What Are We Going To Talk About?

Van Gogh, Cafe Terrace At Night, 1888

I have just finished re-reading Henri Nouwen’s lovely Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living In a Secular World. Nouwen tells the story how a young man named Fred asked him to write something that would speak to him and to his secular friends: “Put it in a language we can understand.” Their friendship began when this Jewish, secular, young writer for The New York Times, came to interview the renowned Christian priest and writer.

And so Nouwen set out to say what he really believes, all the while knowing he is speaking across the huge gap between Christians and those of little or no faith at all, that rapidly growing group we have come to know as the nones. Nouwen knows his task will not be easy: “Would I be able to step out of [my] God-centered reality and respond to those who say: ‘Do I really need God to live, to be happy, to enjoy life, to fulfill my deepest desires? Do I need faith to live a decent and creative life?’”   

The drama comes to a climax as Nouwen hands over the manuscript to Fred. Did he meet the challenge? Sadly, Fred responds with gentle, straight-up honesty: “You are just not aware of how truly secular we are.”

“Fred was quite willing,” Nouwen adds, to admit, “with the disappearance of the sacred from our world, the human imagination had been impoverished and that many people live with a sense of loss, even emptiness. But where and how can we rediscover the sacred and give it the central place in our lives? I am quite aware now that, in this book, I have not adequately responded to his question.”

I was stunned by this confession of failure. The gap was perhaps too wide. I know this gap well, more lately than before, as I sit across the table with friends, even loved ones, feeling this unacknowledged distance between us. I sense my friends may never have given a whit for the things that matter most to me.  

Along with the great Lesslie Newbigin, I know “I have a truth to tell.” I want to put that truth into words. I need to offer up, along with Augustine and the Church Fathers, “a new starting point for thought.” In my writing, teaching, and leadership, I’ve tried hard to tell “the old, old story” in ways that speak into our world of unbelief.

But what if nobody is listening anymore? Or what if we’ve lost the vocabulary to fill the gap between us? What do we say then when all we get from the other side of the table is a blank stare?

Nouwen ends the book talking about “the disappearance of the sacred from our world.” We feel impoverished, left with an emptiness at the pit of our lives. As we have airbrushed the sacred from our lives, as we have pushed God from the center to the margins of our culture, we have paid a huge price.  

I am seeking now how better to recover the sacred, for myself and the world I inhabit. Listen to the great poet Isaiah:

10 As the rain and snow come down from the heavens
and do not return there without watering the earth,
making it produce grain
to give seed for sowing and bread to eat,
11 so is it with my word issuing from my mouth;
it will not return to me empty
without accomplishing my purpose
and succeeding in the task for which I sent it.

12 You will go out with joy
and be led forth in peace.
Before you mountains and hills will break into cries of joy,
and all the trees in the countryside will clap their hands.
13 Pine trees will grow in place of camel-thorn,
myrtles instead of briars;
all this will be a memorial for the LORD,
a sign that for all time will not be cut off. Isaiah 55:10-1312

As we stare into the gap, we need first to draw nearer to our Lord, individually, personally. But then we are reminded, vividly, that everything becomes sacred. We find new purpose for our lives and for our world. But imagine this: As we carry this sacramental view into our days and our world, the hills will break out into cries of joy and the countryside will clap its hands.

This is the kind of world we’ve lost. This is a world I want to do my best to recover. This could even give us something to talk about the next time we sit across the table.