By Gretchen Keiser

The Rev. Henri Nouwen did not give the talk he was billed to give in Athens, GA, last week. The writer and teacher confessed from the podium that the talk on vocation, temptation and formation in ministry that he had given in the past -- and that was listed on the program -- had been supplanted in his mind and heart over the last few months by an urgent and abiding interest in the matter of peace and peacemaking.

He said that the three-part talk he would, in fact, give had been prepared practically into the doorway of the conference room at the University of Georgia's Center for Continuing Education. Father Nouwen, a priest born in the Netherlands who has taught in U.S. universities for many years, said his interest in peacemaking had been fueled, as he worked in Switzerland, by the internationally vocal concern about nuclear arms and by the gruesome violence at work worldwide. Nouwen said that as he began his study and reflecting, "I felt a strong resistance in my heart to peace."

"I still feel quite nervous to speak and act for peace," said Nouwen, whose compact books on prayer and spirituality have made him a very popular writer and speaker. Yet, with frequent emphatic gestures, Nouwen spoke for most of the day, Nov. 24, on peacemaking, confessing more than once that his thoughts were being expressed in full length for the first time and were not yet fully polished. "Look on these reflections as the reflections of someone who is struggling with the issue," he said.

Several hundred people, including many from the Atlanta archdiocese, went to Athens the day before Thanksgiving to hear Nouwen, author of The Way of the Heart, Reaching Out, The Wounded Healer and many other books.

His three-part reflection, interwoven with Scripture citations, began with his assertion that peacemaking is the primary responsibility and beatitude for Christians today -- the "central task for Christians" made urgent by the fact that making peace in a world where nuclear war is a possibility means ensuring the survival of life itself. "Making peace today means making a future for humanity," he said.

Nouwen asked what a "spirituality of peace" might look like and drew an outline around three terms central to Christians -- prayer, resistance and community. The three terms -- and even the call to them -- are completely familiar to Christians, he said. Yet, against a background "of a world dangerously close to self-destruction," he said, "the age-old call to prayer, resistance and community becomes virtually a new call.'

In the opening segment on prayer, Nouwen said, "praying at all times is the first aspect of peacemaking" since prayer means to be in the house of God, the one Who gives peace. Those who live in the world are caught in its "net of wounds and fears," he said, whereas Christians who live in God, and who experience His love, are set free and enabled to move in the world as people who bring peace and who live in peace.

While it is tempting to first "do" something for peace, "we have to have the courage to pull back and be with God in solitude," he said.

Nouwen also observed that people trying to work for peace sometimes succumb to the temptation to use fear to change people's minds -- frightening them with the consequences of war. This temptation changes those who are working for peace into the opposite, he said. "When peacemaking is based on fear, it is not that different from warmaking.”

Christian peacemaking "is the work of love and fear is driven out by perfect love," he said.

If the first talk pushed toward a fresh sense of what it means to pray, the second, on resistance, sought an understanding of "peacemaking" much broader than that tied to demonstrations and civil disobedience.

Nouwen said peacemaking is a way of loving "that involves our whole being all the time" constantly resisting "the powers that lead to war." Resistance is two-fold, he said -- a "no" to death and a "yes" to life.

In his list of "death" items to say "no" to, Nouwen included entertainment with death" -- books, films, television programs that use death to entertain -- calling it pornography. He also included "death talk' -- conversations and social gatherings "in which people are evaluated, found guilty and discarded" as worthless -- and thoughts that turn "death inward through self-rejection and self-doubt.

The contemporary fascination with death may be because "the uncertainty of life has become so frightening that we are attracted to the certainty of death," Nouwen said.

But in addition to saying "no" to death, resistance must say an equally strong "yes" to life, Nouwen said, or it risks becoming the victim of what it is opposing. Saying "yes" to life -- to what is vulnerable, needing protection, growing gradually and graciously -- brings joy. Finally, he said, resistance for a Christian is prayer because it is not based on results that might be achieved in the world, but on its witness "to a living God in the midst of a death-oriented world." While secular resistance may seek to change other people, Nouwen said, for Christians "maybe the question is not how can I change others, but how can I remain my true self?"

In between sessions of the day, which was sponsored by the Department of Clinical Pastoral Education at Athens General Hospital, seminar participants stepped up to microphones in the horseshoe-shaped auditorium and raised questions, prompting several lengthy exchanges. As part of the day's prayer, Nouwen taught several hymns from the Taize community in France and led a closing worship service.

The third and closing reflection on community, Nouwen introduced by giving a humorous half-apology for its "visionary" quality, which might well leave the audience wondering where the existing church ended and the vision of the church began. But, he said, the threat to life today is of such a qualitative difference from previous threats to life -- threatening all life for all time -- that the history of Christian communities provides no identical model to draw upon. His vision centers upon a network of Christian peacemakers, supported by the prayers of one another and by the chance to come together to sustain strength and joy in their work, which could be isolated work among the poor and lonely.

The Christian community, Nouwen said, "is the place where people come together to recognize Jesus as Lord" and where people can humbly repent and acknowledge their sinfulness to one another. To find one's real community, he said, as "to whom have I confessed my darkness and who has confessed their darkness to me?"

Community is essential in the trio with prayer and resistance or the first two degenerate into "individual heroics,' he said.

When the Christian community gathers, prayer and resistance takes place because the community actually is the Body of Christ, Nouwen said.

"This is not symbolism," he said emphatically.

"The community resists evil by being what it is, by being Christ," he said. "It is the living witness of the victory already won over death."

(Tapes of the Henri Nouwen talks are to be made available at $10 a set and can be ordered by writing to David Payne, Georgia Center for Continuing Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602)