As a professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School, the late Henri Nouwen spoke and wrote often about the challenge of being displaced—not only intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually but geographically, too.
“In our modern society, with its increasing mobility and pluriformity, we have become the subjects of so many displacements that it is very hard to keep a sense of rootedness,” Nouwen wrote in Compassion, a book he co-authored with fellow priests Donald McNeill and Douglas Morrison. “Our first and often most difficult task, therefore, is to allow these actual displacements to become places where we can hear God’s call.” The Christian community, Nouwen wrote, is a people “being-gathered-in-displacement.”
