When I first started this blog, I named it "Fists Give Way to Open Hands." The title came from some of my favorite writings by Henri J. M. Nouwen in With Open Hands. I had completely forgotten about these passages until I read them again today for the first time in a very long time.
Praying is no easy matter. It demands a relationship in which you allow someone other than yourself to enter into the very center of your being, to see there what you would rather leave in darkness, and to touch there what you would rather leave untouched. Why would you really want to do that?...
The resistance to praying is like the resistance of tightly clenched fists. The image shows a tension, a desire to cling tightly to yourself, a greediness which betrays fear. A story about an elderly woman brought to a psychiatric center exemplifies this attitude. She was wild, swinging at everything in sight, and scaring everyone so much that the doctor had to take everything away from her. But there was one small coin which she gripped in her fist and would not give up. In fact, it took two people to pry open that squeezed hand. It was as though she would lose her very self along with the coin. If they deprived her of that last possession, she would have nothing more and be nothing more. That was her fear.
When you are invited to pray you are asked to open your tightly clenched fists and give up your last coin. But who wants to do that? A first prayer, therefore, is often a painful prayer, because you discover you don't want to let go. You hold fast to what is familiar, even if you aren't proud of it.
I asked myself today if I was like that elderly woman who clung to her coin with all of her might. To her, that coin symbolized control. As long as she held that coin, she was in control of something, even if it may be small. What she couldn't see was that she was in a place where a doctor could help her, could put her mind at rest, could give her the attention and care she needed. But along with her coin, she fought for her madness.
It's true that whenever I am challenged to give up a part of myself, I clench my fists in defense, and I swing wildly to keep it. But why? Why do I want to hold on the darkest parts of me, the parts of me that I hate? Why do I want to cling to my doubts, my selfishness, my lust, my pride, my over-ambition, my fear? What is it that makes me hurt when I give up some dreadful part of me to God?
I believe part of the answer lies in the fact that we are called to share in Christ's suffering. My dear friend Brittany Mizell touched on this point in her last blog post, and it got me thinking about those implications. In Philippians 2:5-8 it says, "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself and became obedient to death--even death on a cross."
I think it's easy to read through that scripture and not really think about the implications of those statements. Our God made himself NOTHING for us. Nothing. He opened his trembling hands to the father in the Garden while sweating drops of blood, and said, "Yet not my will but thy will be done." And then he died the most brutal of deaths and bore the weight of our sin on his shoulders.
And we are called to take up our own cross and follow him.
If we choose to clench our fists in fear and hold on to our last coins, we are not allowing the father to humble us. We are not allowing him to make us nothing just as he did his own son. And we will miss out on his divine plan.
But just as we follow Christ in his suffering and his "letting go/unclenching of fists," we follow him into glory. Philippians goes on to say, "Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." ...And he calls us to be co-heirs to the throne with him.
So I say this, brothers and sisters. Let go. Whatever it is. Just let go.
"And what strange breezes makes a sailor come to this, with lines untied, slipping through my fists."
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