With Open Hands Quotes

“To care for others requires an ever-increasing acceptance.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands

“The resistance to praying is like the resistance of tightly clenched fists. This image shows a tension, a desire to cling tightly to yourself, a greediness which betrays fear.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands

“And yet you are Christian only so long as you look forward to a new world, only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society in which you live, and only so long as you emphasize the need for conversion both for yourself and for the world. You are Christian only so long as you do not let yourself become established in a situation of seeming calm, only 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 must keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands

“This is why praying demands poverty, that is, the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you can always begin afresh. Whenever you willingly choose this poverty you make yourself vulnerable, but you also become free to see the world and to let the world show itself in its true form. You have no need to defend yourself. You can proclaim loudly what you know through your intimate contact with God, who is the source of all life.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands

“To pray means to stop expecting from God the same small-mindedness which you discover in yourself.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands

“Prayer has meaning only if it is necessary and indispensable. Prayer is prayer only when we can say that without it, we cannot live.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands

“When we live with hope we do not get tangled up with concerns for how our wishes will be fulfilled. So, too, our prayers are not directed toward the gift, but toward the one who gives it. Our prayers 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. You wish that…but you hope in….”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands

“The immense difference that exists between hope and wishfulness is revealed in the remarks of a student who wrote: “I see hope as an attitude where everything stays open before me. Not that I don't think of my future in those moments, but I think of it in an entirely different way. Daring to stay open to whatever will come to me today, tomorrow, two months from now, or a year from now—that is hope. To go fearlessly into things without knowing how they'll turn out, to keep on going, even when something doesn't work the first time, to have trust in whatever you're doing—that is living with hope.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands

“Often you will catch yourself wanting to receive your loving God by putting on a semblance of beauty, by holding back everything dirty and spoiled, by clearing just a little path that looks proper. But that is a fearful response—forced and artificial. Such a response exhausts you and turns your prayer into torment.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands

“something”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands