Listening to Goddess-God-the Divine
6.4 Praying in Color as a Contemplative Practice
To introduce the practice of praying in color, I invite students to meditate on the phrase “Tree of Life.” In sharing their reflections, students note the tree’s yearly life cycle. Collectively, they describe how the trunk, limbs, branches, and leaves are all part of a living system and how the tree stretches up toward the heavens while still rooted in the earth. Afterward, I show the “Contemplative Tree of Life” and describe some of the branches representing different ways to listen to the Divine through contemplative practices.[1]
As we move into the last hour of our three-hour class, I pass out card stock paper and crayons and sense the energy level of the class perk up. I begin narrating. Tonight, we introduce one more way to listen to the Divine called praying in color. First, let’s watch a short video clip from Sybil Mac Beth to introduce the idea of praying in color.[2] Notice in the video that she doesn’t like to pray formally but enjoys doodling.[3] While doodling one day, she wrote the name of a sick friend inside of her doodle and then continued making doodles and coloring around the name. Afterward, she realized she was praying for the person as she doodled. She was praying in color! When we finished watching the video, I grin and invite, “Let’s have some fun and ‘doodle around’ while listening to the Divine.”
To begin praying in color,[4] I instruct students to write their symbol for the Divine in the center of the page and draw a circle around it. I suggest they add their name and the names of anyone else they would like to connect with. After writing the names, I recommend that they listen to the Divine for inspiration, adding whatever artwork they feel is appropriate (e.g., shapes, landscapes, animals, other symbols, and colors). After about five minutes, I ask the students to wrap up their drawings, but they protest, “We need more time to doodle!” I provide another five minutes for them to doodle with the Divine. Then, we share our pictures in small groups. Those who want to share their artwork with the larger class. Their designs are so beautiful. Hearing the stories behind the designs, I could see how they were listening to the Divine as they doodled and prayed in color.
Praying in Color Practice
- First, gather the materials—a blank paper and crayons or other colorful drawing instruments (e.g., colored pencils, markers, or pens).
- Next, provide a comfortable and relatively quiet environment where you can invoke a sense of Divine presence (e.g., light a candle, burn incense, take a few deep breaths . . .).
- Write a word or symbol to represent your meaning of the Divine in the center of the page.
- Write another word or symbol to represent youself.
- Visually connect the symbol for the Divine with the symbol for yourself.
- Add other people you want to pray for to the picture with words, symbols, and connections.
- Finally, add creative elements to the picture, such as colors, shapes, lines, patterns, symbols of things you love, and so forth.
The process of drawing IS listening to the Divine by praying in color. Optionally, you can spend some time gently gazing and meditating on your creation, and journaling about what you have learned.
Students genuinely enjoy listening to the Divine when praying in color. They become like children in a free school,[5] creating spontaneously whatever emerges from within. Some of their pictures look like artwork that could be in a gallery. Other pictures, like mine, are more modest but still beautiful. When we discuss the process of praying in color, students generally report that they don’t feel like they are praying formally but still feel like the experience is prayerful. This suggests that listening to the Divine in prayer is not limited to traditional formal prayers like petition, thanksgiving, or praise but that prayer as listening to the Divine is a much broader practice.[6] Prayer, as listening to the Divine, can be expressed in a variety of art forms such as coloring, drawing, painting, sculpting, whittling, pottery, dancing, singing, Ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement), writing, poetry, and doodling!
For Reflection
- What kinds of creative art[7] do you enjoy?
- If you do not regularly engage in any type of artwork, please review the list of art forms for listening to the Divine and consider making space to experiment with one of them for at least twenty minutes sometime this week.
- For those engaged in creative art, what kind of intention might you add (if you do not already do so), before or during your creative artistic expression, that frames the activity as listening to the Divine? How does adding a listening intention influence your experience of creating art? Perhaps you may feel a closer connection and a sense of co-creating with the Divine.
- If you are a teacher of listening, how might you translate your personal experience of listening to the Divine through creating art into the classroom context of listening to the Divine?
- Contemplative Mind in Society, "Tree of Contemplative Practices," (website) Maia Duerr (2016). http://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/tree. The seven branches of the tree of contemplative practices are stillness (e.g., meditation, centering), generative (e.g., beholding, loving-kindness), creative (e.g., music, journaling), active (e.g., pilgrimage, social justice), relational (e.g., council, storytelling), movement (e.g., labyrinth walking, dance), and ritual-cyclical (e.g., retreats, ceremonies). The video on the website describes the research supporting the tree of contemplative practices. An additional resource for spiritual-contemplative practices is Thomas G. Plante, Contemplative Practices in Action: Spirituality, Meditation, and Health (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010). ↵
- Paraclete Press, "Praying in Color by Sybil MacBeth | Sybil MacBeth," YouTube, November 11, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch. ↵
- Doodling, according to Sunni Brown is, ". . . making spontaneous marks (with your mind and body) to help yourself think." Doodling is a kind of "visual thinking" linked to creative problem-solving. Sunni Brown, The Doodle Revolution: Unlock the Power to Think Differently (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2015), 11. Brown's doodling process aligns with the playful, contemplative spirit of "praying in color." ↵
- The process I narrate for praying in color is my version of MacBeth's instructions for praying in color. Sybil Mac Beth, Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God (Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2007). ↵
- For the history of the countercultural free school movement that began in the 1960s in the U.S. See, John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2006). For an example of a free school, see Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud. Stone Johnny School (Seattle: Lantern, 1989). ↵
- For a complete discussion of traditional prayers, see E. James Baesler, Theoretical Explorations and Empirical Investigations of Communication and Prayer (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). For another interpretation of prayer as direct Divine communication, see J. E. Sigler, "A Critical Review of Baesler's Relational Prayer Model (RPM) and Proposal of a New, RPM-Complementary Direct Divine Communication Model (DDCM)," Journal of Communication and Religion 38, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 69-94. ↵
- My sense of art aligns with entrepreneur and creative genius Seth Godin's definition of art as, "The human act of doing something that might not work, something generous, something that will make a difference. The emotional act of doing personal, self-directed work to make a change we can be proud of." Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020). ↵