Spiritual Strategy : Rebuilding: Father Henri Nouwen specializes in giving direction to troubled flocks. Recently, he outlined how L.A. could get past the riots.

Henri Nouwen is one of the most popular writers and educators in his field, but most people have never heard of him. He has published 30 books, including his latest, “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” new this fall from Doubleday. But he’s never been on a big-time author’s tour.

When he taught at Yale, his classes were packed. At Harvard, his fame preceded him. But when he left academic life in the mid-’80s, he didn’t go into politics, business or on the talk-show circuit. He went to the town of Richmond Hill, near Toronto, where he got up each morning to bathe, feed and dress Adam, a 24-year-old man who couldn’t do these things for himself.

Nouwen isn’t the sort of man the world is aching to meet. He’s a Catholic priest who lives and works at Richmond Hill’s Daybreak Community, a home for the severely mentally impaired. For the last six years, he has served as the pastor and worked with the staff to care for the patients. But before he dropped out of academia, he gained fame as a teacher of pastoral counseling. He taught thousands of seminary students, most of them at Harvard and Yale, how to give spiritual direction to a religious community.

Dressed in a navy blue sweater and gray pants and carrying a backpack, he looks like a man who would be more at home on a college campus than in an urban church. But, in fact, he has been a powerful force in both worlds.

Now 60, Nouwen has established himself as expert at determining where to go from here. Especially when “here” is some place spiritually dangerous.

Since the Los Angeles riots, he has been invited to speak here twice, both times by non-Catholic parishes--the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove and, last weekend, the First Congregational Church near downtown Los Angeles.

“Our first responsibility in the midst of violence is to prevent it from destroying us,” he told a group of religious leaders at First Congregational. The church’s senior minister, the Rev. Steven Berry, had invited Nouwen, who was his professor at Yale Divinity School.

Nouwen’s outline for post-riot recovery is as precise as a lawyer’s brief. He calls it a spiritual strategy that starts with the need to stay centered. “ Centered means our relationship with God,” he said. And that’s as ethereal as he gets.

“Don’t romanticize it,” he advised. “Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” To keep the peace, he said, forgive people for being human and give them credit for what they do well.

How do we reach the complacent bystanders? someone in the audience asked.

“That’s not the right question,” Nouwen answered. “We’re not here to reach people. We have to live something, a message of peace. Trust that it will be contagious. And if people don’t accept it, move on.”

Nouwen, who worked in the poorest ghettos of Lima, Peru, between academic assignments, spoke cautiously about getting results: “Don’t try to be successful, but to be fruitful. Success is about how I rebuilt this city. Proving yourself means getting back at those who doubted you.

“Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability, from a willingness to be vulnerable together.”

He predicted a slow recovery: “The fruits of your labors may be reaped two generations from now. Trust, even when you don’t see the results.”

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Nouwen has learned these things the hard way. Born in the Netherlands, raised under Hitler, trained in psychology after seminary and proven to be a powerful speaker, he was prepared for the life of a college chaplain. But at Yale and later at Harvard, he was invited to teach.

“I loved being at Yale, it was very fruitful,” Nouwen recalled. He taught there for 10 years and wrote a number of books, including “The Wounded Healer,” his best-known work, now in its 19th printing.

Harvard was another story.

“He had a tough time there,” said Cornish Rogers, a professor at the School of Theology at Claremont, where he teaches a course in pastoral theology and practice that features Nouwen’s works.

“He is not a theologian, except in the broadest sense. His fellow faculty didn’t look at him as a scholar. They didn’t accept him as one of their own.”

It was shattering for Nouwen, and he admits it.

“I’ve had a tremendous problem with depression in my life,” he confessed to his Los Angeles audience. “I’d rather not talk about it, because it’s over. But depression is real .”

Personal comments are not unusual for Nouwen. He speaks and writes about himself as vulnerable, physically and emotionally. He has always owned up to his jealousies, angers and insecurities.

“It’s exactly why students believe in him, so frail a being,” said Rogers. “They feel the same way, facing the uncharted areas of their lives.”

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It appears as if Nouwen’s struggles have helped him form a strong core.

“Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us,” he explained with an intensity that left him short of breath. “And we are not what we have. We are the beloved daughters and sons of God.”

That is the theme of his latest book, a reflection on a Rembrandt painting based on the gospel story of the prodigal son:

A young man asked his rich father to give him his inheritance, an insulting request by any standard. The son moved away from home and wasted all the money. He couldn’t find a job and finally dared to go back to ask his father for one. Instead of punishing him, the father forgave his son, welcomed him home and celebrated his return with a feast.

Preachers don’t usually equate the story with a need to mend their communities. But in the context of Nouwen’s visit to Los Angeles, it seemed appropriate.