Yancey begins the column with a testimonial from Nouwen. “Adam is a 25-year-old man who cannot speak, cannot dress or undress himself, cannot walk alone, cannot eat without much help. He does not cry or laugh. Only occasionally does he make eye contact. His back is distorted. His arm and leg movements are twisted. He suffers from severe epilepsy and, despite heavy medication, sees few days without grand-mal seizures. Sometimes, as he grows suddenly rigid, he utters a howling groan. On a few occasions I’ve seen one big tear roll down his cheek.
“It takes me about an hour and a half to wake Adam up, give him his medication, carry him into his bath, wash him, shave him, clean his teeth, dress him, walk him to the kitchen, give him his breakfast, put him in his wheelchair, and bring him to the place where he spends most of the day with therapeutic exercises.”
Three years ago, author Henri Nouwen moved from his post at Harvard University to a community called Daybreak, near Toronto. There he took on the daily mundane chores related above … Yet in a recent article in World Vision magazine, Nouwen insisted that he, not Adam, is the chief beneficiary in this strange, misfitted relationship.
From the hours spent with Adam, Nouwen says, he has gained an inner peace so fulfilling that it makes most of his other more high-minded tasks seem boring and superficial by contrast. As he sat beside that silent, slow-breathing child-man, he realized how violent and marked with rivalry and competition, how pervaded with obsession, was his prior drive toward success in academia and in the Christian ministry.
From Adam he learned that “what makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love. Whoever speaks about Adam as a ‘vegetable’ or ‘animal-like’ … misses the sacred mystery that Adam is fully capable of receiving, and giving love.” From Adam, Henri Nouwen learned – gradually, painfully, shamefully – that the way up is down.
My career as a journalist has afforded me opportunities to interview diverse people. Looking back, I can roughly divide them into two types: stars and servants. The stars … are the ones who dominate our magazines and … television programs … Christian magazines and Christian television programs too. … Yet I must tell you that, in my limited experience, these, our “idols,” are as miserable a group of people as I have ever met. Most have troubled or broken marriages. Nearly all are hopelessly dependent on psychotherapy. And in a heavy irony, these larger-than-life heroes seem tormented by incurable self-doubt.
I have spent time with servants. People like Dr. Paul Brand, who worked for 20 years among outcasts – leprosy patients, the poorest of the poor in rural India. Or health workers who left high-paying jobs to serve with Mendenhall Ministries in a backwater town in Mississippi. Or relief worker in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, or other such repositories of world-class human suffering. Or the PhD’s scattered throughout jungles of South America translating the Bible into obscure languages. …
As I now reflect on the two groups, stars and servants, the servants clearly emerge as the favored ones, the graced ones. … somehow, in the process of losing their lives, they have found them. They have received the “peace that is not of this world” such as Nouwen described in his article, a peace he discovered not within the stately quadrangles of Harvard, but by the bedside of incontinent Adam.
“Keep your eyes,” Nouwen said, “on the one who refuses to turn stones into bread, jump from great heights, or rule with great temporal power. Keep your eyes on the one who says, ‘Blessed are the poor, the gentle, those who mourn and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; blessed are the merciful, the peacemakers and those who are persecuted in the cause of uprightness’ … Keep your eyes on the one who is poor with the poor, weak with the weak and rejected with the rejected. That one is the source of all peace.”
The Gospels repeat one saying of Jesus more than any other. 'Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.'
Truly the way up is the way down."
Philip Yancey, Christianity Today, Nov. 18, 1988
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