Some Henri Nouwen thoughts on prayer

A woman from my church gave me a bunch of spiritual books because she was downsizing, including an old Henri Nouwen book about prayer called With Open Hands. Yesterday, I read this book by Lake Accotink since we had the only fifty degree day we’re going to have for the rest of January. I underlined some quotes that I wanted to share on my blog.

Someone will tell you, “You have to be able to forgive yourself.” But that isn’t possible. What is possible is to open your hands without fear, so the other can blow your sins away. [22]

Because Nouwen is trying to reach out to a secular audience, he sometimes uses “the other” for God. But I think the truth expressed here is profound. We cannot forgive ourselves for our mistakes. We can say that we do and declare it to be so. But the shame will remain inside of us and come out in all sorts of twisted up ways. Much of this book describes prayer with the imagery of moving from a clenched fists to open hands. When we deny our sins, we are clutching onto them in our fists. To confess them is to open our hands so that God can blow them away like dust.

The gift [of the gospel] is the life breath of God himself, the Spirit who is poured out on us through Jesus Christ. This life breath frees us from fear and gives new room to live. A man who prayerfully goes about his life is constantly ready to receive the breath of God, and to let his life be renewed and expanded. The man who never prays, on the contrary, is like the child with asthma; because he is short of breath, the whole world shrivels up before him. [64]

I have often said that obedience to God should be described as inspiration. It is not being clamped down into some kind of oppressive yoke. God breathes into us. If we respond to that breath, our life is richly opened. If we don’t, then our life gets smaller and more trivial.

Above all, prayer means to be accepting toward God who is always new, always different. For God is a deeply moved God whose heart is greater than mine. The open acceptance of prayer in the face of an ever-new God makes me free. In prayer, I am constantly on the way, on pilgrimage. On my way, I meet more and more people who show me something about him whom I seek. [69]

I really like this description of prayer as “accepting” God. He does not impose Himself on us. We can certainly interpret the powerful forces in nature to reflect God’s omnipotence. Or we can explain them away with science. But to really gain intimacy with God requires the concentration of listening to someone tell you a secret in a scarcely audible whisper. And the reason God is always new is not because He changes per se, but because the journey to knowing Him is infinite and He reveals new things about Himself the further we go in our journey.

A man with hope does not get tangled up with concerns for how his wishes will be fulfilled… His prayer might still contain just as many desires, but ultimately it is not a question of having a wish come true but of expressing an unlimited faith in the giver of all good things… For the prayer of hope, it is essential that there are no guarantees asked, no conditions posed, and no proofs demanded, only that you expect everything from the other without binding him in any way. Hope is based on the premise that the other gives only what is good. Hope includes an openness by which you wait for the other to make his loving promise come true, even though you never know when, where, or how this might happen. [82]

This is a very interesting insight about hope. When we have hope, we are not necessarily hoping for a particular set of results, but trusting that God will use whatever results occur for our good.

In this way, every prayer of petition becomes a prayer of thanksgiving and praise as well, precisely because it is a prayer of hope. In the hopeful prayer of petition, we think God for his promise and we praise him for his trust. Our numerous requests simply become the concrete way of saying that we trust in fullness of God’s goodness, which he wants to share with us. Whenever we pray with hope, we put our lives in the hands of God. [86]

Nouwen here is addressing the way that some people think prayers of petition (aka asking God for “stuff”) are not as “noble” as thanksgiving or confession or praise. What he’s saying is that when we go to God with the details of our lives, it’s not that we’re being petty and self-absorbed but rather that we’re trusting in his benevolent watch over everything that happens to us.

Praying means to stop expecting from God that same small-mindedness which you discover in yourself. To pray is to walk in the full light of God, and to say simply without holding back, “I am a man [or a woman] and you are God.” At that moment, conversion occurs, the restoration of the true relationship. Man is not the one who once in a while makes a mistake and God is not the one who now and then forgives. No, man is a sinner and God is love. [102]

We were talking in our Bible study Sunday night about the way that holiness is less about being morally flawless and more about recognizing that God is God and we are not. When we see God for who He is and recognize ourselves as dependent creatures through whom God can move, then we’ve become people God can use.

Praying therefore, means being constantly ready to let go of your certainty and to move on further than where you now are. It demands that you take to the road again and again… This is why praying demands poverty, that is, the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you always begin afresh. Whenever you willingly choose this poverty you make yourself vulnerable, but you also become free to see the world and to the let the world be seen in its true form. [147]

I have written before that I think the “powers and principalities” to which Paul refers in Ephesians 6 are not governments or armies or other things we think of as being powerful. They are rather the invisible social conventions that Michel Foucault writes so much about that police our behavior better than any Gestapo ever could. Living in the kingdom means shredding these puppet strings. The failure of much of American Christianity today is that it’s about the self-justification of suburban social conventions rather than the “poverty” of living completely open to God’s call.

As long as we’ve got our feet planted in concrete, we’re only going to go so far in our prayer life. We have to be uprooted in order for our lives to look like Jesus told Nicodemus they would: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” If we have truly been born of the Spirit, then we will be as free as the wind.