Stick 'em up: put your hands in the air like you just do care when praying to God.

I'D FINALLY HAD IT WITH GOD. THINGS JUST WEREN'T going right, and I needed to let it out. But how do you read the riot act to the Almighty? I prepared my words, folded my hands as I'd been taught all my life, and got ready to let out the biggest screamer in my moderately developed spiritual life. But something was wrong; my steepled hands just didn't seem appropriate to the prayer I had ready. So I flung them up in the air and let God have it, hands extended and shaking Italian style.

Most of us have said a prayer like that, I guess, sheepishly returning to God the next day (or week or month) to seek a little reconciliation. But there was something about that prayer that was for me so true and honest that I couldn't take it back, and there was something so right about raising my arms in prayer that day that I find it hard now to pray any other way.

I was comforted to find out not long after that Christians have been praying "arms up" practically since the beginning. Though many in the ancient world prayed to their gods fiat on their faces, as if in abject fear, Christians prayed standing, arms outstretched, in a posture we now call "orans."

Bathed in the light of Resurrection, confident of their new relationship with God in Christ, ancient believers found in this posture a bodily sign of their joy. So important was this way of praying that Christians were later actually forbidden by church councils from kneeling at all on Sunday, even during Lent. An ancient mosaic depicting a Christian woman praying this way is simply called "Orans." And the posture survives today in the body of the priest at Mass, who offers prayers in the assembly's name with hands raised.

What about those folded hands taught to every child and modeled in a thousand little hand sculptures? Praying with folded hands, usually while kneeling, comes from the Middle Ages, when vassals swore loyalty to their overlords by offering their folded hands, which a lord would cover with his own. Medieval Christians imagined God to be like their own lords and kings, and so sought favors in that way. Today's rite for ordaining a priest still has the newly ordained promising obedience to the bishop with this gesture.

Of course many will point out that it isn't the posture of prayer that matters but the attitude of the heart and the words we offer. True as that may be, the way we hold our bodies says a lot. It tells us who we think we are before God and who we believe God to be. Are we vassals of the Almighty Overlord? Serfs on the eternal estate? Or are we God's children, brothers and sisters of Jesus, who dare call God "Father"? I'd like to think the latter, and as one of God's chosen sons, I sometimes take the liberty of approaching God with a little spunk.

Then there's the prayer itself. Folded hands seem passive, at least to me, appropriate to begging for mercy but not much else. With hands raised, though, I can praise God with all the joy of a Pentecostal Christian drenched in Holy Spirit ecstasy. With hands raised, I can lift up the needs of the poor and hungry, cry out for peace and justice, shout the names of the sick, and bear up the spirits of the dead. With hands raised, I can even be angry with God, joining the psalmists who lament God's absence: "Why have you forsaken us?" Even more, perhaps, with hands raised I can plead for God's mercy, sharing Christ's posture at Calvary, arms outstretched in the ultimate prayer for reconciliation and forgiveness.

I GRANT THAT APPROACHING GOD IN THIS WAY IS A LITTLE, well, bold. (If you think I m irreverent, let me tell you about my friend who, in grand fits of pique, addresses You-Know-Who as "O Absentee Landlord"!) And it certainly isn't on the strength of my own holiness that I'd dare to call out to heaven in this way.

But I'd like to think that God can accept and even desire the fullness of my prayer: praise and thanksgiving to be sure, but anger and frustration as well, along with sorrow and even disappointment that this good, beloved world God made is in such a sorry state. And that prayer, which St. Paul calls the Spirit's "groaning" within us, is just too big and too deep in me for folded hands. It needs my whole body, standing with arms outstretched, reaching for the kingdom God promises in Jesus.

By BRYAN CONES, associate editor of U.S. CATHOLIC.