She wrote about it herself, three years before she left.She was singing a hymn in her living room during the pandemic — alone with me, separated from her church, the way everyone was separated that year — and something happened that she felt she had to write about. She sensed, in the middle of the…

I have been sitting with a sentence from Nouwen’s In Memoriam that I am not sure I am yet capable of receiving.He says, at the end of his account of his mother’s death: By letting her go I did not lose her. Rather, I found that she is closer to me than ever. In and…

I need to say something I have not said publicly, because I think Carol’s story cannot be fully told without it.When I retired from my last ministry position, I made a vow. I would not teach again, would not preach again, would not serve in a church again. The years had been long — Chad,…

I have to be honest. This is the hardest thing Nouwen says, and I am not sure I believe it yet.He is writing to his father, six months after his mother’s death, and he builds a careful argument — rooted in John 16:7, in the words of Jesus to his disciples on the night before…

She taught me most things I know that are worth knowing.That is not sentiment. That is the considered judgment of sixty years of paying attention. She taught me what fierce love looks like when it is not afraid of cost. She taught me what it means to uproot a family and carry three children to…

Henri Nouwen, in the weeks after his mother’s death, came to a conviction that I have been sitting with since December 22. He wrote that to truly mourn someone is not to tell their story over and over, not to place photographs on the wall or visit a stone in a cemetery. It is something…