Regular readers of this blog may remember Margot Starbuck from her interview with me about her memoir, The Girl in the Orange Dress: Searching for a Father Who Does Not Fail. She’s back today to kick off our month of book-love. Ooh la la! Take it away, Margot!
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I was surprised and delighted the first time a reader approached me to show me that she’d marked up my memoir, underlining and highlighting, as if to prepare for some big test, because it had been so meaningful to her.
For me, the book I own with ball-point scribbled stars, dog-eared pages, and dated personal notes is Henri Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom. It is the necessary companion for anyone who has suffered or is suffering.
The Inner Voice of Love was never meant to be published. This collection of brief entries are from Nouwen’s secret journal during the most difficult period of his life. Friends finally convinced him to permit these powerful words, the affirmations he received from God during those days, to be published.
Though Nouwen does not spell out the particularities of his suffering, he explains in the preface, “I had come face to face with my own nothingness. It was as if all that had given my life meaning was pulled away and I could see nothing in front of me but a bottomless abyss.”
I’m a big believer in the power of exposing the lies which bind us. Nouwen raises an amplifier to the quiet voices, hissing to our hearts, that insist upon our unworthiness. Sharing the true words which were spoken to his heart, Nouwen tips the reader’s face toward God’s so that she sees and hears the true words God always speaks. This is truly powerful stuff.
“What is important,” he writes, “is to keep clinging to the real, lasting, and unambiguous love of Jesus. Whenever you doubt that love, return to your inner spiritual home and listen there to love’s voice.”
Don’t go one more week without reading this book! When you finish, you will swear that your struggle—grief, loneliness, depression, anxiety, addiction, unrequited love—is the one which Nouwen endured.
And maybe it was…
I haven’t read The Inner Voice of Love, but I read Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved as a freshman in college and it introduced me to an entire realm of Christianity that I had no idea existed: the contemplative life. I resonated so strongly with this way of being a Christian, and it remains one of the central pieces of my faith. So I am grateful to Henri Nouwen, too, for introducing me to what has become a profound part of my life in Christ.