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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