Sam Lee

Bruce: Hello and welcome to this episode of the Love Henri podcast, produced by the Henri Nouwen Society. My name is Bruce Adema, I’m the executive director of the Henri Nouwen Society, and I’m part of a great team that encourages spiritual transformation through the writings and legacy of the spiritual guide Henri Nouwen. If you’ve appreciated Henri’s wisdom for a long time or if you’ve just been introduced to it, I encourage you to sign up for our daily meditations on our website, Henrinouwen.org, where you can be reminded every day that you are a beloved child of God. Our guest today is Dr. Sam Lee. Dr. Lee is a co-lead pastor at Spring Garden Baptist Church in Toronto. He has over 15 years of ministry experience with children and youth ministry, and he has been the co-lead pastor of Spring Garden Church since 2020. His dissertation, which is one of the reasons why I am so excited to have him as my guest, was on the central role of spiritual identity in youth integrating Henri Nouwen’s book, The Life of the Beloved.  This man knows what he’s talking about when it comes to Henri Nouwen!  Thank you Sam, for joining us. I’m really looking forward to our conversation. I’ve introduced you in a really, really brief way. What more should we know about you to understand who you are?

Sam: Thanks Bruce, for this opportunity. What can I say about myself? I am married to my beautiful wife, Jen, and have three children who are grown now. Taylor, Toby, and Olive are 19, 17 and 14 now. So they’re all kind of growing up and really, they’re the base of who I am.  They keep me sane a lot of the times, keep me grounded, as does obviously the community that surround me. I love the outdoors, I’ve been into mountain biking more recently.  I came from Korea in 1987 and have been in Toronto my whole life since then.

Bruce: Thank you. Good to meet you. Now, your dissertation focused on youth ministry in terms of one of Henri Nouwen’s books. What made you choose Henri Nouwen to be one of the focuses of your dissertation?

Sam: In many ways, I stumbled upon Henri Nouwen. I mean, I’ve read Nouwen and knew of him and really appreciated his writing. While I was in my studies at Acadia, in one of my courses, I was focusing on trying to see youth ministry beyond what normally we call youth ministry.  This is what Dallas Willard calls the Gospel of Sin Management – what does it mean to form our children and youth in their relationship to Jesus? In one of my courses, really it was a simple quote that I mentioned Nouwen in his Life of the Beloved. And so then that really got me looking at that book a little bit more and just seeing how he talks about what it means to be the beloved child of God, and that kind of set it into motion. So I kind of stumbled upon that, but I’m very grateful for finding it since it became the central piece of my studies.

Bruce: Interesting. Thanks for sharing that. Now, this podcast that we’re doing is called Love Henri, because we’re drawing on the letters that he wrote during his life. He was a popular author, frequently led retreats and gave lectures and such things. And because of that, he became well known and people would write him, wanting advice on this issue or that or something in their life. And he invariably responded to them. Henri had this lovely habit. He kept every letter that he received, and he made a carbon copy of every letter that he sent. And all of those letters are in the archive at the University of Toronto. There are actually over 16,000 letters of Henri Nouwen that are there. What a ministry he had. Now, some of those letters have been pulled together and put into a book called Love Henri.

Bruce: What we are doing in this podcast is taking one of those letters and speaking with somebody that has some knowledge or some insight into the topic of the letter.  We’re looking at what Henri wrote, but also going beyond so that we can understand how we can delve into that topic. Now, today’s letter was written on September 26th, 1989, to a man named Seth, a young man who wrote him.  I’d like to read Henri’s response to that letter. Remember, this was written 35 years ago.  “Dear Seth, thanks so much for your very good letter and for your very kind words about Clowning in Rome.”  Clowning in Rome was a book that Henri wrote.  “I appreciate the honesty with which you write about the church. I wish I could write you a very long letter in response to what you write, but at least I want to say to you that the mystical life, the life of communion with God is indeed the heart of all spirituality.

Bruce: You are right that all the great saints have found this God. But I also want to say that all the mystics I have read, such as John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Thomas Emus, and Meister Eckhart were all people deeply connected with the church. The church, as you say, so clearly can be in the way of God, but it will never cease to be also the way to God. This is the hard paradox of the religious life. When we give up the church completely, we will end up losing God. In many ways we are in the same situation Jesus was in during his life. He strongly criticized the religious leaders of his time, but continue to say that people should listen to their words without following their example. While Jesus was very critical of the religious institutions of his time, he never suggested that people could do without them.

Bruce: And this is even true today. I just spent in a month in France, and I was deeply impressed by the beautiful new spiritual life that is developing in the French Church. But the French church also is a church full of conflict and a church in which there are many hardened hearts among the clergy as well as lay people. It has always struck me that the Great Saints, such as St. Francis and the contemporary saints such as Mother Teresa and John Vanny, continue to say that we have to remain faithful to the church even in the midst of all conflicts without sound doctrine about who God is as Father, son, and Holy Spirit. Without some external structure, it will be impossible to live a faithful spiritual life. Doctrines and structures are basically nothing but the fences around the garden where we can meet God. They are to keep us connected with the truth so that we can enter freely in communion with the one who wants to share his love with us.

Bruce: Well, these are just some reflections I have, and they’re obviously very tentative, but I simply wanted you to know that I never would be able to write Clowning in Rome if I had not been deeply connected with the church. Again, thanks for writing and for your openness and directness and closeness. I send you one of my later books that you might like to read. It means a lot to me that you are interested in what I am trying to express in words. Sincerely yours, Henri Nouwen.” That’s a, a thoughtful letter that he wrote. Sam, what is your response or reaction to this letter?

Sam: It’s a great letter because it speaks to what no one was writing about in Clowning in Rome. He was there for about five or six months, staying in Rome. He talks about what a clown is.  He talks about clowns that are people who are in the periphery, that may not be in the main center stage of things, but he equates clowns with people.  He says pastors should be people who are in the periphery sometimes, that they’re serving and doing things that are what God is calling us to do that may not be always at the center stage. Yet, when we see them as clowns who can smile and cry and have tears that, then we can relate to the clowns and say we are like them, and they are like us.

Sam: It is interesting that Seth writes about being spiritual but not religious, because that’s what Nouwen says in the book.  There is hope in the Church of Rome because there are enough clowns there. Even though there is that sense of organized religion with the cathedrals and all of that, that there’s still enough clowning around, enough clowns who are doing ministry in ways that can still give him and us hope of the church.  I found it interesting that Seth responded that way by asking about what is the value of the church to those who are spiritual and not religious? I’m actually curious because at the end of that letter where Nouwen says he’s attached a book for him to read, one of his later books. I’m curious to know what that book was.

Bruce: I have no idea what that book was. He wrote a lot of really great books.  This was written in 1989 and he died seven years later.  We’ll have to check his bibliography and see which were written around that time.

Bruce: What I find interesting is how timely this letter is.  When I talk to many people, they say, “oh, I am a deeply spiritual person, but I’m not a religious person.” The spiritual but not religious set, which is a growing part of the population. What is the difference, Sam, between being spiritual and being religious?

Sam: When I hear that from people, I usually want to ask them a question first just to see where they are coming from. I find people who say they’re spiritual but not religious have had a negative experience with religion or with organized religion. So they want or they recognize, I think, that within them they are more than this physical world, that there is something beyond themselves. They want that connection. They want that spiritual communion with God, yet possibly because of past experiences or just maybe the views that they have with the organized church as it were, that I find that they don’t want that to be part of their spirituality.  I believe this is a movement towards a very individualized faith. That faith is about you and your journey. And although there is that intimate or that individual personal aspect of faith, one would say faith is never an individual task.

Sam: To be spiritual is to be part of a community. For him, that’s why I think he believes in the church, because the church is the body of Christ. It’s the people. And so what I would say to people who say they’re spiritual is, I would ask them the question, “who is the community that’s around you? Do you have a community? And how does your spirituality fit in or interface with your community?” Because I never think I truly believe your faith is never about yourself as much as beyond that. Like we talked about just before we started, religion is everyone and everyone is religious, whether we want to be or not.  People have kind of made that dichotomy between the two. It could be spiritual but not religious. I think they’re the same in many ways as well.

Bruce: I have wondered when I hear this that to be spiritual is something that’s internal. It’s about how the person intersects and receives and responds to the God, the Divine, the holy other, whatever term you wish to use.  It’s your response to that which tends to be very individual.  Religion is the formal response to that, which is communal, can be structural, and it has shape to it. I appreciate what you’re saying – that people who say, “I am not religious”, probably have had a negative experience with organized religion. Now, if spirituality is this reaction to our relation with the divine, how does a person develop that? How do we open ourselves up to God coming into our lives?

Sam: Nouwen would say that sometimes we look too much on to the outside, but God is within that.  We need to find God within our hearts, because he refers to the incarnation.  In a couple of his books, he talks about the incarnation and how God has become flesh and wants to dwell with us.  It’s because of that belief and theology that we are embodied beings recognizing that God is with us. To me, and I think Nouwen would also say, is in solitude. He talks about solitude as the beginning of this communion with the divine in that it’s looking within and being alone.  It’s in that quiet place where we’re faced with who we are, who we truly are.  He believes that it’s in solitude that we are faced with our compulsions, our masks.

Sam: The voices we hear try to tell us who we are and who we tell ourselves that we are. We have to be able to get to a place beyond that to hear that quiet still voice that says good things about us, that says “you are my beloved son, my beloved daughter.”  That’s what we need to hear, and that that is who we are. That’s our true self. And then out of that, then we can enter into the world and be a people of communion. So he talks about the importance of being part of a community, you can’t have community without solitude and solitude without community. Those two things are interrelated. That’s one thing I love about what Nouwen says about that.  In many ways it gives a lot of space and openness to people who are spiritual to say, “yeah, I mean, this is what I want to experience. This is what I’m feeling, that there’s something beyond myself that I need to connect with.“  Henri would give some words to that. I think that’s where the church comes into play, too, right? Because we don’t know about Jesus, we don’t know about the God of love without the church, because without the church, you don’t have the Bible. The Bible didn’t exist before the church.  Sometimes I think that even with the Reformation movement, we have forgotten that the scriptures came to being through a community of believers. He really believed in that idea. I think that’s what I would say about that. Yeah.

Bruce: Yes. Be still and know that I am God.

Bruce: It’s in stillness. When I read Henri in his various books, I’m always seeing “don’t talk so much. God gave you two ears and only one mouth. So listen twice as much as you speak.”  If we listen for God, then we can maybe start to hear him. That’s great. It’s so interesting that he acknowledges that the church often gets in people’s way. It almost prevents us sometimes from seeing God, but it also is the way to God. He talks about the paradox that is the church and that the dark side of that paradox is what keeps people away. How do we speak to people? How do we explain that strange, broken, twisted nature of the church that is supposed to be holy, that is supposed to be the body of Christ?

Sam: I would say it is very valid, and in certain cases for people to feel that way because they see people in leadership, people who they feel should be people that are holy, that should not harm, but that have. But now when we say that the church is made up of the fellowship of the weak, not the fellowship of the strong.   He would point us to, even now in his life of the blood he talks about this, the fact that we are all broken, that none of us can say that we are whole on our own, and that the church is made up of broken people. And really Christ Jesus enters into our brokenness and in our brokenness through the cross. He redeems our brokenness and brings good out of what is so broken.

Sam: He actually says that we are all uniquely broken. That that brokenness of who we are isn’t the same from one person to the other, but that each of our own brokenness also speaks to who we are as individuals. That brokenness isn’t something to just push away or to fix quickly, but we’re to embrace our brokenness. I mean, in light of our blessedness, that’s what he would say. He would say, “Put your brokenness under the blessing that we are God’s beloved child.” Even our brokenness is something that we shouldn’t run away from, but we should enter into. So when people see the church and see a lot of brokenness in the church, that can cause people to say, “What’s going on?  I thought maybe they are supposed to be better people, or they should be further ahead.” Nouwen doesn’t believe in that idea of this spiritual progression.

Sam: He talks about movements versus stages in spiritual formation. He says that we move from one to the other. From, for example, opaqueness to transparency. It’s this idea that we’re always kind of moving from one polarity to the other. It’s not this like climbing this ladder of holiness as much as living into who we are. Some of that is still that we are broken, and that will be part of who we are. That’s hard. Right? That is the reality. I don’t know, maybe sometimes we don’t speak out enough about the fact that the church is not for the healthy, but for the sick. Right? Jesus said to the Pharisees, “I’m here for those who need a doctor.”  I think that is an important reality of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. It’s not that you become a Christian and then you’re sinless.  Just that we hopefully sin less.

Bruce: People have said to me, “I don’t want to go to church because it’s full of hypocrites.” And I say, “You’re absolutely right. Sure is. And that I’m the first of them.”

Bruce: We come to church not because we’re perfect, but because we know that we’re broken and together are trying to find the way to healing, to wholeness. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. The hard part, of course, is that society says that churches are where everybody has it all together, and that’s why they’re there. In fact, I would want to say no, we’re here – as Henri says – because we’re all falling apart.  This is the hope of wholeness.  Proper expectations of the church are important to share with people

Sam: I think part of that is just conversation and the fear of the unknown, right?  Even as Christians, I think we at times are in this bubble of just our own people.  It’s hard for people, especially these days because our world is post Christendom.   We can’t expect everyone to understand what the church is, nor do we have that common knowledge or even language. And so I think in many ways, we need to be able to get to know people outside of the church, and for them to get to know who we are. And then it’s through conversations. I think that some of these barriers can be broken down, right? It’s really what Nouwen says when we talk about hospitality and inclusion, that we need to be people who are hospitable and to be able to share. I think conversation just like that’s the first place. Yeah.

Bruce: The church has certainly made some terrible, terrible errors. There’s been travesties of justice that have been done in the name of the church, and that that certainly turns people off. We need to understand that the church, though it is the body of Christ, is made up of people that are on the journey that have incomplete understanding and sometimes make terrible, terrible mistakes. The church needs to be understood. It also needs to be forgiven as an institution.

Sam: Nouwen, in this book and in the name of Jesus, speaks a little bit about that as he was writing to pastors or to priests   They need to be part of that community of forgiveness and repentance, and that the church is the place.  We want it to be a place of forgiveness and repentance and reconciliation. It would be great if we could do that. I think the church as an institution has failed at times in asking for forgiveness.

Sam: And there needs for repentance and reparations if need be. But again, it’s that idea. You don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Jesus never came to start a new religion. He himself said “If you can’t keep the smallest part of the law,” right? And he wasn’t speaking about being religious necessarily, but he is speaking to the reality of something deeper and a greater right. This communion with God and with one another. I would say there is hope. That’s what Nouwen says. There are enough clowns around in Rome. There are enough people who are living this out that even in the midst of some of these bigger controversies or headline stuff that we hear, that we can’t give up hope in the fact that Jesus is with us in our brokenness. That’s what he came for.

Bruce: It’s interesting that Henri in this letter, it refers to saints. He notes some historical saints, and then he says, there’s some contemporary saints, which he holds up. Both of those contemporary saints have been shown in one way or another to be not saintly at all. You know, particularly, Jean Vanier, who many know was held up as a true contemporary saint who was revealed to be a very fallen man who created terrible damage. This speaks to me of the importance of ongoing discipleship. We talk about how when you become a believer, when you give your life to Christ, or whatever way you phrase that, that you receive the blessing of forgiveness from God. But then you start a journey of sanctification of being made better, growing more and more into the image of Christ. You know the tradition I come from, we talk about that a lot, but this journey of becoming a better disciple is also very important in terms of the church.

Sam: Yes. We’ve seen many Christian leaders, more and more, um, people who’ve been exposed for what they’ve done. And I think it speaks to some of the isolation that Christian leaders have, and that they’re not part of a community where they could practice this spiritual discipline of repentance and forgiveness. And now it speaks about it that sometimes it can’t be the community you’re serving in, but you still need another community where that happens. And I think this speaks to the kind of thought on how spirituality is this thing that is very internal individualistic to that of something that’s so much more communal. Nouwen would say is that as ministers, but also as every human being, we rely on three lies.

Sam: So he talks about the three lies of identity. I am what I have, I am what I do. I am what others say about me, or what I say about myself. So I think now, one would say that those three temptations or lives of who we are as human beings, when we over identify with any of those things, that’s when we start living our lives in ways that are harmful to others. Because then we want people to love us. We want people to say good things about us, and that drives our motivation and the reasons behind what we do. And so now it says, you’ve got to be able to get to a place where you say, no, those are not who I am. That’s not who I am. I’m God’s beloved, a child of God. I think he experienced that himself.

Sam: When he gave up his tenure, he was working at, I believe, Harvard by then. He was, he was a professor at Harvard. He was at a professor at Yale before that. And he felt lost himself. And he was searching for this new kind of calling vocation. As many of the listeners I’m sure probably know, he found home in L’Arche with people who knew nothing about his degrees and all the things he’s done. He was able to come to a place of understanding. Oh, I’m just me, and they love me for who I am. And the love that the core members at L’Arche showed him really helped him really understand what it meant to be the beloved child, the guy versus Henri, the, the writer, the professor.

Sam: So I think for me, when I hear of these stories of saints that aren’t sometimes saintly, is to remember for myself. I need to be reminded that that’s not who I am. These things that the world says I am, but I’m really God’s beloved child. And to live in that. Again, I think the other part is too, as Christians. I don’t think this is a Christian problem, but it’s, is I think human humans want to uplift others. And sometimes I think of Christians, what I call Christian rock stars, or Christian celebrities. We want to uphold some Christians and almost worship them for who they are. But I think it’s recognizing that we are all broken. Even people who should be better than us, or who we think is better than us, recognizing that they themselves are broken and in need of a savior, they are wounded healers, and that they’ve also been wounded and continue to live with their brokenness that Jesus enters into.

Sam: But they’re in that process of sanctification that doesn’t just stop. Just because now you’re a priest or a pastor or a leader, but that it is ongoing. So I think even as people who aren’t lay leaders, who aren’t leaders in the church, just recognizing they’re not God. They’re not Jesus. They point to Jesus, but they themselves are also like them in many ways. I think that’s an important reminder, because it is so easy for us to give praise and honor to, whether it’s a famous writer or some kind of famous pastor.

Bruce: We really do need community. When I think of what it is to be religious, that term is a really a communal term. You can be spiritual by yourself, but to be religious, you need others. With you. Religiosity allows you to participate in the rituals. But it also lets you be a community where you can get guidance from each other. I think that’s one of the reasons that Henri talks about that you can’t really grow in God unless you are connected with the body of Christ, that our need for each other to grow in healthy spirituality, to experience religiosity at its very best. We need others to be around us and with us.

Sam: In his book, the Selfless Way of Christ, he talks about these three disciplines which are part of spiritual formation of what it means to be spiritual. And two of those, the first one is, he calls it the discipline of the church, and then is the discipline of the book. And I believe the third was the discipline of the heart. And even when he is talking about the discipline of the church, what he’s speaking to is those liturgical disciplines of the church. What he says is that, it is the discipline by which we, the people of God, create space in the midst of our human chronologies to present the Christ event as true for us. Thus, the church is our first and foremost spiritual director.

Sam: The church not only teaches us what to reflect on what to pay attention to, and what to speak or think about, it also realizes in and through the liturgical discipline the Christ event itself. So he speaks about advent, he speaks about Easter, about Pentecost, that these are rhythms of not only the church life, but he says this is, it reminds us that the story of Jesus isn’t the greatest story ever told, but the only story ever told that we need to align ourselves with this story of Christ who has become flesh, lived and dwelled among us. So, I love that idea. That, and for him, the Eucharist, which is a huge part of Catholic worship every week, or at almost every worship gathering, that the Eucharist for him was so central to who he was.

Sam: It was something he practiced every day, even at L’Arche, with his community. He found in the Eucharist, that there’s a tangible and physical way of celebrating God’s love in the body of Christ, and even the life of the beloved. In the book, he uses the Eucharist as the key theme to talk about the four ways of living out what it means to be the life of the beloved. So he talks about, I am blessed, I’m broken, I’m forgiven. That doesn’t happen without the church. Communion isn’t done alone. It’s always in community. I was talking to someone who I knew from a long time ago, a youth who is an adult now. And he and I have chatted about this idea, because he’s spiritual, he says, and, you know, he’s taking a little bit of this, little bit of that, and he’s kind of trying to figure out what it all means.

Sam: And I said to him, you know, you need community. It’s never even finding God isn’t your own journey, but it’s done in community. So who are the people, what now one would call guides. Now one talked about how one of the complaints about the mystics were that there weren’t enough guides to help with the interior process. And so he says, what we need are spiritual guides who will help us find God. In that way, I think being spiritual without being religious is to remove yourself from the other side of the coin of what it means to be a thriving human. You can’t have one without the other, so you need both.

Bruce: Henri was famous for delighting in the Eucharist. He was never happier than when he was officiating at the sharing of the body of Christ, the, the bread and the wine. It is impossible to celebrate the Eucharist, Lord, supper, communion, the Feast, whatever title you give it, alone. It requires giving and it requires receiving. You have to say, this is the body and blood of Christ, and the response is, thanks be to God, I receive it with joy. Community was absolutely central to Henri, and is absolutely central to the Christian way. People that haven’t discovered that are missing out. Henri says in this letter that if you give up on the church completely, in time, you will give up on God completely. You can’t maintain a spiritual life without the religious life. You just become colder and colder until suddenly you’ve forgotten that even that spiritual commitment that you had seems to have been something from another day. I appreciate that Henri is telling us to stay the course to, and to grow in the way of faithful discipleship.

Sam: You can’t learn to love alone. You could learn about love, you could learn about how to be spiritual, but you’re never alone. I would say that because he believes in the God of Trinity, a God who is communal in his own being, that we as the children of God made in the image of God are created to be communal. We’re never individual. We say that no person is an island. That is, we can’t survive alone. God has created us that we can’t survive on our own. Whether or not you believe in Jesus or not, we’re all called to community. You see that in the different communities that are formed over different interest groups. All these things.

Sam: But I think what is amazing about the church is that we believe in the God of love. If we love God. You know, John says, we are to love one another. And that can only happen in community. Love cannot happen on your own. And it is in fleshed, as it were, you could learn to love with people. That’s when the rubber hits the road. Like, I could talk about how I, I want to love so much, but until I’m with a person that annoys me and have to learn in community, how do I be with this person and love this person when they’re not like me? And we clash even, right? I think that is when your love is played out.

Bruce: One of Henri’s letters, that’s in the book, “Love, Henri” was written to an anchoress, a woman who said, my calling is to be in this one place. It was a little cabin in the woods, and just to pray and be with God, and enter into the devotional life, which sounded very isolated. But people would come to her for conversation, for wisdom. And she wrote. She had a letter writing ministry when one of her letters went to Henri. Henri responded. And that letter was in the book. Even a, a person who was like a modern day hermit still found ways to be connected to community, and to receive a blessing and to be a blessing through it. That was beautiful. And that echoes in, in this letter, that we need each other just as we need God. So we need the fellowship, for all of the good reasons, to nourish our souls and to guide us along the way. Sam, this has been a really enjoyable conversation with you, and I appreciate your depth of knowledge. It shows the study that you did, but also your interest and commitment to being a spiritual guide yourself. So thank you. Was there anything that you want to share with us before we wrap this up for today?

Sam: No, I’m just thankful for being able to be with you, and your listeners, I would say, and echo what Nouwen has said, that you are God’s beloved child. And to be able to embrace that truth for yourself is important. And obviously within the communion of the saints, as we would say. So I just want people to be reminded of that.

Bruce: Okay. We hear you. Thank you for that, for sharing and for the time you’ve given to us. So thanks, Sam. Also, thank you to you, our listener. We appreciate you. There’s not much point in doing this if you don’t listen! So you are here and we appreciate it. If you’re listening to the audio version of this conversation. Wonderful. You also can find a video version of this on YouTube, which you can access through our website, henrinouwen.org. While you’re there, sign up for those daily meditations and also search around our website, find out about the other great programs and resources that are there as part of the Henri Nouwen Society. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, please leave a nice review. Give it a big thumbs up, how nice it would be if you would tell your friends that we’ve had this wonderful conversation and they might enjoy listening to it too. Thank you for listening. And as Sam said, never forget that you are a beloved child of God.