Item 1779 - The duet of the Holy Spirit: when mourning & dancing are one: healing life's hurts

7 p. of textual records

This item is a 7 page article by Henri Nouwen entitled ‘The Duet of the Holy Spirit: When Mourning and Dancing are One’, published in New Oxford Review, Vol. LIX, No. 5, June 1992, pp. 5 – 12. Parts of this article have been published in The Catholic New Times, Toronto, March/April 1992 and in a revised form in a posthumous book, ‘Turn My Mourning into Dancing, 2001. Nouwen begins the article by writing about healing as the skill not only of healing professionals but of all: ‘ It belongs to the heart of our Christian vision that all of us, whether we have degrees or not, are called to be healers’. Nouwen then goes on to suggest that ‘healing is mourning as well as dancing’; that without facing and accepting the dark side of our existence healing cannot occur. ‘But true healing calls us to face the harsh realities of our lives and to come to grips with the truth that, while we live in a world subject to the power of the Evil One, we belong to God’. Nouwen’s next focus is upon facing and mourning our many losses in life rather than pretending all is fine. Nouwen suggests that we need to let go our illusions of control in order for true healing to occur. We need, as well, to help others to do this if we ourselves are to be healers and we all need a safe place to enter this process. Nouwen then goes on to say ‘To heal is to let the Spirit call us to dance’. ‘Can you feel the freedom that rises up in you when you have been stripped naked and have nothing to inhibit your movements …’ Nouwen describes two movements of the dance: forgiveness and celebration and concludes the article identifying the presence then of the song of gratitude and of joy.

Access copy available in Access Copies - Published Works, Articles by Nouwen, Box 2.

Published in New Oxford Review 59, no. 5 (June 1992): 5-10, 12.
This item appears in a revised form in, Nouwen, Henri: Turn My Mourning into Dancing, ed. Timothy Jones, W Publishing Group, Nashville, TN, 2001.

Added by L Joson, 21 November 2017
Revised by L Joson, 25 June 2018