[Note: As you know, this post continues our two-month-long series through the month of July on the topic of “desire” and “longing” in concert with my recent book on the topic. The context for this post is that I lectured all week last week in a graduate theology program and found myself experiencing waves of loneliness and tiredness. What follows was birthed out of that. Thanks for reading!]
The story of Henri Nouwen has been retold many times; and rightly so. Nouwen’s is the inspiring life of a man who experienced a deep sense of call from God to leave what he desired to pursue what God desired. The story goes that in 1985, Nouwen—a revered and respected theologian at Harvard Divinity School—left his position of academic prowess to go and serve those who would not likely make their way into an Ivy League classroom: those experiencing mental disabilities at the L’Arche community in France. God was inviting Nouwen to leave a world that recognized him for his academic brilliance and enter a hidden life of love, unrecognized and unseen by the world.
Nouwen called this journey the path of “hiddenness.” And it was a path that had a heavy price. Nouwen would experience years of sadness, depression, and even suicidality. Many of these dark emotions are what makes his writings so powerful. Nouwen was finding God in the dark. These excruciating emotions of feeling obscure and forgotten can be seen on many pages of his journals—which millions have read since. One such compilation, called The Road to Daybreak, offers insight into the valleys of sadness Nouwen traversed. But they also expose the many epiphanies that came from feeling forgotten. Nouwen writes,
If you really want to be less visible, less known, try to use this event to become more forgotten, more passed over; be grateful for the occasion. Trust that hiddenness will give you new eyes to see yourself, your world, and your God. People cannot give you new eyes; only the one who loves you without limits.1
What a revelation. The power of hiddenness, of course, is that it obfuscates the way we see ourselves through the eyes of others. Hiddenness and obscurity, one might say, help us begin to see ourselves directly. No longer do we see what others see. We begin to actually see ourselves. This is captured in the lyrics of the song “Three” by Sleeping at Last—which seems to narrate this time in Nouwen’s life:
And I finally see myself
Through the eyes of no one else
It's so exhausting on this silver screen
Where I play the role of anyone but me.2
It is likely that we all find stories like this both inspiring and life-giving because we have all experienced the difficulty and pain of feeling thrown into unchosen hiddenness and obscurity. We are all prone to want to be at the center. Something at the heart of most people is a desire to clamor and cling to being seen, understood, and recognized. All in the name of truly ‘finding ourselves.’ But to seek this kind of affirmation and recognition, in the Christian story, is a dangerous trap, a kind of codependency to the world that we can be freed from. We were made in obscurity. And it is in obscurity Christ is found in us. As the psalmist would say:
You watched me as I was being
Formed in utter seclusion
As I was woven together
in the dark of the womb...
And when I wake up,
You are still with me. (Ps 139.15, 18)
Loving God involves seeking friendship with God. This journey spans a lifetime. This narrative unfolds vividly in the account of Moses. God has a significant purpose for Moses. He is tasked with leading Israel out of bondage and into liberty. In the early Exodus narrative, Moses raised objections to God’s commands five times. Each time, he presents a different reason for why he feels unqualified for the task God is assigning him. God addresses each objection, imparting a distinct lesson with each response:
Ex 3.11. In this first instance, Moses takes particular objection to his own worthiness to do the task of confronting Pharaoh. Moses, in short, feels totally uncomfortable with the calling that God has put on his life. God’s response is to give Moses one thing: his presence: “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.”
Ex 3.13. In this second objection, Moses is concerned that God’s people will not be able to believe that God had, indeed, sent this insignificant man, Moses. God responds: “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
Ex 4.1. In the third objection, Moses expresses deep doubt that anyone will believe what he is saying or that God has spoken to him. God responds by giving Moses three particular signs that he is to perform—turning a staff into a snake, having a hand that will turn from being leprous to being healed, and that the water of the Nile will be turned to blood.
Ex 4.10. Moses is aware that he does not have eloquence and therefore should not be the one to speak before the oppressor Pharaoh. God asks him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”
Ex 4.13. In the final objection, Moses makes his case that God should send someone else other than himself. God expresses anger—but then permits Aaron to be the representative.
God’s responses reveal much about why and how God calls any of us. In fact, on four of the five occasions in which Moses objects to God, God’s response is simply to offer Moses the divine name of God. I am who I say I am. Yahweh! God does not apparently feel satisfied in bolstering Moses’ negative self-talk or quelling his intrusive thoughts. God gives Moses, once again, his powerful name. I am God. You are not. And there is no other basis for your calling. Nothing else is needed.
Moses eventually trusted and followed. But not without a litany of mistakes, errors, and blunders. The story of Moses, no doubt, is anything but the tale of some royal representative who fully arrived at perfection on this side of heaven. His life is a life of mistakes. Still, in spite of this, Moses’ story is still marked by one thing. We see it in his burial in Deuteronomy 34.5-6:
And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab, as the Lord had said. He buried him in Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows where his grave is.
The reader must see two things. First, Moses is given a very important (and rarely used) title—“the servant of the Lord.” This language is categorically reserved for biblical characters who were seen as God’s closest allies. In fact, in Ex 33.11, the most intimate language is used about Moses and God: “The Lord would speak to Moses face-to-face, as a man speaks with his friend.” This friendship, second, is marked by the fact that God buried Moses. This is no funeral. This is God grieving the death of a best friend. The journey of Moses is beautiful. He went from self-centered, self-focused, and self-defeating to simply being God’s friend. He learned the most important lesson.
Friendship with God.
Christian history is full of similar stories. In the 4th century, the story of Moses captured the attention of one of the most important early church fathers—Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory (335-395) had the unenviable task of being the younger brother of Basil the Great who had quickly become one of the most influential leaders in the church at the time. Living under the shadow of Basil would have been difficult.
The difficulty came to the surface when he was eventually pressured into being the bishop of Nyssa by his older brother who had become the bishop of Caesarea. But Gregory didn’t want to. For him, it wasn’t an important town that would bring him prominence like his brother. Nyssa was a backwater town of the little-recognized province of Cappadocia.
His brother encouraged him, however. And told him that to be formed in the image of Christ, Gregory would need to embrace a pastoral task of no distinction. This was the work of God. The work of caring for people was not to be given distinction by the people you loved, but to give them your distinction. Gregory, we know, spent the rest of his life pastoring an out-of-the-way little church in Nyssa.
The writings that came out of Gregory transformed the church. This is most evident in his allegorical theology of The Life of Moses (357). The singular attribute of Moses’ life, Gregory sees, is not that Moses did everything right, fully obeyed, or had a fulfilling ministry call. Rather, Moses is simply known as God’s friend and servant. Nothing else matters. It is this singular desire that makes Moses the man that he is. Gregory writes about coming to a place in his life where he no longer craves and desires to be seen by people but to be seen by God:
Since the goal of a virtuous life was the very thing we have been seeking. And this goal has been found in what we have said, it is time for you, noble friend, to look to that example and, by transferring to your own life what is contemplated here...to be known by God and to become His friend (Ex 33.11). This is true perfection: not to avoid a wicked life because like slaves we servilely fear punishment, nor to do good because we hope for rewards, as if cashing in on the virtuous life by some businesslike and contractual arrangement. On the contrary, disregarding all those things for which we hope and which have been reserved by promise, we regard fall from God's friendship as the only thing dreadful and we consider becoming God's friend the only thing worthy of honor and desire. This, as I have said, is the perfection of life.3
What do Moses, Nouwen, and Gregory have to teach us? They teach us the ancient lesson that no desire has more gravity upon our existence than one: the desire to be counted as God’s friend. All our human friends will fail us. We all know this and bear the pain of it. But Moses, Nouwen, and Gregory all seemed to find what we all most need. God wants to be our friend. Such a reality, over time, can be the orienting passion of our earthly existence—a passion that will carry us to resurrection. As a friend quoted Nouwen to me in a text this week, every moment of feeling unseen takes on a whole new, holy meaning. As he writes in The Inner Voice of Love:
You have to begin to trust that your experience of emptiness is not your final experience, that beyond this place is a new place where you are being held by love.4
Thanks for reading my work. As always, you can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or you can listen to my podcast, Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your journey, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants, which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore what the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.
Nouwen, Henri, The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey (New York, NY: Crown, 1990), 26. The vivid personal account of Nouwen is narrated in and applied beautifully to prayer in chapter 5 of Starke, John, The Possibility of Prayer: Finding Stillness with God in a Restless World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2020).
Quoted in Tyson, John R., Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 98.
Nouwen, Henri, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom (New York, NY: Random House, 2010), 26.
This conversation of obscurity has been an important one. It is one so ripe with emotional consequence that sometimes we miss the spiritual significance. I appreciate how you brought that together here and always good to hear from folks like Gregory of Nyssa in the conversation!😉 Thanks!
Yes, being counted as a friend of God is what eternity is all about, it should be “…a passion that will carry us to resurrection.” After attending a pastor’s retreat led by Dr. Swoboda about six years ago, I began to see the path to true oneness with God: obscurity, separateness from the bright lights and people’s praise. One of the first things I did after that retreat was a silent retreat, and I heard God say to me in that quiet place, “Brian, you need to learn to keep secret the things I show you in the secret place.” Thank you AJ for this powerful word, I am slowly learning to value silence, stillness, and solitude.