The Father’s Love
A review of "The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming" by Henri J. M. Nouwen
Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. Glasgow, Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd., 1994. Print.
Dear Fellow,
Today’s despatch is a reflection on the value of art. Of how a piece of painting would bring to sharp clarity words that were spoken centuries before the painting was produced. If one case study is enough to make a general conclusion about a matter, the book under review will be a definitive answer to the question posed by Professor John Carey in his book What Good Are the Arts?; the answer to the chapter titled “Do the arts make us better?” would be a resounding yes.
The Backstory
My first encounter with Dutch Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen (1932-1996) was in Philip Yancey’s Soul Survivor. A collection of biographies of his “mentors as if in a portrait gallery, in hopes of passing on their legacy to others”, Yancey labelled the chapter on Nouwen as “Henri Nouwen: The Wounded Healer”. Having read the chapter on Nouwen and savoured the experience, I could not back out at the opportunity to grab a copy of his book The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming at Books2Africa Nigeria.
The Reading
Yancey did a better job in retelling Nouwen’s fellowship with Rembrandt’s painting:
In 1983, the priest and university professor Henri Nouwen first encountered Rembrandt’s painting Return of the Prodigal Son in the form of a poster pinned to the back of a door. Perhaps because he had just completed an exhausting lecture tour on Central American justice issues and was nearing emotional collapse, the painting touched him as he had never before been touched. He wanted nothing more than to take the place of the ragged son kneeling before the father, to bathe in the golden light, to feel the tender weight of the father’s hands on his shoulders. He wanted nothing more than to go home—wherever that might be.
Born in the Netherlands, Nouwen had an affinity for paintings by his compatriots, especially Rembrandt and van Gogh. [In 1986], when offered the chance to visit Russia, he quickly agreed, in part because it gave him the opportunity to view Rembrandt’s painting in person. Twice within a week he entered the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and sat for several hours before the masterpiece, which Rembrandt had painted on a huge scale, larger than life. Dwarfed by the painting, Nouwen watched it change hour by hour with the sunlight, drinking in every detail of the characters in their spare setting.
A short time later, after resigning his professorship and making a radical change in his life, Nouwen wrote the slim book The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. By moving into a community of the physically and mentally disabled in Toronto, Canada, he hoped he had found his true home at last. The painting continued to captivate him, and Nouwen began to see his own story in terms of Jesus’ parable of the prodigal. Ten years after the move, his life ended with a kind of poetic unity, for he was working on a television special on the painting in 1996, making preparations to visit the Hermitage with a Dutch camera crew, when he suffered the heart attack that ultimately killed him.
The Lessons
Rembrandt’s painting evoked Nouwen’s book. Both masterpieces proceeded from meditations on Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son from centuries old, as found in Luke 15:11-32. Nouwen wrote, “At the heart of this adventure is a seventeenth-century painting and its artist, a first-century parable and its author, and a twentieth-century person in search of life’s meaning.” Bridging time and geography, art (oral literature, painting, and writing) became the level ground for these men to commune. If I’d produce a summary like Nouwen’s, Philip Yancey will be in it, and then myself. You, my reader, will include yours from this end. You see art crossing time, a long chain. The more definitive remark on the painting by Rembrandt from Nouwen reads: “The painting has become a mysterious window through which I can step into the Kingdom of God.”
The Conclusion
The title of this despatch seems to be far removed from the content you’ve read. But it is not so. I set out to also speak of the parable of Jesus in far greater detail than I had ever done. I could not do otherwise from what you have. Perhaps a reflection on the parable of Jesus on the prodigal son will serve you better than my retelling of it. Nouwen had Rembrandt’s painting to help rediscover the parable. He saw the parable in far greater detail, every stroke of Rembrandt’s painting revealing profound truths—producing a book of 139 pages.
God is so loving a Father that He gave His only son Jesus (John 3:16). Yet He is also grand a designer that He gave us many art mediums to contemplate His beauty. Those of us who may have lost faith in human goodness, could turn to paintings like Rembrandt’s and find some bit of hope or “a mysterious window through which I can step into the Kingdom of God.”
See the beauty around you today and always, good Fellow.
Your LetterMan,
Tongjal, W. N.
Still on the run planning for my book launch. Kindly make a donation in support, especially if you enjoyed the content you have read so far on this newsletter:
Thank you, good Fellow.
Interesting review...
Art indeed is a window!!!