Remembering a Life Lived With Integrity

There are times, perhaps more frequent in the life of a religion writer, when you encounter people who have a spiritual aura about them--a simple presence that provides eloquent testimony of their faith.

One such person is the Rev. Sharon Stanley, a Presbyterian minister in Fresno who has so immersed herself in the lives of the immigrants she serves that she lives with the poorest of them in an apartment complex so dangerous that some youths are afraid to visit her.

Another was the Rev. Joseph Bissonette, a Buffalo, N.Y., priest whose humble demeanor cut across lines of race and ethnicity to establish a true Catholic parish before he was brutally murdered by two teenagers.

Among more famous personalities, you can sense the transcendence in the peaceful walk of Mother Teresa who, in a talk before the Knights of Columbus in a luxurious New York City hotel, softly told of granting dignity to a dying man in Calcutta by picking worms off his body. She left the hotel before the elegantly dressed crowd enjoyed a lavish banquet.

Having had several long conversations with Billy Graham, it was no surprise that when everyone else deserted Jim Bakker, Graham visited the disgraced evangelist in jail, living out Jesus’ admonition to the apostles.

And for the answers to why a stooped, older man delivering sermons in a monotone could inspire hundreds of millions of people worldwide, you had only to look into the faces of the dying and severely handicapped on a football field in Phoenix as Pope John Paul II slowly grasped their hands and looked into their eyes, conveying an inner peace to everyone he touched.

What all these people have in common along with an unmistakable spiritual presence is an integrity of lifestyle, a humanity that recognizes the capacity to sin but an ability to consistently choose to live according to the words they preach.

All of this comes to mind as the religious world mourns the passing of one of these rare human beings--the Rev. Henri J.M. Nouwen, a writer and Catholic pastor who died of a heart attack in September while traveling in his native Netherlands.

Nouwen, 64, was the author of 38 books on spirituality--including such well-known works as “The Wounded Healer” and “The Return of the Prodigal Son”--and a teacher at Yale and Harvard divinity schools. To be among a handful of students in a monastic, stone chapel in the basement of Yale Divinity School as Nouwen led the liturgy with simple enthusiasm was to truly experience the Mass as a celebration of a living faith.

Consistent with his writing, he never sought solace in fame and adulation. Nouwen would periodically leave comfortable posts at the finest academic institutions to spend time as a pastor in South America.

He spent the last 10 years of his life as pastor of L’Arche Daybreak Community, a nondenominational residence for the mentally handicapped in Toronto.

Two of his books--”The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery” and “Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life”--are being reissued by Doubleday. He also left a new book, which is coming out shortly. “The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom” is an amazingly personal journey through a time of deep spiritual torment in Nouwen’s life eight years ago.

The loss of a close personal relationship had left him despondent and struggling to find meaning in life.

“Everything came crashing down--my self-esteem, my energy to live and work, my sense of being loved, my hope for healing, my trust in God . . . everything,” he wrote.

He finally consented to release this “secret journal” when others convinced him that the people who have deepened their spirituality by reading his work would find a source of consolation to see that hope and despair, love and fear, are never far from one another.

Nouwen’s passing was briefly noted in some major newspapers, and went unremarked on in many other places. But to those who knew him, through his writing or in person, he left an indelible impression.

“Many friends and family members have died during the past eight years, and my own death is not so far away,” he wrote earlier this year in his last book. “But I have heard the inner voice of love, deeper and stronger than ever.

“I want to keep trusting in that voice and be led by it beyond the boundaries of my short life. . . .”