1972
Sometimes the most powerful part of a book is its title. Sometimes that's all you need. The Wounded Healer is a tiny book, just a hundred pages, and Nouwen fills these pages with insightful analysis and inspiring stories. But the main gift this book has { 173} given the world is the simple idea captured by its title—The Wounded Healer.
This is a book for ministers, spiritual healers. These leaders feel enormous pressure to be strong for their people. In times of crisis they must carry everyone else. People look to these ministers for answers. As a result, they often hide their own wounds.
They deny their own struggles and doubts.
Nouwen, a Catholic priest involved in ministry to the disabled, understood this double life and urged such leaders to make their wounds a source of healing. How? By using these wounds to connect with the people they serve. This is simple compassion and understanding, yes, but Nouwen calls it hospitality. The hospitable host pays attention to a guest, and the wounded healer concentrates on those who come for healing.
The hospitable host offers a place of community, and so the wounded healer creates a company of wounded souls who can share their struggles with one another.
This may seem like common sense to you—now. But in 1972 it was groundbreaking. Now we see support groups and seeker churches and pastors who bare their souls to their congregations.
That's Nouwen's influence behind all of those, for good or ill.
But in its time, Nouwen's honesty was refreshing. The Wounded Healer was a message of liberation for struggling ministers.
We often forget how far-reaching the social revolution of the 1960s was. For a decade, 1964-73, Beatles to Watergate, everything was questioned. Many of society's assumptions were overturned. The hippies' catchphrase "Do your own thing" became
a clarion call for personal freedom, a pursuit that is even stronger today. The church had to scramble for effective ways to do ministry in this new era. There were peace protests in the mainline churches and Jesus freaks in California, but the main strategy that made a difference was simple honesty. Don't pretend you have all the answers if you don't. That was the plan Nouwen was proposing.
The Wounded Healer spends three of its four chapters exploring the human condition in the modem age. Many other books at the time were doing this, trying to figure out the new world. Nouwen talks about "the nuclear man," "fragmentation," "historical dislocation," "a generation without fathers." As insightful as those labels are, Nouwen wasn't alone in applying them. But the fourth chapter of this little book carries the payload: "... a deep understanding of his [the minister's] own pain makes it possible for him to convert his weakness into strength and to offer his own experience as a source of healing to those who are often lost in the darkness of their own misunderstood sufferings."
In other words, the wounded minister becomes a healer.