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    Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times
    Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times
    Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times
    Ebook106 pages2 hours

    Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

    By Henri Nouwen

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    How do you find hope in hard times? Learn not only how to survive the difficult seasons, but to live a full life in the midst of them and beyond. Grounded in God's constancy and rooted in eternal hope, Nouwen guides you towards the kind of life that you can dance to—even through the darkest night.

    Deeply comforting and profoundly realistic, Turn My Mourning into Dancing discusses five movements we experience during hard times:

    • From Our Little Selves to a Larger World
    • From Holding Tight to Letting Go
    • From Fatalism to Hope
    • From Manipulation to Love
    • From a Fearful Death to a Joyous Life

    Healing begins with taking our pain out of its toxic isolation and seeing our sufferings in communion with all humanity, and all creation. Nouwen teaches us that our lives participate in something much larger. Turn My Mourning into Dancing is a must read for:

    • Those seeking growth and insight on the struggles of life
    • Anyone going through the grief process and searching for real solutions
    • Those who have experienced a loss, betrayal, or hard times

    Everyone grieves differently. It is a process, not a science experiment. Mourning shouldn’t last forever. Do you want the kind of life that allows you to dance even in the middle of the darkest night? Get the answers and find hope within your hard times.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Nelson
    Release dateJun 29, 2004
    ISBN9781418536091
    Author

    Henri Nouwen

    Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996) was the author of With Open Hands, Reaching Out, The Wounded Healer, Making All Things New, and many other bestsellers. He was the senior pastor of L’Arche Daybreak in Toronto, Canada, a community where men and women with mental disabilities and their assistants create a home for one another.

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    Reviews for Turn My Mourning into Dancing

    4.5/5

    34 ratings5 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Henri Nouwen's five movements for hurting times to turn mourning into dancing is even more relevant and useful today in 2020, to heal brokenness and anxiety.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Henri Nouwen is a true person of God who used his gifts of the written word to help us better understand our relationship with Christ through a self exploration.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I'd learned of Henri Nouwen fairly recently, and it was through other authors who'd admired him.(Fans as diverse as Elizabeth Sherrill and Anne Lamott), So I decided to check out this short book first. What a gem. Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest whose writings and teachings have garnered a following from Catholics and Protestants alike. Though I don't think this book's title is quite accurate to reflect its content, I was not disappointed in this book. It's full of deep insights into our human condition, our deepest longings and disappointments and losses. I found myself underlining and highlighting just about every paragraph. I'm anxious to now read his other works, The Wounded Healer and The Return of the Prodigal Son especially. Highly recommend this book, and this writer in general.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This was a deeply thought provoking and encouraging book. I highly recommend reading it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The title can be a bit provoking when you mourn, but it is still very tempting, and the title and my knowledge to Nouwen as a great writer made me read this book.I've read a lot of books in my life, but i seldom read them twice. But i will read this book over and over again until i fully realize the important knowledge of Nouwen.In his wonderful way he teaches people to trust in God, and see the light through the darkness. This book should be read by everyone, but if you go through some troubles in your life you will have a extra benefit of reading it.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Turn My Mourning into Dancing - Henri Nouwen

    PREFACE

    It won’t be enough, I decided early on, "to visit only the archives." To compile Turn My Mourning into Dancing would require my going deeper.

    I would, of course, sort through the hundreds of pages of lecture notes and sermon transcripts that Henri Nouwen had left behind in shelved archive boxes. That went without saying. And I had every confidence that the files of unpublished writings of the late priest and author would yield ample material for a book. Decades of reading Nouwen’s books on the spiritual life and ministry in a needy world had demonstrated his concern for prayer and his insight into human nature. That much I knew. But I wanted to gain also a greater sense of the person. As I worked with his archived files, I wanted to absorb more of the pastoral presence behind the jotted pages and typewritten notes.

    That opportunity came serendipitously. My friend, John Mogabgab, Henri’s assistant during his years at Yale Divinity School and editor of the esteemed journal Weavings, suggested that I also visit Daybreak, the community that serves the profoundly disabled where Henri spent his final years as pastor. Because the archives sit within easy driving distance of Daybreak, the way seemed clear. I would spend the days of that week in the John M. Kelly library of St. Michael’s College in Toronto. And then spend the evenings at Daybreak, talking with Henri’s associates, getting to know the community members, eating dinner with the core members and their assistants, even stay in the Cedars, a combination house and library that Henri himself founded, lived in, and used for writing.

    I learned much in those moments about the man behind the words, even from the moment I stepped off the plane. Kathy, Henri’s secretary for the last years of his life, met me at the airport to drive me to Daybreak; she stood with a sign that read Daybreak Community welcomes Timothy. And welcome me they did. Sue Mosteller, Henri’s executrix, and countless other members of the community welcomed me into their morning worship services, group homes, evening meals, and spur-of-the-moment conversations.

    Kathy and Sue and others gave me glimpses into a man with a heart that constantly reached out to hurting souls. He lived with immense and inspired energy, I learned. He received calls from people with deep needs constantly—people with no prior relationship to Henri that most public figures would ask to be shielded from.

    And the community itself! Years before, Henri had resigned from Harvard to spend a sabbatical year writing in Trosly-Breuil, France, in the original community of L’Arche that served people who had cognitive and physical disabilities. He felt so at home there that in 1986 he accepted an invitation to become pastor for the L’Arche community of Daybreak near Toronto, Canada. His finding Daybreak, he and so many of his friends said, represented a homecoming. This professor who taught some of the nation’s brightest and most articulate divinity students—with stints at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard—spent the final years of his life ministering profoundly through his gentle (if sometimes intense) presence and his simple, pastoral words of blessing. His writing continued, of course, and his influence only grew in one of the paradoxes that truly great figures so frequently live out.

    Since Henri Nouwen’s death in 1996, interest in his writings has only gathered momentum. The key has to do, I believe, with far more than his sometime artful turns of phrase or his striking accomplishments. More than anything, I believe, the continued interest grows out of who he was—a heart broken before God and opened for his fellow friends and readers. Henri was complex and unfinished; he knew it well and did not pretend otherwise. But still, he also knew, there was ministering to be done. Suffering to care for. Hope to bring to bear in life’s dark places.

    All this, I hope the reader will discover, informed the sermons and lectures and scribbled notes that comprised and fed into this book. Turn My Mourning into Dancing offers yet more glimpses from the pen—and the life—of this slightly stooped, always passionate preacher of spirituality. As we learn from this chronicler of the possibilities of a human life lived vibrantly with God, may our sorrows also turn to expectancy and even joy.

    Timothy Jones

    INTRODUCTION

    HOPE IN OUR HURTING WORLD

    This afternoon my good friend Jonas called, his voice trembling, shock muting his voice. His daughter, he told me, had died four hours after birth. Margaret and I and our three-year-old son, Sam, had so been looking forward to the new baby, he said. She had been born early in an emergency C-section, but still, it looked as if she would come through. The vital signs soon told them that Rebecca could not live long.

    In the intensive care unit, Jonas and Margaret held the tiny life in their arms. Then it was all over. Jonas said a prayer for the baby, he told me, and made the sign of the cross.

    I was struck by what Jonas said next. Driving away from the hospital, I kept telling God, ‘You have given us Rebecca and now I return her to you. But I know a beautiful future is being cut off. It hurts so much to lose her. I feel such emptiness.’

    I searched for the right words. What could I say? I did not want to interfere with Jonas’s grieving. But I also knew that Jonas would not have to face this grief without consolation. Rebecca, I said, is your daughter—yours and Margaret’s. She always will be. Sam will always have a sister. Rebecca was given only a few hours, but they were not futile. Your prayers are not in vain. She lives now in God’s eternal embrace.

    It was a long conversation. I know my words gave only modest comfort. More than anything Jonas and I wanted to hug one another and cry. How important did our friendship seem at such a time!

    And I wondered again, as perhaps we all wonder when grief hits hard and hurts us deeply: Why did such a thing happen? To reveal God’s glory? To remind us of the fragility of life? Or perhaps to deepen the faith of those who carry on? It is hard to answer yes when everything seems so dark.

    When I think of Margaret and Jonas holding tiny Rebecca in their arms, I think also of Jesus’ own mother. So often paintings and statues depict her holding her Son’s limp, lifeless body on her lap. She was not bereft, not left without hope, but what pain she endured to watch her Son die on a cross! And as I think of my friends Margaret and Jonas, I feel moved to pray.

    The hardships we all endure require more than words, of course, even spiritual words. Eloquent phrases cannot soothe our deep pain. But we do find something to lead and guide us through. We hear an invitation to allow our mourning to become a place of healing, and our sadness a way through pain to dancing. Who is it Jesus said would be blessed? Those who mourn (Matt. 5:4). We learn to look fully into our losses, not evade them. By greeting life’s pains with something other than denial, we may find something unexpected. By inviting God into our difficulties, we ground life—even its sad moments—in joy and hope. When we stop grasping our lives, we can finally be given more than we could ever grab for ourselves. And we learn the way to a deeper love for others.

    How can we learn to live this way? Many of us are tempted to think that if we suffer, the only important thing is to be relieved of our pain. We want to flee it at all costs. But when we learn to move through suffering, rather than avoid it, then we greet it differently. We become willing to let it teach us. We even begin to see how God can use it for some larger end. Suffering becomes something other than a nuisance or curse to be evaded at all costs, but a way into deeper fulfillment. Ultimately mourning means facing what wounds

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