The Trojan Horse of an Open Heart

Praying with open hands

In high school, I was on the speech team. To practice more intentional hand gestures, and to be more generally aware of our bodies while speaking in front of people, our coach would sometimes have us hold soup cans in our hands while we gave our speeches.

I can still remember both the awkwardness of holding those soup cans while speaking in front of people, and also how effective the exercise was. It made me so much more aware of where my hands were and how often or not I was moving them.

This exercise has been on my mind the last couple of weeks as I have had the privilege of directing retreats for the summer at one of our Jesuit retreat houses. So much of prayer, and contemplative practice in general, is learning to become aware of our hands, both physically and spiritually.

Open hands signal an interior openness, a readiness to receive. And that is what our role with God is: the receiver. In prayer, and especially on retreat, we are invited to open our hands, and whenever we begin to close them, to ever so gently work at opening them again. This may be practiced with our physical hands, but more than anything, it is about our interior posture.

This is the internal disposition we are invited to before God: a readiness to receive whatever God wishes to fill us with, and then to hold those gifts with open, not clenched, hands.

What can be painful about prayer is that we are so often used to having our hands closed. We hold on to so much, and often we aren’t even aware of all that we are holding. In the quiet, when we begin to become aware of our hands and slowly open them, we notice there is much more there than we might have expected.

We might be clinging to gifts, holding tightly to possessions, friendships, locations, feelings, successes, or resentments. We may still be holding failures, memories, dreams, or desires from years past. We may even be surprised to find at the bottom of our hands, there are still wounds in our palms we thought had been healed long ago.

Opening our hands can be difficult; it can ask much more of us than we expected.

But without an awareness of what is in our hands, we may not be fully able to receive, at least intentionally, what God wishes to place in our hands now.

Last week, I had the privilege of visiting the Carmel Mission Basilica, the second of the mission churches founded in California in 1771. There, I found this stunning wooden carving of St. Benedict of Palermo, also known at Benedict the Moor.

The statue, worn by many years and the elements, is an evocative representation of prayer, and Christian life in general. The saint’s hands are held open in the posture of reception. He is cracked right down the middle, as if to present the honesty of our human poverty, our human reality. We are indeed broken, and only in the deep acceptance of our brokenness can we approach God with an open and honest heart.

This statue reminds me of what Johannes Metz writes in his book Poverty of Spirit: “Satan fears the Trojan horse of an open human heart that will remain true to its native poverty.” A deep acceptance of our weakness, our brokenness, and our ultimate human poverty is what makes us supple, loving, tender. We see this in Jesus.

Jesus held his hands wide open in the desert. The basis of the temptations he underwent there was the enticement to close his hands, to grasp his divinity, to tighten his grip. Instead, he held them open.

Can we accept our wounds, notice our brokenness, and still hold our hands open with trust that God will fill them, and continue to fill them, without our tightening grip?

It is okay if we can’t. In fact, that may well be the honest answer for many of us. So, let us pray for grace to begin to open them, to be aware, and perhaps ever so slightly to release our grasp.