A wonderful legacy of the YMCA is it’s participation in supporting the creation of Father’s Day, a way to build up the family and the young men they serve.
Through the work of the brilliant Rev. Anthony Bowen, a freed slave, he founded a YMCA in Washington D.C. in 1853, a work which became crucial to creating a safe space for young black men to become fathers of liberation, justice and peace.
Since the founding of the YMCA in London England, 1844 refugees have been a core of our mission, as it still is today across the world, as you can see from this 2021 conference.
As a minister who is a father, and whose father was a minister, Father’s Day is a time when I reflect on ministers and fathers in my life and the difficulties they endure, their hopes and aspirations, their flaws and failures.
The YMCA has been built up by ministers and fathers – Rev. Anthony Bowen, Marine Missionary Thomas Sullivan, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Ecumenical Leader John Mott, and many, many more.
Being a minister and father now with the YMCA, amidst the chaos and turmoil of our generation, I found the writings of the priest Henri Nouwen to be particularly poignant, especially as it relates to being a Christian minister and leader in our culture still struggling towards racial equity and welcoming refugees.
This morning I was re-reading parts of the classic meditation by Nouwen called The Wounded Healer. The last chapter is called “Ministry By A Lonely Minister”; brilliant, compassionate, prophetic, honest reflections that resonate with me in my work in the world, my community and the Y.
For you, as you strive to do your part to lead, love, care and serve (minister) in the Y and our hurting world, may Nouwen be an encouraging guide, especially this weekend as we remember our fathers, our emancipated neighbors, and refugees searching for a welcoming home.
We live in a society in which loneliness has become one of the most painful human wounds.
The growing competition and rivalry which pervade our lives from birth have created in us an acute awareness of our isolation.
This awareness has in turn left many with a heightened anxiety and an intense search for the experience of unity and community.
It has also led people to ask anew how love, friendship, brotherhood and sisterhood can free them from isolation and offer them a sense of intimacy and belonging.
…the more I think about loneliness, the more I think the wound of loneliness is like the Grand Canyon – a deep incision in the surface of our existence which has become an inexhaustible source of beauty and self-understanding.
Therefore, I would like to voice loudly and clearly what might seem unpopular and maybe even disturbing: The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects it and cherishes it as a precious gift.
Sometimes it seems as if we do everything possible to avoid the painful confrontation with our basic human loneliness, and allow ourselves to be trapped by false gods promising immediate satisfaction and quick relief.
But perhaps the painful awareness of loneliness is an invitation to transcend our limitations and look beyond the boundaries of our existence.
The awareness of loneliness might be a gift we must protect and guard, because our loneliness reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be destructive when misunderstood, but filled with promise for him who can tolerate its sweet pain.
When we are impatient, when we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, too soon, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations.
We ignore what we already know with a deep-seated, intuitive knowledge – that no love, no friendship, not intimate embrace or tender kiss, not community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely conditions.
When the minister lives with these false expectations and illusions he prevents himself from claiming his own loneliness as a source of human understanding and is unable to offer any real service to the many who do not understand their own suffering.
Nouwen, The Wounded Healer, pgs 83-85
The wound of our loneliness is indeed deep. Maybe we had forgotten it, since there are many distractions.
But our failure to change the world with our good intentions and sincere actions and our undesired displacement to the edges of life have made us aware that the wound is still there.
…a deep understanding of his own pain makes it possible for him to convert his weakness into strength and to offer his own experience as a source of healing to those who are often lost in the darkness of their own misunderstood sufferings.
This is a very hard call, because for a minister who is committed to forming a community of faith, loneliness is a very painful wound which is easily subject to denial and neglect.
But once the pain is accepted and understood, a denial is no longer necessary, and ministry can become a healing service.
Making one’s own wounds a source of healing…does not call for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one’s own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the human condition which all men share.
A Christian community is therefore a healing community, not because wounds are cured and pains alleviated, but because wounds and pains become openings or occasions for a new vision.
Mutual confession then becomes a mutual deepening of hope, and sharing weaknesses becomes a reminder to one and all of the coming strength.
When loneliness is among the chief wounds of the minister, hospitality can convert that wound into a source of healing.
Concentration prevents the minister from burdening others with his pain and allows him to accept his wounds as helpful teachers of his own and his neighbors condition.
Community arises where the sharing of pain takes place, not as a stifling form of self-complaint, but as a recognition of God’s saving promises.
Thus, ministry can indeed be a witness to the living truth that the wound, which causes us to suffer now, will be revealed to us later as the place where God intimated his new creation.
Nouwen, The Wounded Healer, pgs 87-96
As Christ Jesus is a wounded healer to you, may you in your leadership and ministry be a wounded healer to those the Lord has brought into your life.
May this weekend of Father’s Day, Juneteenth, and World Refugee Day be one of grace, truth and peace.