| With Open Hands - Henri Nouwen Henri Nouwen invited twenty-five theology students to explore prayer with him, and this book is the final result of those discussions, musings, and learnings. He starts with a defining metaphor -- tells the story of an elderly woman in a psychiatric ward, who is so hysterical she clings tightly to an old coin as if it were her very life. Her clenched fists are our clenched hearts, holding tightly to things worthless and unwilling to let the loving touch of the father heal us. Through the rest of the book Nouwen explores how choosing to live with open hands -- to unclench and let God in to our deepest and most intimate places -- affects our lives. Open hands lead us to self-discovery, acceptance, hope, compassion, and revolution. The way to unclench one's hands is in prayer, and so this is a book about prayer. But it is about prayer as a lifestyle of openness -- living with open hands. The format of the book is a little strange: "chapters" are written in 1-4 paragraph chunks, as in a devotional, or reflection. But they clearly follow upon one another, and could be written together. I'm not particularly fond of the format the book is written in; It's not exactly a series of reflections. a passage: "And yet you are Christian only so long as you look forward to a new world, so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you emphasize the need of conversion both for yourself and for the world, so long as you in no way let yourself become established in a situation of seeming calm, so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come. You are Christian only when you believe that you have a role to play in the realization of this new kingdom, and when you urge everyone you meet with a holy unrest to make haste so that the promise might soon be fulfilled. So long as you live as a Christian, you keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life." |