Hisham Matar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, writes of,
‘the longing that I sometimes feel for prayer. It is like a space that is unattended, gathering dust inside me.’
He then describes a visit to the National Gallery and standing in front of the portrait of A Young Man at Prayer by Hans Memling:
‘The boy was making space, and in so doing he had inadvertently arrived at the farther reaches of himself … one who has arrived at the boundary of himself and, with cautious hope, is now looking in.’
