I owe some of my faith to Henri Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son.

Lonely Mystic: A New Portrait of Henri J.M. Nouwen
MICHAEL FORD
(PAULIST PRESS, 184 PP, £13.33)

I owe some of my faith to Henri Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son. His acknowledgement that it is possible to hold in one hand the suffering that life can bring and, in the other, the tender love of God, with one not causing the other to drop, was, to me, profoundly impactful.

Yet, reading that book all those years ago, knowing nothing about the author, it was clear that Nouwen’s own sense of loneliness and pain, extinguished only in the arms of the Jesus he described, lingered.

In a new portrait of the much-loved spiritual writer and Catholic priest, the journalist and theologian Michael Ford works from the premise that it is Nouwen’s immense personal suffering that makes him “one of the world’s greatest luminaries and mystics”.

Lonely Mystic is compiled from previously unheard radio interviews collected by Ford in 1999 when he was working on his first, award-winning biography of Nouwen.

It is from these unpublished testimonies (or “the digital equivalent of what ends up on the cutting-room floor”) that Ford re-examines the life of Nouwen through a mystical lens.

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