Discernment in the Writings of Henri J.M. Nouwen
The other two documents in this set ask how a leadership team tests a teaching or a claim. This one asks a quieter, prior question: how does a person become someone capable of hearing God at all? Henri Nouwen — priest, psychologist, and one of the twentieth century’s most widely read spiritual writers, who taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard before spending his final years at L’Arche Daybreak among people with intellectual disabilities — never wrote a single book devoted to discernment, yet the theme runs through nearly everything he wrote. This guide draws that thread together from across his forty books, journals, and lectures, centered on the posthumous collection Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life.
For Nouwen, discernment is less a verdict reached than a way of listening — “faithful living and listening to God’s love and direction,” as he puts it, so ordinary that it can happen through Scripture and prayer, but just as truly through a book that will not let you go, a walk in the woods, a stranger’s offhand remark, the news of the day, or the slow unfolding of a calling. The guide surveys eleven such forms Nouwen names across his writing: the discernment of spirits familiar from the wider Christian tradition, but also discernment through sacred reading, nature, people, current events, vocation, God’s felt presence, personal identity, time itself, community, and spiritual direction. Each is treated with Nouwen’s own definition, its purpose and fruit, how he counseled practicing it, and what he saw as its chief obstacles — self-rejection and busyness chief among them.
Everything in Nouwen’s account, though, converges on one center: belovedness. He insists that discernment attempted without first knowing oneself as God’s unconditionally loved child collapses into its opposite — an anxious, performance-driven search for the right answer that only mimics the real thing. “Self-rejection,” he writes, “is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life.” A person secure in being loved can afford to wait, to be wrong, to be corrected by others; a person still trying to earn love cannot. The guide traces how this conviction shaped Nouwen’s own life, including his deliberate movement away from prestige and toward hiddenness, and closes with discussion questions suited to adult small-group study and a guide to his key texts for further reading.
Where the Comprehensive Study and Testing the Spirits work from Scripture outward as a case for right judgment, this document works from the human heart inward as a case for the soil right judgment needs to grow in. Read together, the three keep discernment from drifting into either a cold set of tests with no love in it, or a warm formlessness with no test in it at all.