Chiaroscuro: An Origin Story of Vocation

There’s an anecdote I want to share about the late Henri Nouwen (1932-1996). Nouwen was a 20th-century Dutch psychologist, Catholic priest, and prolific writer whose devotional books on human brokenness and belovedness found a wide readership beyond religious circles. Some of his most well-known publications include The Wounded Healer (1972), The Return of the Prodigal Son (1992), and The Inner Voice of Love (1996).

From the age of four to six, one of Nouwen’s favorite games was Eucharist. He would pour some water into tiny plastic cups, take bits of bread from the kitchen, and gather his siblings together to perform Communion. He wore homemade child-sized vestments, set up a simple altar with the bread and water on a little table, and assigned his siblings to be chalice-bearers and communicants. I’m enchanted by this story because it’s about child’s play. At the same time, it’s about a game carried out with such earnest preparation and loving attention that the pretending becomes real, becomes a true expression of a child’s embrace of the sacred.

My religious life began, too, as a form of play—although, at the age of eighteen, I was much older than Nouwen was when he performed his miniature Eucharists. I was raised in a first-generation Chinese immigrant family in New York City. Both my parents were Buddhist and also observed many traditions of Chinese folk religion, an eclectic mix of rituals and practices that draws from Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.

My mother in particular seemed to have a rich spiritual life. I have potent memories of her going to Buddhist temple on special days and setting up altars at home, offering me and my brother candy that had been blessed at the temple, stuffing tiny scrolls tied up with string into our backpacks. There was a practicality and determination with which she performed these activities that gave my mother an alluring aura. I could tell these rituals powered her ordinary life with a vitalizing source of meaning. As a girl, I associated her activities with my nascent ideas of what it meant to be a powerful and purposeful woman.

My parents rarely explained to me and my brother their reasons for attending Buddhist temple and performing all those rituals. Perhaps we hadn’t annoyed them enough to elicit fuller replies. Perhaps the day-to-day requirements of providing for our family took up so much of their headspace that they just didn’t have the time to sit down and explain. Or perhaps, like many religious and cultural practices around the world, performing rituals and living a spiritual life were so intertwined with the routines of the everyday that it wasn’t bordered off as religion at all, and therefore didn’t need to be formally explained to the next generation. Maybe my parents considered their unspoken, matter-of-fact adherence to these observations as a more tacit way of bestowing knowledge. If we kids just observed and followed, we might one day just know what to do and recognize the meaningfulness of it all. Or perhaps our parents wanted us to grow up first before we determined for ourselves whether or not we wanted to adopt their kind of spirituality.

My point is, religious life as I witnessed it growing up wasn’t formally taught or explained to me. Nor was it enforced. It was just there happening in the background. The Buddhist rituals and Chinese folk traditions my parents observed remained mysterious and inaccessible to me. At that time (1980s and 1990s), there were few English-language resources that a young person like me could easily get their hands on to learn about these religious practices.

My relationship to Christianity, however, was wholly different. Although I didn’t have any knowledge of Christianity for most of my childhood and teenage years, as an art history major at Vassar College I was introduced to lots of Christian imagery. It was right there, all around me. There were tons of books about Christian art and theology in the college library that I could peruse on my own. The college bulletin offered numerous courses on Christian Medieval and Renaissance art and architecture. Taking these courses, I became curious about the biblical stories depicted in the artworks. Rather than take at face-value how my professors and the textbooks summarized and explained these stories, I began reading the Bible for myself. The first biblical stories I read were events represented in paintings by Masaccio, Matthias Grünewald, and Rogier van der Weyden. 

The Bible opened up an entirely new and magical world to me: I was enthralled by the mysterious stories, the foreign names and landscapes, the unusual language, and most of all—the evocative imagery. There were treasures hidden in fields, mustard seeds and yeast, spices and oils, and heavenly cities whose foundations were made of jasper, emerald, and numerous other jewels of which I had never heard but whose names delighted me with their complex sounds and visual diversity. 

I relished the book’s vivid descriptions of wild settings and fantastical creatures: “There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number—living things both large and small. There the ships go to and fro, and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there” (Psalm 104). The wealth of imagination hidden in the Bible’s pages captivated me, and as I continued to engage with spiritual texts and religious works in my study of art during college and graduate school, I found I had become a person of faith. For me, falling into Christianity was like falling in love: I didn’t plan for it to happen, I just fell into a new world.

From that literary beginning, then, my life as a religious person was strongly tied to my study of art history. The bond among spirituality, intellect, and art proved lifesaving at various periods in my life. In my early twenties, I was overcome by a chronic pain syndrome called fibromyalgia. Its symptoms completely unraveled my world and disrupted my former sense of self. Depression and physical ailment became a constant, daily reality. Feeling cut off from my past identity as a person who could do anything she set her mind to, and confronted by ambitions scrambled by physical illness, I frequently pondered the nature of suffering and grief.

I turned to the study of art, a discipline that was familiar and comforting to me, for the inner support I needed to make sense of my new conditions. Quite unexpectedly, I found some comfort in thinking about suffering in terms of chiaroscuro, an art-historical word used to describe the dramatic effects of contrast between light and shadow in painting. Chiaroscuro appears most markedly in works by Caravaggio and Rembrandt, and it is especially in the areas of darkness and shadow that lend to their paintings visual and emotional dynamism. 

I began to consider my own suffering in terms of this effect of painting, of darkness and shadow as giving dramatic depth to an otherwise flat form, of suffering and depression as deeper shades of human feeling and experience that lend to an individual life greater dimension. Although broken by health for the foreseeable future, I started to see my life as containing chiaroscuro, a discovery that gave my soul a measure of aesthetic satisfaction and sense of redemption despite the persistent feelings of loss.

Since that revelation, I have often contemplated the mysteries of my own life—and of human experience at large—through the lens of art. In fact, my spiritual life has been fundamentally shaped by my training in art history. Art historians pay close attention to detail, taking time to thoroughly study a work of art. This willingness to slow down attention and notice as many aspects of an object as possible is one of the key skills of the profession. We are also generally attuned to appreciate beauty when we find it, as well as respect the processes makers go through when they create. Art historians tend to value the skill it takes to match verbal language to visual and other sensory phenomena, as their own discipline often requires them to use words as precisely and vividly as possible to analyze objects and their effects.

The slowing down of attention. Beholding beauty. Finding words to describe the ineffable. Are these not also practices akin to meditation, worship, and spiritual awe? My love for art, my fascination with the history of artistic production, and my spiritual curiosity are intertwined. The synergy of these three realms is the basis of why I simultaneously pursue art history, theology, and pastoral care.

Nouwen’s presence continues to accompany me in this venture. When I was a graduate student at Yale Divinity School, I used to go to a small room in the school’s library called the Nouwen Chapel (Nouwen had taught at Yale Divinity School in the 1970s). As a full-time graduate student enrolled in multiple academic programs and coping with chronic illness, I often needed to lie down several times a day to rest, sleep, or simply be horizontal to minimize my physical pain and discomfort. Using my backpack as a pillow and my down coat as a blanket, I’d lay down on a bench in the chapel and utter a quick prayer to Nouwen before I closed my eyes: “Please show me how to make a meaningful life out of this constant fatigue and pain.”

The years I spent in Divinity School felt like a haze—a blustery, chaotic time of too much and never enough: trying to manage my symptoms, trying to show up for classes, trying to get my papers done on time. Oftentimes I couldn’t tell whether I was asleep or awake. I moved through life as though stumbling through thick fog.

With more time and distance, however, I realized these moments of retreat in the Nouwen Chapel were crucial for my intellectual formation. They were as instructive to me in finding my vocation as the time I spent in the classrooms of the Divinity School. In the alchemy of recumbent sleep and rest, gentle affirmations propped me up. Nouwen’s presence was like a lullaby, reassuring me that all my experiences—especially the ones in which all I seemed to be doing was failing at life and succumbing to exhaustion—were critical to my vocation. These experiences were threads that tied me to the heart of what it meant to be sacredly human.

To this day, Nouwen’s influence is anchoring: the first words I read each morning are Nouwen devotionals, a short paragraph of his writing to remind me of the wisdom and companionship that resides in the paradoxical existence of brokenness and belovedness that is the human condition. I feel a special kinship with Nouwen. He was a flawed individual who suffered from depression almost his entire life. Up until his death he went through cycles of self-doubt. Despite that, he continued to hold fast a posture of playfulness and grace towards the sacredness of being imperfectly human. And that kind of humility and openness to the divine in the midst of ordinary life is at the heart of my practice of intellectual and creative work as well. I don’t see my vocation as a job title, a list of responsibilities, or highlights of accomplishments from my CV. Rather, it is a living response to a call to stay curious and engaged with people and communities that reveal chiaroscuro, that aesthetic potential in both works of art and the human condition that conveys depth and dimension, that lifts up the idea that many of life’s joys and bewilderments—both the bright and awful moments and the broad spectrum of human experience—can generate meaning and beauty.

Now that I am a grown adult and have had years of formal training as a scholar of Christian history and theology, I am increasingly compelled to turn towards my parents’ Buddhism. I want to learn more about the rituals and practices they performed when I was a kid. My questing is a way of giving thanks to my parents. It’s a form of gratitude that I hope will bring healing and lightness to me and my family in the face of intergenerational mysteries and traumas. I especially feel a yearning to honor my mother’s spirituality; to her I owe my capacious religious curiosity. Whether or not she intended it, witnessing her devotion as I was growing up created a wild spaciousness in my imagination for learning about different religious traditions and practices.

What more sensible way to come full circle at this point in my life than to approach my parents’ Buddhism with the same attitude of wonder and enchantment that I have been applying to my study and practice of Christianity? I hope that all my playing and curiosity, like young Nouwen’s childhood games of Eucharist, will turn out to be an acceptable form of devotion as well.