With Open Hands

Henri Nouwen's With Open Hands was an important catalyst to integrating visual journalling into my spiritual life. Before I started I had not really drawn since I was 11 years old and these images come from January 2003 many many years later.

My spiritual director suggested that the activity of journalling itself focuses and therefore concentrates the drawing itself. Around the same time I was reading The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. A monk who worked in the kitchens and yet over 17 years learnt to find God there. The book records "It was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times ... prayer was nothing else but a sense of the presence of God." For drawing the hands and reflecting about what I was reading was to discover something I already knew well which was "Letting go and letting God" but to transfer it. This was, in the words of my old pastor Patrick Brock, the 18 inch drop, namely from head to heart.