Nouwen-2

THE WOUNDED HEALER

What does it mean to be a minister in our contemporary society? Nothing can be written about ministry without a deeper understanding of the ways in which the minister can make his own wounds available as a source of healing.

The first and basic task of a Christian leader in the future will be to lead people out of the land of confusion into the land of hope. Therefore, he must have the courage to be an explorer of the inner territory in himself and to articulate his discoveries as a service to the inward generation.

Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority. The man of prayer is a leader precisely because through his articulation of God’s work within himself he can lead others out of confusion to clarification.

Christian leadership is accomplished only through service. This service requires the willingness to enter into a situation, with all the human vulnerabilities a man has to share with his fellowman.

Making one’s own wounds a source of healing, therefore, does not call for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one’s own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the human condition which all men share.

Many people in this life suffer because they are anxiously searching for the man or woman, the event or encounter, which will take their loneliness away.

These sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. (Ministry) does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken.

When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.

A Christian community is therefore a healing community not because wounds are cured and pains alleviated, but because wounds and pains become openings or occasions for a new vision.

Even when we know that we are called to be wounded healers, it is still very difficult to acknowledge that healing has to take place today.

We cry out for a Liberator who will take us away from our misery and bring us justice and peace.

To announce that the Liberator is sitting among the poor and that the wounds are signs of hope and that today is the day of liberation, is a step very few can take. But this is exactly the announcement of the wounded healer: “The master is coming…right here where we are standing.”