Jo-Ann Iannotti

Learning from Henri Nouwen and Vincent van Gogh

Christian Living

“In her recent book, Carol Berry has created a place where art meets life and a new compassionate life emerges. She learns from two artful men of great compassion, artist Vincent van Gogh and theologian Henri Nouwen. It was what she learned in Nouwen's course on van Gogh at Yale Divinity School, and Carol's own subsequent research about the artist, that eventually spilled over into her own life experiences and gave her a new lens of compassion through which to filter all of it. The vignettes she relates from her own life as an artist and from her ministry witness to a life that is met on its own terms. She doesn't try to manipulate the details. She enters the life that is given to her at any moment and is transformed by it. Some may use the word serendipitous to describe the interweaving of the events of her and her husband's lives; she may call it providence.”