The Beloved of God

This article is an excerpt from Henri J.M. Nouwen's forthcoming book The Life of the Beloved. The book is written in the form of a personal letter to a friend, in which the author attempts to explain the life of faith.

In the prologue of the book, Nouwen recounts his friend's request: "Speak to us about a vision larger than our changing perspectives and about a voice deeper than the clamorings of our mass media. Yes, speak to us about something or someone greater than ourselves. Speak to us about God."

Henri J.M. Nouwen was a Sojourners contributing editor and shared his life with mentally handicapped people in the L'Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto, Ontario, when this article appeared. - The Editors

As the one who is chosen, blessed, broken, and given, you are called to live your life with a deep inner joy and peace. It is the life of the Beloved, lived in a world that constantly tries to convince you that the burden is on you to prove that you are worthy of being loved....

Spiritually you do not belong to the world. And this is precisely why you are sent into the world. Your family and your friends, your colleagues and your competitors, and all the people you may meet on your journey through life are all searching for more than survival. Your presence among them as the one who is sent will allow them to catch a glimpse of the real life.

Everything changes radically from the moment you know yourself as being sent into this world. Times and spaces, people and events, art and literature, history and science, they all cease to be opaque and become transparent, pointing far beyond themselves to the place from where you come and to where you will return.

It is very hard for me to explain to you this radical change because it is a change that cannot be described in ordinary terms; nor can it be taught or practiced as a new discipline of self-knowledge. The change of which I speak is the change from living life as a painful test to prove that you deserve to be loved, to living it as an unceasing yes to the truth of that belovedness. Put simply, life is a God-given opportunity to become who we are, to affirm our own true spiritual nature, claim our truth, appropriate and integrate the reality of our being, but, most of all, to say yes to the One who calls us the Beloved.

THE UNFATHOMABLE MYSTERY of God is that God is a Lover who wants to be loved. The one who created us is waiting for our response to the love that gave us our being. God not only says: "You are my Beloved." God also asks: "Do you love me?" and offers us countless chances to say yes. This is the spiritual life: the chance to say yes to our inner truth.

The spiritual life, thus understood, radically changes everything. Being born and growing up, leaving home and finding a career, being praised and being rejected, walking and resting, praying and playing, becoming ill and being healed--yes, living and dying--they all become expressions of that divine question: "Do you love me?" And at every point of the journey there is the choice to say yes and the choice to say no.

Once you are able to catch a glimpse of this spiritual vision, you can see how the many distinctions that are so central in our daily living lose their meaning. When joy and pain are both opportunities to say yes to our divine childhood, then they have more in common than they have apart. When the experience of being awarded a prize and the experience of being found lacking in excellence both offer us a chance to claim our true identity as the Beloved of God, these experiences are more similar than they are different.

When feeling lonely and feeling at home both hold a call to discover more fully who the God is whose children we are, these feelings are more united than they are distinct. When, finally, both living and dying bring us closer to the full realization of our spiritual selfhood, they are not the great opposites the world would have us believe; they are, instead, two sides of the same mystery of God's love.

Living the spiritual life means living life as one unified reality. The forces of darkness are the forces that split, divide, and set in opposition. The forces of light unite. Literally, the world "diabolic" means dividing. The demon divides; the Spirit unites.

The spiritual life counteracts the countless divisions that pervade our daily life and cause destruction and violence. These divisions are interior as well as exterior: the divisions among our most intimate emotions and the divisions among the most widespread social groupings. The division between gladness and sadness within me, or the division between the races, religions, and cultures around me, all find their source in the diabolic forces of darkness.

The Spirit of God, the Spirit that calls us the Beloved, is the Spirit that unites and makes whole. There is no clearer way to discern the presence of God's Spirit than to identify the moments of unification, healing, restoration, and reconciliation. Wherever the Spirit works, divisions vanish and inner, as well as outer, unity manifest themselves.

What I most want to say is that when the totality of our daily lives is lived "from above," that is, as the Beloved sent into the world, then everyone we meet and everything that happens to us becomes a unique opportunity to choose for the life that cannot be conquered by death. Thus, both joy and suffering become part of the way to our spiritual fulfillment....

WHERE DOES ALL this lead us? I think that it leads us back to the "place" we come from, the "place" of God. We are sent into this world for a short time to say--through the joys and pains of our clock time--the great yes to the love that has been given to us, and in so doing return to the One who sent us with that yes engraved on our hearts. Our death thus becomes the moment of return. But our death can be this only if our whole life has been a journey back to the One from whom we come and who calls us the Beloved.

There is such confusion about the idea of a life "hereafter," or "the eternal life." Personally, I do believe deeply in the eternal life, but not simply as a life after our physical death. It is only when we have claimed for ourselves the life of God's Spirit during the many moments of our "chronology" that we expect death to be the door to the fullness of life.

Eternal life is not some great surprise that comes at once at the end of our existence in time; it is rather, the full revelation of what we have been and have lived all along. The evangelist John expresses this succinctly when he says: "My dear people, what we are to be in the future has not yet been recorded; all we know is that, when it is recorded, we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is" (1 John 3:2-3).

With this vision, death is no longer the ultimate defeat. To the contrary, it becomes the final yes and the great return to where we can most fully become children of God. I don't think that many people look at death this way. Instead of seeing it as a moment of fulfillment, they fear it as the great failure to be kept at bay for as long as possible. All that our society has to say suggests that death is the great enemy who will finally get the best of us against our will and desire. But thus perceived, life is little more than a losing battle, a hopeless struggle, a journey of despair.

My own vision and yours too, I hope, is radically different. Even though I often give in to the many fears and warnings of my world, I still believe deeply that our few years on this Earth are part of a much larger event that stretches out far beyond the boundaries of our birth and death. I think of it as a mission into time, a mission that is very exhilarating and even exciting, mostly because the One who sent me on the mission is waiting for me to come home and tell the story of what I have learned.

Am I afraid to die? I am every time I let myself be seduced by the noisy voices of my world telling me that my "little life" is all I have and advising me to cling to it with all my might. But when I let these voices move to the background of my life and listen to that small, soft voice calling me the Beloved, I know that there is nothing to fear, and that dying is the greatest act of love--he act that leads me into the eternal embrace of my God whose love is everlasting.

From The Life of the Beloved, copyright © 1992, by Henri J.M. Nouwen. Used by permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York.