Flying, Falling, Catching

Flying, Falling, Catching: An Unlikely Story of Finding Freedom (HarperOne, 2022) is credited to Henri Nouwen and Carolyn Whitney-Brown. It presents Nouwen's unpublished writings about the Flying Rodleighs, a trapeze troupe in a travelling German circus, whom he befriended in the last five years of his life and whose act he believed could become the subject of his most important book. Whitney-Brown frames these writings with the story of his rescue by paramedics through a hotel window during his first heart attack, and with the wider story of his life, presenting him as a spiritual risk-taker for whom the flyer and the catcher became an image of trust in God.