Monday, November 28, 2016

The coming of something new (Henri Nouwen)


   In the silence of prayer you can spread out your hands to embrace nature, God, and your fellow human beings.  This acceptance means not only that you are ready to look at your own limitations, but that you expect the coming of something new.  For this reason, every prayer is an expression of hope.  If you expect nothing from the future, you cannot pray.  Then you say with Bertolt Brecht, As it is, it will stay.  What we want will never come.

   If you think this way, life stands still.  Spiritually, you are dead.  There can be life and movement only when you no longer accept things as they are now but look ahead toward that which has not yet occurred.

--Henri Nouwen, With Open Hands

Image source:  Figure in the orans (or prayer) position, symbolic of the human soul, in a fresco from the Catacomb Via Anopo, 3rd c. Rome

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