely.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Now, you know, people who read Reaching Out the first time might be a little curious about the order. Why do we reach into ourselves and then reach out to others? And then, oh, finally we reach out to God in the third movement from illusion to prayer. But Henri talks about that, and he says, these movements are first only in the sense that they are more quickly recognizable and easier to identify with, not because they are more important. In fact, they could only be described and reflected upon because they are rooted in the most basic movement of the spiritual life, which is the in the movement from illusion to prayer. It is through this movement that we reach out to God and he calls prayer the core of the spiritual life. Now, how have you, he talks about how this notion of illusion is a little hard to explain or describe. How have you experienced illusions? Sort of distracting you from prayer, and what are some really tangible things that you’ve done to address that in your own life?

Kyle Norman: Sure. I think some of the illusions that… well, I think a lot of the illusions that I’ve wrestled with,   because I am a priest and preacher, and, and I think a lot of the illusions have to deal with my own competency, right?  Like that, that, well, I know what to do <laugh>, and I know how to pray in this situation. I know what to say. I know all of this kind of stuff. I know how to read the Bible. And so, it can be easy then to do my prayers, you know, rushing through whatever it is thinking, okay, I, I’ve done that, that’s great. Or read the Bible. I read the chapter in five minutes and I’m done, and I’m good. For me, you know, part of the illusion is getting it done right, kind of that successful kind of thing.

Kyle Norman: Can I be successful in saying my prayer? Can I be successful in reading the Bible? Can I be successful in preaching the sermon? And, you know, peeling back the layers and saying, no, this isn’t about, success. This is about fruitfulness. This isn’t about information. This is about formation. Who are you being formed into? How are you growing? And so the practical steps for me is to try to engage these places of my spiritual life, whatever it might be, fasting, worship, scripture, reading, all of these kind of things to  approach that, not from the stance of I know what to do, but to be more contemplative, meditative, be a little bit more slow in this process. Now, in time-wise, if I am, if I read the Bible slowly, it only actually takes me like an additional two minutes to read the passage.

Kyle Norman: So I’m not wait, you know, like, I don’t lose a lot of time, but it just slows me down so that I can be present. And I think that’s kind of a big thing, is being present in this moment with this activity of prayer or scripture reading, or whatever it might be, so that I can hear, and I can feel God around me, and I can hear the presence in the voice of God as God speaks in the silences and in the listening, or in the words that I’m reading. If I try to muscle my way through it and say, you know, I will do this, I will do this, I will do this, then it becomes more something in my own strength rather than receiving the gift of God in this place, in this moment.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Thank you. It strikes me that so much of the church is polarized today. And something that Henri spends quite a bit of time talking about is our images of God. Our sense of… we’ve got God figured out. And we tend to be in our own echo chambers. We listen to the other folks who speak about theology and the spiritual life and ethics, et cetera, who agree with us. And so our sense of who God is gets reinforced continuously in that particular arena. And, you know, we glibly talk about iron sharpening iron at times, but truly, in what ways do you think making space to be in deep sustained dialogue with brothers and sisters who are grappling with things differently than we are around interpretation or ethics or whatever? I feel like there’s sort of a fatigue in a lot of denominations and local churches even that say, we did that. We’ve done it, we bought the T-shirt. You know, we’re done with that. We need to get on with it and kind hang out with our folks, but in what ways might we be unknowingly contributing to a certain illusion of what God is like?

Kyle Norman: I think that, I think that’s the big thing. And so I write a lot on what I call spiritual discouragement, and this sense that largely, and I think in churches today, we don’t allow that dialogue to occur, right? And to sit in the pain and the struggling. And so as a priest and as a pastor, you know, like I’ve received a lot of, I’ve talked with people and so many people think that if I’m struggling in prayer, that somehow I’m doing it wrong  Right? And the problem is me, right? And sometimes that gets reinforced by you just need to pray harder. Or if you’re going through a hard time, you know, then it is, okay, well, we’re just going to pray, and that hard time is going to get removed from you.

Kyle Norman: Wait, wait, wait, wait. No, <laugh>, like that’s, you know, the beauty of our faith is that we understand a God who doesn’t necessarily always remove us from the hardships of life, but dwells in the hardships with us. And so if we would build the capacity to be able to say, “Hey, I’m really struggling.” Or I have this question and not address it with, you know, easy sound bites and rote answers, and all that kind of stuff, then we will actually grow our capacity to hear what God says to us in those moments, and to receive the gift of love in those moments. And again, you know, like, I wouldn’t have known this when my wife was going through cancer. I would have a lot of people say to me, you know, don’t worry, Kyle, God’s not picking on her. He’s handpicked her. And I thought, wait, like sure. That kind of sounds… we’re just going to pray the pain away. No, wait. Like, let’s, let’s peel back the layers a little bit. Like those are become bandaids that we put on a situation to make us feel better so we don’t have to deal with the ugliness that is before us, or the questions, or the hurt. But we worship a God who takes that ugliness and hurt upon himself, right? And so being willing to dwell in that place and not explain it away, not, you know, but to actually talk about it and to engage it and to recognize, well, where is God in this? And even just ask the questions and to yell and to scream and do all that kind of stuff. That’s actually how we reach out to God. You know, believing that we can’t do that is an illusion that actually keeps God a little bit at bay.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: My friend Bradley Jersak speaks of a co-suffering God.

Kyle Norman: Absolutely.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Now, one of the risks of doing a podcast like this is that we’re in some ways giving soundbites of a book that is so rich. And so we hope that this conversation is a bit like an hor d’oeuvre <laugh> that it will  compel you to either pick it up and read it for the first time, or read it again, Reaching Out: the three movements of the spiritual life. Henri speaks about three aspects of prayer that we can practice when we feel like we don’t know how to pray. One is the contemplative reading of scripture. Some of us know that as Lectio Divina. And, and if you look up Lectio Divina through your Google tools, you’ll find some very simple guides on how to engage in contemplative reading of scripture. We have a new series of daily meditations this year that I compiled from maybe slightly different sources than have typically been used for the daily meditations.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: And, we, I designed it so that people would read them as a form of Lectio Divina. They’re shorter, and they’re not meant to educate. They’re meant to make space for God to read contemplatively. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is to make space for God. And again, Henri speaks about wasting time with God, which he both was deeply committed to and also not very good at. He talks about monkeys jumping in the tree. And then thirdly, he speaks about having a spiritual guide. Now that may or may not be a spiritual director, someone who’s has the qualifications of a spiritual director, but what I always think is slightly ironic about the title spiritual director is that they’re not directive <laugh>. They are there to accompany and to invite you to listen to God, to be curious with you about what God might be saying. Now Kyle, how have you found those three intermingling practices helpful for you?

Kyle Norman: They’ve been immensely helpful. I love Lectio Divina. It’s you know, just that kind of, that slow, repetitive movement of, of scripture. I remember the first time I ever tried it, it was, well, it was transformative, right? Like, you know, and because I was reading something that, you know, obviously I’ve read before, but it was like in those movements of, you know, meditating on it and thinking, “Okay, so what is Jesus saying to me in this?” Really started to feel that, “Hey, this text is actually addressing me. I’m not reading it. It’s reading me.” Right? And so that was just a really kind of, so, and again, that slowing down and not rushing, “Oh, I know, I know this parable. Let’s move on.” Right? The slowing down and reading it, and with ears that are open to hear possibly what God might be using this passage to speak into our lives, in a way which is not just about, can I answer the Bible trivia?

Kyle Norman: But can I, can I see how this applies? I think that’s, I think that’s fabulous. I’ve had a spiritual director previously, particularly in that hard year, I had a spiritual director I talked to a lot. Like, it’s just, you know, it’s so important I think, in terms of, you know, cultivating these things in our lives in the ways that they fit most organically, right? So there has been a time where I spent a little bit more time with Lectio, and then there was a time where I spend a little bit more time with a spiritual director. And now I don’t have a director per se, but I have people that I call for mentorship and say, “Hey, you know, like, I’m struggling with this.” Because if we fully believe that we exist in a community and that God uses community to speak into our lives  then we need to allow that community to have voice, through sacred readings, through building in these solitude, these places of prayer, but also these conversations with holy guides that we can kind of have to affirm us and to encourage us and yes to even to challenge us if we need to be challenged in a loving, peaceful way.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: The book is Reaching Out: the three movements of the spiritual life. One of the things that Henri speaks about is the prayer of the heart  and does a wonderful description of that prayer going from our mind and our language and our mouth into our very being. And so, again, such a rich staple within the Henri Nouwen canon, if you would, we encourage you to pick it up, read it. Thank you Reverend Kyle for being with us for this rich conversation. And friends, thank you for listening. Thank you for being with us and wanting to dig into a spiritual life that is relinquishing the loneliness, the hostility, and the illusions for a life of authentic vulnerability, a poverty of the heart that makes space for God. And so friends, I remind myself as I remind you, never ever, ever forget you are the beloved of God.