The Same, But Different
- Dec 18, 2024
- 22 min read
Updated: Sep 22, 2025
Reflections on Homecoming with Henri Nouwen
STORIES
"Unlike a fairytale, the parable provides no happy ending."—Henri Nouwen
I often thought of my father as I sped down dusty tracks. My motorcycle kicked up a haze that obscured the road behind me in a red cloud, and I would sometimes hum an old hymn to myself, the foam on the inside of my helmet amplifying my voice with a warm baritone resonance. "Were you there, when they crucified my Lord?" I'd learned the hymns from my dad, and began riding too in part because of his old stories of bumping around the Kenyan bush in his days as a missionary veterinarian. My heart was full of his stories as I lived into my own those days, working on a private conservancy on Kenya's frontier. He told me about once riding alongside a cheetah across the plains, about hitting a dog on a narrow turn and flying over the handlebars, about telling Bible stories under a tree that for all involved was a bona fide church.
As my father and I drifted further apart over my early twenties—as I hit escape velocity from the orbit of the Christian church—I often wondered about this version of my father, who dashed through the world on God's grand adventure, from rural Georgia to the Maasai rangelands, who could see the story with humour and grace. He left home in a radical way, grew up by trial and error. He followed his heart across the world and into a deep belief. I followed my heart right out of it.
Why was it that he seemed unable to recognize my own grand adventure into the "secular" as the same in substance as his own, as a journey guided still by faith? And why did I so viscerally need him to see this? Is a pattern always the same, but different? In how many ways can one be lost?
These were among my busy thoughts as I rode, including on the day that I turned off the rocky track in Burguret, Kenya, and mounted the tarmac heading south to Naromoru.
DEPARTURES
I.
"I tried to discover the last thing beyond the passing, the eternal beyond the temporal."—Henri Nouwen
I had been unofficially apostate since my sophomore year of college, and more visibly and emphatically so since I had published an incendiary essay during the run-up to the 2020 presidential election entitled "Let's Talk About Christian Values." I received some very bitter emails from aunts and old college friends for a tone that, in fairness to them, was itself lacking in that Christian virtue of generosity. It is hard to stake your opinion without creating a shadow of hypocrisy.
But I embraced my position as iconoclast, and at times relished embodying the "atheist missionary kid" narrative, so deliciously upsetting to the web of campus ministers, ex-girlfriends, my southern Christian extended family, the network of supporters that had put my family in the mission field for so many years. One might say that I took my spiritual inheritance and squandered it willfully away. I didn't feel this way, of course. I felt that I had discovered freedom: cracking open the layers of dualism that my Evangelical education had taught me to project on the world, I found myself able to move through much more of the world with curiosity, and often with compassion. That this compassion did not extend into my own history seemed, at the time, unimportant.
My dad was a product of the Reformed Protestant tradition, and I'd educated myself into the same persuasion by way of bookshelves full of Abraham Kuyper, Timothy Keller, John Piper. It was a tradition not lacking in rigor or wonder, two values I cherish to this day, but also a tradition committed to a predestined understanding of human depravity and salvation through belief in Jesus as Saviour. Maybe by dint of the inadvertently cosmopolitan nature of my adolescence—no small irony that a missionary kid ends up fraternizing with people of myriad faiths and ideals—or simply through the timeless story of identity by distinction, I began to find these non-negotiables somewhat contrived.
Most especially, I struggled to see how belief, intellectual affirmation of a doctrine, squared with an experience that ebbed and flowed. Nowhere I looked could I find a solid barrier off of which to ground such confidence. With horizons seeming to recede as I approached them, I read and took to heart the opening words from Walt Whitman's Passage to India:
"Not you alone, proud truths of the world,
Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science,
The deep diving bibles and legends,
The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions;
Towers of fables immortal, fashion'd from mortal dreams!
You too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest!
You too with joy I sing." [1]
The strict boundaries of Reformed theology had proven an effective guide for my father, a logos sufficiently coherent for the world as he encountered it. My joyful itinerance, embracing experiences of all kinds and apparently unconcerned with outcome, seemed to him a "rebellion" against God. He could not see in my exploration what I believed I did: that my ideas themselves were entirely entangled with the mutable and morphing reality I lived in. Although he also had made great departures in his life, leaving rural Georgia for Africa with a burning sense of mission, those lines of belief were immutable to him.
During that long journey away from the church, my mother would more readily meet me in spiritual intimacy. Her faith had always been less logos and more pathos, a deeply felt and poignant sense of the presence of God in her life. More specifically, the presence of Jesus himself, and whatever was living about that presence made my gesticulating feel childish. I could pontificate on tautologies until they dissolved in the air between us—and I would open again to wherever my heart was, religious or not, and she would be there, too.
It was over one of these many conversations that she shocked me by saying, "James, whatever God you believed in clearly wasn't working for you. I'm glad you've left that God behind."
This greatly perturbed my intellectual position, for it had been quietly angled in opposition to my parents' faith, defining itself through the story of departure even as it believed it transcended and absorbed it. I used to say to my father, "My belief has room for you. It's only yours that has no room for me." I had discovered new tactics and tools for observing reality, yet I avoided looking at entire parts of my life; I had deconstructed and reconstructed language and determined it to be relative, all while the distance between I and my true relatives deepened; I had discovered the intellectual freedom of spiritual perennialism, while avoiding the responsibility of spiritual wisdom.
When my mother gave me a copy of Henri J.M. Nouwen's book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, I graciously accepted and then quickly put it on a shelf to gather dust after perusing the prologue. Too much Jesus for me. Besides, I had always found the typical rendering of that story presumptuous and needling. "Go ahead and leave, young man! You'll be back." That sort of thing.
Somewhere along my peregrinations, I lost that copy. I hadn't realized that within the book was a much richer, textured, living interpretation of Jesus' most famous parable than I was prepared to accept. My mother knew, in her lived religion, something I couldn't yet understand.
II.
"Giving up the somewhat safe position of the critical observer seemed like a great leap into totally unknown territory."—Henri Nouwen
Henri Nouwen left Harvard only shortly after he arrived. Though his classrooms were overflowing and his students eager, what seemed to be the pinnacle of his career as a priest, theologian, and writer was also, it seems, the nadir of his spiritual life. He had taught at Duke and Yale Divinity Schools, had been extensively involved in political affairs in South America, and had become well-known as a pre-eminent thinker on Catholic (and Christian, broadly) ministry, vocation, and devotion.
A famously intense and passionate teacher, his entrance to the space was welcomed by some and troubled others. According to Michael O'Laughlin, "[It] seemed like an injection of real Christianity into a staid New England institution, and I was more amused than anything else to see Henri creating such a scene on the Divinity School's doorstep." [2] Although to some he represented a mature, modern Christian theologian with liberal perspectives—"Henri showed Harvard what ecumenism [is], in the true, original sense" [3]—he also placed an increasingly determined emphasis on Christocentric theology that resulted in tension with the unusually diverse student body.
"This change was deliberate," wrote O'Laughlin. "The first year he had attempted to go with the Harvard flow, but he grew tired of mincing words and resolved the second year to speak more clearly about Jesus. This created some friction with a number of students. Henri's approach was so different from what they were used to that they accused him of 'spiritual imperialism.'" Although his living and working quarters in the Carriage House on Francis Avenue became a beloved gathering place for many of Nouwen's students and colleagues, "the dissension that was present in the classroom and in the general politics of HDS invaded even that space," recalled Stephen Pavy.
"Henri, who was never really good at sitting still in silence and meditation, had increasing difficulty quieting the restlessness in his hands. But the restlessness in his hands was merely a reflection of the pain and suffering he was experiencing that semester." [4]
The Return of the Prodigal Son, one of Nouwen's most famous books, was written just after these years at Harvard. In it he reflects on Rembrandt's seventeenth century painting of the same name, exploring the depths of the climactic scene from the Biblical parable [5] and placing himself in various roles within it for reflection. Although Nouwen was well known for his emphasis on vulnerability in leadership and service, in the idea of "the wounded healer," it may be that his time at Harvard brought some of his deepest wounds to the surface.
"It dawned on me," Nouwen writes in the book, "that even my best theological and spiritual formation had not been able to completely free me from a father God who remained somewhat threatening and somewhat fearsome."
He resonates first with the arrogance of the younger "prodigal" son, seeking selfhood in venturing away from the undiscriminating love of the father. Nouwen's arrogance was the shadow side of his insecurity, he found, a tendency further enabled by the environment at Harvard, where ideas and intellectual capacity were (and are) privileged. "The simple fact of being able to express an opinion, to set up an argument, to defend the position, to clarify a vision has given me, and gives me still, a sense of control," he writes. "And, generally, I feel much safer experiencing a sense of control over an undefinable situation than taking the risk of letting that situation control me."
Nouwen gradually realized during this season that the spiritual anguish he felt would not be rectified by continued prominence as a professor and peacemaker, acknowledging that "against my own best intentions, I find myself continually striving to acquire power." He needed to descend to the "place where I will receive all I desire, all that I ever hoped for, all that I will ever need, but…also the place where I have to let go of all my most want to hold onto.… It is the place of surrender and complete trust."
He had awoken, like the younger son, to his desires having led him to a kind of spiritual poverty, the worldly acclaim and intellectual prowess nothing more than rags draped across his soul. "I so much wanted to keep some control over my spiritual journey, to remain able to predict at least a part of the outcome, that relinquishing the security of the observer, for the vulnerability of the returning son seemed close to impossible."
III.
"I did not realize how deeply rooted my resistance was and how agonizing it would be to 'come to my senses.'"—Henri Nouwen
I have wondered if what we call "the secular" is something like this younger son. It may be, in its origins, a manifestation of an apparently elemental human need to question, to diverge, to evolve, to examine, to push against purportedly solid walls and find them permeable. Like the mariner in Whitman's poem, there is a profound courage to every moment of such errantry in human history, a faith more profound than belief:
"Sail forth— steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all." [6]
Oftentimes it seems it was the most passionately faithful and potent thinkers within the church that dared risk the bold new ideas, with little thought of the eventual consequences. I think of Galileo, Newton, Luther—challenging the institutions of their age to evolve, they unwittingly unleashed entirely new paradigms that would transcend the possibilities of the present authority.
Indeed, some have argued that the modern concept of "religion" is itself largely a product of this Enlightenment divergence into the "secular." [7] Religion as something of use to humankind is thereby challenged to reinvent itself in light of the expanding horizons. The secular, in turn, is bounded by its brief and giddy hubris at having broken through the illusory walls to the open ocean of experience. Like the younger son in the parable, it storms out into the world and sees much, but in denying its origin story it also loses access to the wisdom closer to home. It is "a drastic cutting loose from the way of living, thinking, and acting that has been handed down…from generation to generation as a sacred legacy." There are benefits to this youthful exploration, and there are also serious risks.
Challenging the norms and bounds of my given religion allowed me to see into some of its blind spots. It became clear to me the ways in which conceptual strictures prevented my father, for example, from seeing the common impulses and mechanics hidden behind different spiritual languages. But my identification with the secular also prevented me from seeing how I created my own blind spots by signifying religion. As the scholar Talal Assad writes, "the secular is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity, [but] it works through a series of particular oppositions." [8]
In denying its origins, its contingency, and it's own underlying "myth," [9] the secular worldview risks (and indeed is well into) ossifying into yet a new superstructure with its own illusions. Rather than understanding itself in relation to its ideological roots, it ironically perpetuates the binaries it at first attempted to escape. This is clearly visible in its near-perfect inheritance of the dualism of "natural" and "not." "For the representation of the Christian God as being sited quite apart in 'the supernatural' world," writes Assad, "signals the construction of a secular space that begins to emerge in early modernity." [10]
In my own errantry, at least, these dynamics were clear. My father and I created and maintained a conceptual, theological boundary between us (a boundary that my mother, importantly, did not find as monolithic), defined in opposition to one another; he extolling limits, myself declaiming freedom. I declared my independence without recognizing my roots. In so living without limits, without real reciprocity, I was soon as lost as any other.
On the road to Naromoru, my mind numb from my spiritually enervating work in the bush (emphatically not a missionary, I would zealously proclaim), my body exhausted, I disassociated on the two-lane highway for a brief moment—and collided at speed with a swerving truck.
The days following were a blur of surgeries and morphine. Only in that material moment did my sense of the supernatural become clear. There was indeed something like a structure, a law, a plan, a set of real solid things that hummed in tension like the cosmic throb of an engine. The way home can only be seen from the wilderness, can only be made sense of through the salvation of story itself. In that material moment, my hubris winked at me—I'd become as identified with my departure as my father ever had.
In that material moment, my mom and dad booked tickets from Georgia and met me at the Kijabe hospital after my bumpy and torturous ambulance transfer across rural Kenya. There was no mention, indeed no thought, of belief as they sat with me in the ward. On the day I was wheeled out of the clinic and helped into the car to make the drive to Nairobi, I said to them in a whimper, "I feel so childish—twenty-six years old and I'm being cradled by my parents."
After a brief and deep pause, my dad said, "Sometimes we all need to be cradled."
RETURNINGS
I.
"The paralyzing fear of God is one of the great human tragedies."—Henri Nouwen
Some months earlier, my father had visited me at the conservancy in Laikipia, on the northern frontier of developed Kenya. I had been working as a mediator and peacebuilder in a volatile part of the country and it was the first time the area had been safe and stable enough for visitors for nearly two years. The conservancy was working to repair relations with the pastoralist Pokot community and as its representative I was routinely invited to local rural churches. They knew my father was a missionary pastor and I, unabashedly politicking, offered my dad to preach at a nearby church that Sunday. They were thrilled, as was he. It had been many years since we'd gone to any sort of church together. Somehow, being in the landscape we both loved made it easier.
After a long, jarring drive through barely passable bush tracks in my little Suzuki jeep, we arrived at the Pokot church to a lively party—borrowed speakers bleating praise songs, dozens of children darting about. My father specializes in oral biblical storytelling, and I asked him if he'd tell one of his favorites, "The Return of the Prodigal Son." The region had been gripped by a violent conflict and the process of peacebuilding was revealing hypocrisies and rigidities of perspective on every side. We were collectively climbing out of a darkness like what Nouwen describes: "True communion is gone. Every relationship is pervaded by the darkness. To be afraid or to show disdain, to suffer submission, or to enforce control, to be an oppressor or to be a victim: these have become the choices for one outside of the light."
In my role I was coming to understand the power of story over belief. I thought, much like Nouwen, that this particular story provided the listener with opportunities to identify with and reflect upon multiple roles. It was often the case that "early believers" in the Kenyan church were tempted to see in the parable a kind of paternalistic vindication—the younger son as a sinner rightly repenting to his father. Within a deeply communitarian and patriarchal culture, the prodigal son's rejection of his father and demand for his inheritance is still felt for the radical affront that it would have been to Jesus' audience.
But for many years my dad had emphasized not the younger son but the elder when he told this story—he seemed to identify most not with the lostness of the prodigal son, living without limits and exploring the many delights and despairs of the world, but with the elder son, living with an obedience and virtue masking a deep fear and resentment, "lost within the home." My father had exemplified many of these tendencies throughout his life. He was an idealist and a rule-follower. He prioritized rightness and righteousness. In recognizing himself in the elder brother, he had come to see the church itself as deeply implicated. Although never much of a classical evangelist, his work turned more and more towards equipping local church leaders to examine their own hypocrisies in light of the father's compassion.
Nouwen, too, reflected on this irony of the obedient believer coming to dwell in as great a darkness as the apostate. "As I let myself be drawn into the vast interior labyrinth of my complaints, I become more and more lost until, in the end, I feel myself to be the most misunderstood, rejected, neglected, and despised person in the world," he writes, a description that would aptly fit many religious fundamentalists and ideologues today. "Outside of the light," Nouwen continues, "my younger brother seems to be more loved by the father than I; in fact, outside of the light, I cannot even see him as my own brother."
This is another irony of the religious-secular binary; that in implicitly accepting its definition in opposition to the errantry of secularism, a religious tradition locks itself out of the house of wisdom. Whatever kind of deliberate moderation and discipline and stability it had cultivated through its theology suddenly becomes defensive, reactionary. It has entered the conditional power game. True wisdom is now up for grabs. "As long as the Father evokes fear, he remains an outsider and cannot dwell within me," says Nouwen. The religious tremble with fear for a God that they have demarcated for themselves yet with envy for the God others seem to have found.
II.
"I have left the distant country and come to feel the nearness of love."—Henri Nouwen
For Nouwen, too, it was a material experience that led to his spiritual reconciliation. In the very depth of his season of spiritual angst, while "hitchhiking," [11] he was hit by a car and found himself "in a hospital close to death." There he "suddenly had the illuminating insight that I would not be free to die as long as I was still holding onto the complaint of not having been loved enough by the one whose son I am."
He was visited by his own aging father, to whom he admitted a deep love in spite of their differences and disputes. His father was "somewhat surprised and even puzzled by it all, but received my words with understanding and a smile." Nouwen found in this "frightening, but very liberating" experience a spiritual freedom no longer bound to the specific and ever imperfect human relationships in his life but a freedom to rest in his expanding sense of the "One" who was his true "Father." Indeed, as Nouwen passed through the roles of first the younger and then the elder son, he found to his surprise that the central character in the parable we are asked to inhabit is finally the father himself.
In Rembrandt's painting, the father is portrayed in paradox: simultaneously seeing and near-blind, strong and affirming and yet aging and gentle, and persistent in pursuit of his impertinent sons. Entering into this paradox, Nouwen's writing becomes transcendent and classically mystical. In these apparent but illusory contradictions of "Father and son, God and humanity, compassion and misery, in one circle of love, I would come to know as much as I ever would about death and life," he writes. He begins to speak of God as Father and Mother, and with a radical interdependence with humanity: "the mystery, indeed, is that God in her infinite compassion has linked herself for eternity with the life of her children. She has freely chosen to become dependent on her creatures." In the Rembrandt's last years, "his art no longer tries to grasp, conquer, and regulate the visible," Nouwen writes, and he surrendered in turn to this sacred freedom. "Time and Eternity intersect; approaching death and everlasting life touch each other. sin and forgiveness embrace; the human and the Divine become one."
Through his descent into depression, physical pain and spiritual malaise, he began to see that he could never move into the role of the father while he was still pursuing influence and "power." He decided to relinquish his position at Harvard after two short years, and soon after moved to Toronto to take up a position in leadership of the L'Arche community there, an international network of centers for people with disabilities. In entering the world of those to whom complex concepts are unimpressive and irrelevant to the true work of relating, he chose a path of spiritual depth over worldly acclaim. "For a long time, I had sought Safety and Security among the wise and clever," he writes. "There is a dreadful emptiness in the spiritual fatherhood… but that same dreadful emptiness is also the place of true freedom…each time we touch that sacred emptiness of non-demanding love, Heaven and Earth tremble."
III.
"The finding has the losing in the background, the returning has the leaving under its cloak."—Henri Nouwen
Nouwen's journey reflects my own while also providing a challenge. In living out a dramatic dialectic, swinging from end to end with true prodigality—both as the elder son, a legalistic teenager too stiff to enjoy a good party, and as the younger, intemperate and radical—I have slowly been able to recognize more quickly the ways in which I continue to define myself in opposition to my chosen "Other." Wherever I see my Other, I'm learning, I am choosing to not see a part of myself. "Our enemy is our shadow." [12]
Assad notes these complex relations when he writes that the secular "is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred.)" [13] We are a story of imbricated generations, each performing the life cycle of growing up confident in our own way, getting lost in our own way, and returning home in our own way. Those of us that diverge tend to forget the roots that fed us and made us. Those that remain tend to forget the sacred freedom of being itself. In all cases, we are asked to mature, and to accept our entanglement with one another. "A child does not remain a child," says Nouwen.
The scene at the church in Churo was as rich with these contradictions as with the signs of returnings and reconciliations. I was finally learning to see my father's faith not for what he said but for what he did, [14] which was to meet people where they were at with authentic reflection and humility, holding the structure of a religious tradition that still invited many in and provided stability, solace and maturity. I thus, despite my distaste for the missionary theological schematic, was able to see how liberating a religious story could be.
He, in turn, was meeting me on my turf, embracing "a strange curiosity for the disobedient life that I myself didn't dare to live, but which I saw being lived by many around me," in Nouwen's words, and finding it, and my work, inspired by many of the same moral and spiritual convictions. I held a wide-open view of the world, able to see resonance and similarity where strict ideologies created walls. This, too, can provide solace and liberation as a situation or society evolves into its next formation.
And then there was the contradiction of us Americans preaching at all to an African church. Perhaps my post-Presbyterian fear of theological dogma was simply not so much of a concern for such a deeply embodied community. My father and I could stay caught in the "solemnity and seriousness" of our theological games while the party proceeded unabated, just like in the parable. We, like Nouwen, are simply "not used to the image of God throwing a big party."
But it is the party that frees all of us, dogmatists and iconoclasts and warring tribes alike. It is precisely in the dust and sweat and dancing, in the crackling microphones and the steaming goat stew, that our ideas and identities conspire into a single joyous noise.
IMAGES
"All of the gospel is there."—Henri Nouwen
But if the religious and secular are secretly siblings, what does this make the father? Even for Nouwen, this story of eternal movement through the world (be it out-and-back or in-place) was ultimately still framed by the concept system of the Christian God. "Yes, I know that not everybody has been converted yet, that there is not yet peace everywhere, that all pain has not yet been away, but still," he writes, "I don't have to wait until all is well, but I can celebrate every little hint of the Kingdom that is at hand." To my mind, if Christianity's great gift is its romance with story, its great curse is its fixation on resolution. I gradually realized that underneath the logos was a more foundational telos.
Like my father, Nouwen remained committed throughout his life to this particular story as the linchpin holding together his conceptual understanding of reality, but it is interesting that Nouwen chose to write his book in conversation with a painting—a static image which only his lived experience gave depth and temporality. He watches the painting change as the light passes over it, as his experiences inflect new meaning into every stroke and detail. As always, beyond our frame is the reality of the witnessing, the relationality animating everything.
And so the image and the story speak to the same truth in different ways. A beginning to a story implies an ending, and if it ends, implies a teller. The story cannot exist merely as an idea. It must be seen, heard, told, experienced. The image takes a single event in a story and implies its entirety. Our experience itself creates meaning out of an unmoving moment. Nouwen came to see the profound truth of this reality through the painting, but ultimately through his life.
Thus Nouwen becomes, like many mystics, an accidental one. In living a life of genuine surrender, his finite frame becomes a door to an infinite recognition of the eternally turning paradox of reality. "In our world, joy and sorrow exclude each other," he says, and then concludes, "But such distinctions do not exist in God."
There is in these stories, Nouwen's and those of the lost sons, an invitation for all of us to return to the paradox of the father, that "dreadful emptiness." The religious inclination may be to reiterate the same story, to look for depth without leaving home, and the "secular" impulse to ask what else is possible, to boldly "risk the ship, ourselves, and all." The warning, in either case, is to not identify our journey as the correct one, let alone the only one. Could the elder son have felt righteous without his wayward brother? Would his brother have grown discontent without the turgid sanctimony he saw at home? Furthermore, whatever liberation we find in distinguishing ourselves risks reifying into yet a new system of hegemony, as we indisputably see with certain secular ideologies today.
Nouwen chose to leave Harvard Divinity School because he saw it enabling his pride and eroding his faith. I chose to leave the church for the same reasons. In a beautiful sweeping spiral, I am now at Harvard Divinity School, drawn back to the paradox of religion as the place for sacred stories and images. I no longer fear vindicating my friends and relatives as the repentant and cowed returning son because I now see that every returning can only be to a vast tangle of unending stories, all defining each other. It is clear to me now that whatever we each return to, whatever accepts us back repeatedly, eternally, and without contempt, is by necessity something that transcends us all.
In the words of Whitman, whether we stay or go, we cannot truly depart:
"O my brave soul!
O farther farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?" [15]
My relationship with my dad, too, seems to have entered a new season. We no longer avoid speaking of theology—what was once a looming wall between seems to have shrunk in the rain to a gentle hedge with open gates and fresh breeze blowing from the forest. Our shared experiences, places, and people make the ideas look small in context.
It was in the months before my parents departed Kenya to conclude the twenty-five year stint of their field mission work that I returned home and bought myself that motorcycle, soon to ride north and pursue my own missions. The first time I brought it over to my family's house in Nairobi, where a container sat in the yard full of a few decades' worth of stuff, ready to be shipped, my dad was in shorts and slides and a ball-cap loading and packing and listening to his unceasing audiobooks. "Nice looking machine," he said, and before I could say much of anything he was astride said machine, twisting the throttle, and disappearing down the drive in a roar.
At the time, my stomach lurched and I chided his reckless enthusiasm. Now, the words of Henri Nouwen come to mind: "I have discovered, with some chagrin, that sometimes I am exactly like my own father."
Bibliography
[1] Poetry Foundation, selections from the second passage.
[2] Michael O'Laughlin, HDS News Archive
[3] Peter K. Weiskel, HDS News Archive
[4] Stephen Pavy, HDS News Archive
[5] Luke 15:11-32
[6] Poets.org, selections from the final stanza.
[7] Charles Long, Significations: "In seeking to give a unitary meaning to this phenomenon, religion has been almost created anew within the categories of the disciplines of the human sciences that undertook a study of this phenomenon."
[8] Talal Assad, Formations of the Secular, page 25
[9] Talal Assad, Formations of the Secular, pages 26-30
[10] Assad, Formations of the Secular, page 27
[11] It seems adventure knows no religion!
[12] An aphorism attributed to Zhuang Zhao.
[13] Talal Assad, Formations of the Secular, page 25
[14] David Morgan, The Thing About Religion, page 45
[15] Poets.org, selections from the final stanza.
References
Nouwen, H. J. M. (1992). The return of the prodigal son: A story of homecoming. Doubleday.
Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford University Press.
Long, C. H. (1999). Significations: Signs, symbols, and images in the interpretation of religion. The Davies Group, Publishers.
Morgan, D. (2021). The thing about religion: An introduction to the material study of religions. University of North Carolina Press.
Harvard Divinity School. (2011, February 7). A spiritual mentor's lasting influence: Henri Nouwen.
Harvard Divinity School News Archive. https://news-archive.hds.harvard.edu/news/2011/02/07/a-spiritual-mentors-lasting-influence-henri-nouwen
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