In Let’s Look Together, Robert Wicks explores the life and thought of Henri Nouwen through the lens of spiritual mentorship. The author draws from Nouwen’s writings and his personal mentor-mentee relationship with Nouwen to invite the reader to revitalize their spiritual life: “You could use this book to close your day with a desire to be renewed, to redirect yourself back onto the path—or you could use it to start your day each morning, fresh and refocused” (xi). After a brief biographical sketch of Nouwen, he delves into the spiritual themes of his writing, including the tensions between his personal life and his spiritual exhortations. For instance, Nouwen repeatedly encourages self-acceptance based on our secure status as God’s beloved, but he often failed to embrace himself, struggling with insecurity and emotional neediness his whole life.

Wicks’s study delineates the familiar touchstones of Nouwen’s spirituality. They provide a roadmap of the spiritual life that we, the readers, are invited to follow. They include: kindness, vulnerability, self-knowledge, silence, solitude, loneliness, community, facing rejection, homelessness, compassion, humility, prayer, joy, etc. He illustrates these perennial themes of the spiritual life with copious excerpts from Nouwen’s writings, which he harmonizes with other classic voices, such as Thomas Merton. Several autobiographical interludes of his exchanges with Nouwen on these topics infuses intimacy and authenticity into the discussion.

Sometimes the book’s spiritual exhortations seem to blend Nouwen and Wicks, however. Readers primarily interested in Nouwen will find this hazy hybridity off-putting. Also, Wicks frequently injects his own distinctive spiritual preoccupations, such as ordinariness and self-mentoring, which obscures the focus on Nouwen’s distinctive insights. Readers primarily interested in the spiritual life and the dynamics of spiritual mentoring, will not object to the synthesis. In the final analysis, Let’s Look Together joins three interlocutors: Nouwen, Wicks, and the reader: “This book…has been a call for you to pause, reflect, and note your own ways of embracing the words of mentoring offered to you” (139). As a book about Nouwen, it has limited value because of its tendency to veer toward the author and away from the subject, but as a book about spiritual mentoring that facilitates introspection, it offers many valuable insights.

Nouwen’s life illustrates that those embarking on the spiritual life, especially those teaching and writing about it, will face many challenges, including their own inability to live up to their own ideals. It is instructive to normalize inner conflict and contradiction so that we will not be shocked to discover it in our own spiritual mentors and will seek to expose and root it out in ourselves, even as we learn to accept it as part of the spiritual journey. Nouwen teaches self-acceptance amid imperfection and contradiction and exemplifies the noble desire to face our darkness—rather than repress and deny it—as a necessary step toward the Light.