The Inner Voice of Love

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Welcome everyone to a new episode of Henri’s Bookshelf. I’m Wendy VanderWal Martin, and I’m so pleased today to be having a conversation with a longtime friend, Diane Marshall. Now, before I get to my introduction of Diane, I want to tell you that today we’re focusing on the Inner Voice of Love. Now, the book that I have is my own personal copy, but there’s a brand new edition that not only has a beautiful new cover in lovely lilac, it would match your scarf, Diane, for those of you listening, she’s wearing a beautifully colored scarf, but the Inner Voice of Love was rereleased with also a brand new study guide. So not just a lovely new cover, but a study guide that will really help you engage Henri’s deep reflections. Now, this book was written as a personal journal about eight years before Henri’s death.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: But it was something he never thought would be published. He thought it was between him and God, and yet friends really encouraged him to offer that gift. The subtitle is a Journey through Anguish to Freedom. And his friends said, “There are others who are suffering, who might deeply benefit and experience healing as you journeyed with God, Henri.” And so the final year of his life, 1996, Image Books through Random House published The Inner Voice of Love. So what a, a beautiful book it’s been. I know so many people who’ve read it and have experienced it deeply. But Diane Marshall was a personal friend of Henri’s. She’s a retired psychotherapist, has been a counselor to probably countless people in many ways, offering just deep, resonance, empathy, care, guidance. She now lives on the Sunshine Coast of beautiful British Columbia, gets to hang out with children and grandchildren, but continues to be passionate about restorative justice, about many different marginalized groups. And Diane, I have just known you to be a woman of such passion to participate with God in making things right. So we’re thrilled, thrilled to have you on Henri’s Bookshelf today. And really, you became close friends with Henri in the last years of, of his life when he was at L’Arche Daybreak. But you encountered him a lot earlier when you read the Wounded Healer, and that had a huge impact on your sense of calling. Can you tell us about that?

Diane Marshall: Yes, I would love to tell you about that, Wendy and, and all who are listening. Thank you. I had a major breakdown myself. I was a single mom with three kids, little kids. And in 1975, I was given, my undergraduate degree was in psychology, and I had been working in all kinds of different areas until then. But my dear friend who I worked for, who was the provincial member of the legislature here in British Columbia, gave me a book for Christmas in 1975 entitled The Wounded Healer. And he had been encouraging me to think about going back to university and getting my master’s in counseling psychology. But I didn’t have the confidence at all. And when I read Henri’s book, it changed my life, really, because it spoke to the fact that we can be participants in a healing process with people, even though we’re wounded ourselves. We don’t have to have it all together. And I certainly didn’t. So I had worked up the courage to go have the interview that was accepted into the program, got student housing with my children and all my work and my colleagues since then has been really thanks to Henri’s book, which I then got to tell him about in person.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Yes, and we’re going to get to that, but about this idea of calling something Henri was so passionate about, searched for in his own life. In in the Inner Voice of Love, he says this, “It’s not going to be easy to listen to God’s call. Your insecurity, your self-doubt and your great need for affirmation make you lose trust in your inner voice and run away from yourself. But you know that God speaks to you through your inner voice, and that you will find joy and peace only if you follow it. You have friends who know that your inner voice speaks the truth, and who can affirm what it says. They offer you the safe space where you can let that voice become clearer and louder. Trust the few who know your inner journey and want you to be faithful to it. They will help you stay faithful to God’s call.” And Diane, I know you to be someone who long past the typical age of retirement, you have been so faithful to the call that you sensed even as you read Wounded Healer. But all those years later, after reading Wounded Healer, you and Henri met under rather tragic circumstances. What was that encounter like?

Diane Marshall: Well, we had met kind of informally at L’Arche Daybreak events that I had attended because I was doing some consulting work with L’arche at that time. And but not in a personal way. And then we were, we both ended up being supporters of a wonderful family who had a son who was suicidally depressed and was hospitalized. And tragically in the hospital, this young man took his own life. And it was very heartbreaking. And Henri was asked to give the message at the Anglican Church that this family was part of. And he spoke then about something that I’ve never forgotten and have been able to share with other people who’ve had such situations in their own lives over the years of losing someone. So tragically. He talked about people sometimes being unable to bear the weight of life, and that all we can do is completely commit them into God’s eternal love.

Diane Marshall: And it meant the world to the family involved. I think it meant a great deal to that church community and certainly meant a great deal to me. So when Henri and I agreed to get together partly to talk about the limitations of psychiatry, the limitations of spiritual care that someone so deeply gifted, but so deeply wounded, was unable to bear we got together for dinner. Henri’s invitation to me to join him for dinner at a little restaurant he really liked, and we talked for five hours, <laugh>, I think we closed the restaurant down and decided then and there to be, to become friends. And that was, so, that was 1990, 1991. And it was a very profound conversation. I told him I never thought I’d get to meet him. The person who helped change the trajectory of my own life through reading the Wounded Healer. And then I also told him that I’d had a serious breakdown before I read that book. So then he told me about his breakdown and breakthrough and the journal he had written. And so that, that that began our relationship really – of conversation, right, until the time of his death

Wendy VanderWal Martin: So amazing. It’s one of my deep regrets that I never met him in person. So I’ll confess publicly on a podcast that I’m a wee bit jealous that you had that opportunity, Diane. But I can, just knowing you and being immersed in Henri’s writing, I can just imagine the two of you closing down that restaurant and just having such deeply connected conversation. Now, Henri, of course, is known for offering a deep sense of intimacy and vulnerability in his writing. But it might be argued that the Inner Voice of Love, his journal, from a time of profound heartbreak, is the most intimate and vulnerable. And you and Henri accompanied each other through, through really some very difficult experiences. In the book, Henri says, “Much of your ability to trust your friends depends on your belief in your own goodness. And for many of us, that’s very difficult, isn’t it, to believe in our own goodness.” And then he goes on, “Allow your friends the freedom to respond as they want, and are able to let their receiving be as free as your giving. Then you will become capable of feeling true gratitude.” Diane, you and I have talked about this story, but will you tell us about the time that Henri hosted you over a very wintry weekend at L’Arche?

Diane Marshall: Yes. It was 1994. And it was definitely a, a blizzardy weekend. And he was going to be alone in the house where he lived up in L’Arche Daybreak. And he asked me if I could get up there in this storm. And I said, “Okay, I’ll try.” And he invited me to come and stay for a couple of days with him. And he knew I was in a very, very sad, sad place in my life. I’d lost my mother. My marriage had broken down. And, and the associate clinical director was whom I’d worked for so many years had died. So everything had happened in the space of about four months. And he knew that I was kind of probably on the verge of collapse. And he was right. So I arrived in the evening and he had made tea.

Diane Marshall: So he had tea and cookies, and I couldn’t believe it. He put on sad songs from the Carnival of the Animals. Well, after he took my coat and had me sit down, he said, “I’d like you to listen to something before we talk.” And he put on the swan song. Now, for any of you who haven’t heard the swan song you might not fully appreciate it, but I hope you can listen to it at some point. It is very deeply moving. And all I did was cry. I just cried and cried. And then he played it again, and I cried and cried. That was, that was just like him, you know, I think you should listen to this a couple more times. So he played it again, and I bawled my eyes out, really. And that was that was the kind of beautiful gift he gave me, really. And then he gave me some things on that same weekend, Wendy, too, that he wanted me to reflect on. And he reflects on this in, in the Inner Voice of Love quite a bit. The issue of self-rejection. That when you feel rejected yourself by someone you’ve trusted or loved, it’s even through death, if someone you’ve trusted or loved it, it can lead to profound inner self rejection. And Henri gave me one of the sternest things he’s ever said to me. He said, “Do not let people rob you of your calling.”

Diane Marshall: And wow. He said, and then he said, “Go and write about that in your journal for a while, and then come back and share with me what you wrote. So I did, went and wrote about it, cried some, but that was okay.  I wrote about it and got clarity around the boundaries of myself and not being so porous. And Henri and I then talked about that quite a bit because he said that he’d written about that in his own journal that he’d kept when he was in recovery, that he had to learn what healthy boundaries were so that he wasn’t so porous and so vulnerable. And that that was part of the Inner Voice of Love. So I learned a great deal that weekend. And then can I tell you about driving with Henri in the snow storm –

Diane Marshall: because it was hilariously funny, and it gives you a little picture of what he was like. So he decided that we’d go downtown in this blizzard on the main highway to the downtown L’Arche Toronto community for dinner and a celebration of the Eucharist and conversation. So we get in the car, now, Henri, for any of you who know him or see, talk with his hands all the time, that’s how he expressed himself. We get in the car and start driving, and he’s got just, just, you know, honestly, he was hilarious. But I was terrified. So I kept saying, “Henri, please keep both hands on the steering wheel.” This is, we didn’t even, couldn’t see the road, couldn’t see anything. It was terrible. We got there and had had lovely visit with everyone there and dinner there, but then we had to go back home and it was still snowing.

Diane Marshall: And I was, and Henri said, “Oh, I’ve got something I have to talk to you about.” And he started talking about his experience with the trapeze troop. However, trapeze people fly through the air and we’re driving in this blizzard, as he is describing, flying through the air. Honestly, I was, I thought, well, okay, <laugh>, I can’t do anything. I kept reminding him to put two hands on the wheel, and he would, for a while, we got back home, and then we had another long conversation that evening about everything and listen to more music. And that is what he’s like, he’s full of ideas, very, very expressive in his body. He’s expressive, like he’s up front talking. He walks around and talks. And so he was that weekend was really profoundly healing for me, in the same way reading the Wounded Healer all those years earlier had been, that was a great privilege for me.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Well, and I think he could be such a deep soul friend for you in those moments, because he was no stranger to being at a breaking point and experiencing profound heartbreak. Again from the Inner Voice of Love, Henri said, “You have to trust the place that is solid, the place where you can say yes to God’s love. Even when you do not feel it right now, you feel nothing except emptiness and the lack of strength to choose. But keep saying, ‘God loves me and God’s love is enough.’ You have to choose the solid place over and over again and return to it after every failure.” Now, Diane, how did you experience Henri living this truth? Because it’s, it’s one thing to offer it to another. Many of us who are in some sort of caring service can care for others better sometimes than we care for ourselves. But how did you experience in your friendship with Henri, his returning again and again to that solid place of God’s love?

Diane Marshall: Well, partly, I think, and it was part of his nature that he was an expressive person. And so being able to talk and share even to large groups, I think made a difference for him in consolidating his own inner self in God.  Can I give you an example? That was another humorous one. Very humorous and very delightful. Henri is willing to go outside the boundaries of his normal life in say, churches or a Catholic community or L’Arche or other things. And when Rick Tobias, who was then the executive director of Young Street Mission, who’s no longer with us, but he and I used to go up on a regular basis to visit Henri and go, first of all to the, the morning service that Henri led, because Henri was the priest of the community at L’Arche Daybreak.

Diane Marshall: And so he would do a morning service and Eucharist, which was beautiful because people with intellectual disabilities couldn’t understand a lot of words. Words. So he made it simple. He made it accessible so that they understood what we were doing together. So then Rick and I, with our muffin and coffee would meet with Henri in his room and planned well, first of all, we asked Henri, and he was excited about the idea to be the keynote speaker at, at the very first Street Level Conference that was going to be in Toronto. And it was going to cover people working with street youth, people in the sex trade, people in the drug trade, all the people who worked in these areas. Some of them were really tough. They were former bikers or they were still bikers. And we had an amazingly enormous, and got a huge amount of funding from the federal government. And I was on the board of Street Level at that time. We got the money so that it all, people could come from across the country and stay for two days in a hotel in Toronto.

Diane Marshall: Henri was the keynote speaker. Now, everybody else who, who didn’t know Henri, including other board members, thought, why would you have a Roman Catholic priest as a speaker… and we just said, will you wait and see? So Henri was phenomenal. He was phenomenal. Wanted to meet everybody, wanted to talk to everybody. But then in the final meeting together, Henri decided we should all sing together. Ubi Caritas in Latin, of course. And nobody knew what it meant. And he explained it. And then he gets up front and he conducts this huge crowd of about 400, 500 people, tough looking people, people with tattoos all over them, people who are sitting there like this dumbfounded. And he got everybody singing this. And then he decided we should do it in rounds. And he split the group up and we sang it in rounds. And I think it, in my memory, that’s one of the most incredibly wonderful, memories I have of Henri, of who he was, because he could be with all these people who were very different from the world he lived in. They didn’t have the education he had, and he connected with them and they loved him. And it created and he helped create an environment of love and care in that conference with all these disparate people,

Wendy VanderWal Martin: An environment of love. Indeed, that was Henri’s strength. Everyone I talked to who knew him personally talks about how he was fully 110% present with whoever was in front of him.

Diane Marshall: That’s right.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Now this is a quote that I pulled from the Inner Voice of Love, and, and I think it’s so compelling as someone who read Henri as a hurting teenager, he’s talking about how we share our own narratives. And this is what he says, “There are two ways of telling your story. One is to tell it compulsively and urgently to keep returning to it because you see your present suffering as the result of your past experiences.” “But,” he says, “there is another way you can tell your story, from the place where it no longer dominates you. You can speak about it with a certain distance and see it as the way to your present freedom. The compulsion to tell your story is gone from the perspective of the life you now live and the distance you now have. Your past does not loom over you.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: It has lost its weight and can be remembered as God’s way of making you more compassionate and understanding toward others.” And I think, Diane, the story you’ve told us about the Street Level conference, Henri interacting with some really tough characters who now were acting out of compassion and understanding for other street involved human beings. And we know that those folks on the front lines bring such dignity and value to our street level friends. What are some of the ways that you saw Henri growing in his own freedom with less compulsion, less returning to his past and really letting that be a leverage point, a lever to a freedom of the future?

Diane Marshall: You know Henri said this to me, and I’m sure he said it to many other people who knew him well, fairly well. He had to practice what he preached. He, he accepted so many invitations to speak, and then he’d write, and then he’d speak again somewhere else, and he’d be flying here and he’d be flying there. And I think his bishop, he told me one time that his bishop in Holland had told him that he had to stop flying about and start sitting down and do some writing. And I’m not sure what he was working on at the time, but I was going to the UN conference on women. I was part of the Canadian groups that went to that in Beijing in 1995. So I asked him if he’d like to stay in my apartment while I was gone, because then nobody could reach him and find him and it would be a boundary.

Diane Marshall: And he said, “Oh, yes, I’d love that.” So he did. He stayed there the whole time. And he was typical him, he left me a note saying, “I’m so sorry I didn’t remake the bed, but the sheets are in the dryer.” When I got home, there was this little note on the table, and he was there for, I was away for three weeks. So he came and went and used the place for three weeks. But he did do a lot of writing and having a physical boundary around him where he couldn’t be intruded upon was a discipline he had to learn, I think. And I think one of the things he told me anyway about his years teaching at, at Harvard and Yale, that he was, or was at Princeton, sorry, whatever. He just was always available. And again, he got to the, that verge of you know, burnout.

Diane Marshall: So coming to L’Arche , Toronto L’Arche Daybreak was supposed to be a way of reigning himself in that way. So I do know that that was a lifelong issue for him. And I think it’s one of the things that, it was an ongoing learning curve for him, and it was a warning. He gave me a warning about that for me, that I needed to take more time apart from my work as clinical director of a pretty busy psychotherapy center in Toronto, and make sure that I had times apart where I had better boundaries too, around myself. Most people in this, in the people helping field struggle with this, we all do.

Diane Marshall: So that was a growing edge for him. I think, I think setting boundaries (didn’t) come easily to him. But I think the Inner Voice of Love, he describes the task of learning to set boundaries as a good thing. Because, because when you’re brought up to believe in self-giving love as a way of loving, there’s truth to it, but there’s also a wisdom in knowing when to step back and take time apart and recharge your batteries to use an old expression. And so that was part of what I, I saw him trying to do. And I also, we also had conversations about it.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Yes. And Henri was so very human. One of the reasons I think his books have an enduring connection with people even decades after they were written, is because he situates his own humanity in this journey and drive to know God more deeply and even more to be grounded in his belovedness.

Diane Marshall: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: So what a gift the Inner Voice of Love is to us. If you have suffered, if you have struggled, if you are hurting, if you are looking for a deeper connection with God, we encourage you to pick up the Inner Voice of Love, a very deeply personal journal of Henri Nouwen through a very difficult time in his life. And Diane I’ll give you a final word, and then we always like to give Henri the final word. Is there any other just story or tidbit of wisdom you’d like to share with us before we bring this episode to a close?

Diane Marshall: The only thing I can think about is at Henri’s funeral, which was at, at a large church in Richmond Hill. One of the people who knew Henri, because he knew so many people, and he touched so many people who spoke, was Fred Rogers from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. And he talked about Henri helping him, having Fred Rogers who spent time with children, helping them feel loved, but helping him himself feel loved and affirmed so that he could give that love out every day to children. And he, he shared about that. And that was very moving to me. And it was a wonderful remembrance of the way in which Henri touched multitudes of people’s lives, really, not just through his writing, but through his speaking, and then what other people did who, who you know, like Fred, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, all those children, mine included, who had loved that, that program. So I think that’s something that I kind of hold dear to my heart because it was it’s a remembrance of how much Henri gave of himself to so many people, street level workers, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, <laugh> books. He wrote the Eucharist that he made simple for, for L’Arche Daybreak people with intellectual disabilities. And he included them in the service. What an amazing gift that was and that he was to the world. And I’m very, very grateful for the opportunity to have known him

Wendy VanderWal Martin: Well, and I often think about how much Henri wrote not only about death, but about the presence of those who have died and the ways in which they continue to bear fruit. And the Henri Nouwen Society is not simply a shrine to Henri’s memory or, or simply trying to protect or preserve his legacy. But it’s really living that fruitfulness today, seeking to connect people, whether they know of Henri or whether they’re hearing about Henri Nouwen for the first time to say, pick up one of his books, they’re life changing. And so we started with you reading Wounded Healer back in the seventies, maybe never guessing at that point that you would become such a deep, intimate, personal friend of Henri Nouwen’s. And then through the Inner Voice of Love, his journal, which in his generativity in his generosity finally said, yes, I will make that available, even though I can’t imagine the amount of vulnerability he must have felt in making the decision to allow it to be published.

Wendy VanderWal Martin: But I want to close our time, first of all, by just saying a huge thank you, Diane, how wonderful to be able to share your stories of Henri with a much broader audience. And perhaps others will feel a wee bit of my jealousy of just what a wonderful friendship you enjoyed with him. So thank you for being with us and let’s give Henri the last word from the Inner Voice of Love, “When you discover in yourself something that is a gift from God, you have to claim it and not let it be taken away from you. Sometimes people who do not know your heart will altogether miss the importance of something that is part of your deepest self, precious in your eyes, as well as God’s. They might not know you well enough to be able to respond to your genuine needs. It is then that you have to speak to your heart and follow your deepest calling.” And so, friends, thank you for being with us. And as Henri taught so many of us, never, ever forget that you are the beloved of God.