Also made of wood: the prayer nut

I first came across the prayer nut at Opwekking, a Dutch Christian festival. There was a man there with very special ‘things’. One of them was the prayer nut. I bought one, and a wonderful conversation came with it as a gift. Wiebe has been given the gift of seeing rather than just looking. He tries to see how someone is really doing and speaks from that observation. And then he often prays. He does it just like breathing.

When you are given the prayer nut like that, you put it in your pocket after writing the names of your loved ones on it. They are still there. The nut is no longer in my pocket; it lies in front of me on the windowsill of my study. Sometimes more often than at other times, I pick it up, and now I have done so again. And as I open it, almost automatically a thought, a memory and once again a prayer is born.

This prayer nut is really a kind of pastoral worker who looks at you lovingly and reminds you of your neighbour (sometimes quite literally).

In my contact with Wiebe, the presence of something so strange, in the sense of something so remarkable, led to Wiebe’s other ingredients, namely his wooden sculptures, although I immediately realise that this is a rather clumsy description, because they too are more than their form. As with the prayer nut, their special form and function stand out. Both have their own source of inspiration and both try to make contact with you when you look at them. Neither is made to be looked at, but rather to connect you with what lies behind them and with who is standing in front of you. That is what stays with me: connection! That is the defining word for Wiebe, for his prayer nuts and for all his work.

I found out that this connection is real after I had made a TV programme with Wiebe for Omroep Gelderland and Family7 in the four-part series ‘De Kunst van God?’ (‘The Art of God?’)

I took the four programmes to the Stadsmuseum in Harderwijk, where an exhibition had been organised with the four artists concerned. The director had not yet met the artists at that point, if I am not mistaken, but she approached me and said after Wiebe’s broadcast: ‘So beautiful, it simply moved me.’ Now that is connection in everyday life. Nobody notices it, but God quietly carries on working, sometimes in the foreground and, as here, a little more in the background. That is how it goes with Wiebe’s ‘wood’!

I put my prayer nut back on the windowsill. I have once again been reminded of my prayer companions.