Читать книгу Henri Nouwen and The Return of the Prodigal Son - Gabrielle Earnshaw - Страница 16

As well as exposure to great art, Nouwen had an active and developed imagination. We can enjoy pondering how differently he might have seen the world, as he walked through it, from the way we do. It calls to mind the story of his fascination with the trapeze troupe the Flying Rodleighs who were mentioned earlier.

While most people who saw the Flying Rodleighs perform at a circus enjoyed a beautiful aerial dance or a daring feat of athleticism, Nouwen, with his spiritual vision, saw God, the universe, and the whole meaning of existence. The trapeze act was yet another icon—this time an icon in motion—and it caught his imagination every bit as firmly as Rembrandt’s painting. He wrote, “From the very moment they appeared, my attention was completely riveted. The selfconfident and joyful way they entered, smiled, greeted the audience and then climbed to the trapeze rigging told me that I was going to see something—better, experience something—that was going to make this evening unlike any other.”³¹

Nouwen first saw the Rodleighs while vacationing with his ninety-year-old father in Freiburg, Germany, in 1991. There was a peacefulness to the visit that flowed from Nouwen’s lived experience of the Rembrandt painting. Nouwen reflected, “[Our] visit had about it that wonderful quality of mutual freedom and mutual bonding that can develop when both father and son have become elders.”³²

One day during the holiday, Nouwen saw a poster for the Circus Simoneit Barum. It was traveling through town, and they decided to attend a show. Sitting under the big top they enjoyed the animals and clowns, the juggling acts and tumblers, but it was the last act—that trapeze troupe called the Flying Rodleighs—that changed everything.

Nouwen was transfixed. Later, when he tried to articulate what it was that gripped him with such intensity, he had this to say: “The ten minutes that followed somehow gave me a glimpse of a world that had eluded me so far, a world of discipline and freedom, diversity and harmony, risk and safety, individuality and community, and most of all, of flying and catching.”³³ He saw in this aerial dance an image that satisfied his lifelong desire to be totally free and totally safe. “I somehow caught a glimpse of … the mystery in which complete freedom and complete bonding are one and in which letting go of everything and being connected to everything no longer elude each other.”³⁴

Nouwen’s ensuing trapeze obsession is an echo of his earlier experience with the Rembrandt painting. He asks, “Wasn’t the tenminute spectacle of these five people in mid-air like a living painting put together by great artists?” “Is this trapeze act perhaps one of the windows in the house of life that opens up a view to a totally new, enrapturing landscape?”³⁵