So…Can colored dots be prayer?
The hours I spend with paint and paper and pen provide a direct connection for me with our Creator God, the source of all beauty and love. That holy rumination—with the placing of color and also with the allowing of empty spaces—focuses and calms my soul as nothing ever has. I use watercolor because, like life, it is unpredictable. I use pen because I have a need to write out sacred texts, poetry, and bits of conversations with my life’s companions.
My response to the sorrows I’ve seen in the past two years is this: it might help if you painted some colored dots.
“Seriously?” you might ask. “Painting colored dots as a form of prayer is your theological contribution to our world in need?”
And what I respond is: yes. I have come to accept that not everyone will be stirred by such practices. Some will call it born of ridiculous privilege. Some will question my openness to all sorts of spiritual ideas and traditions. The longer I live, the more I find there is a lot of room at my spiritual table.
And I know that means that I won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Here’s the truth, though—I am really, really, really okay with that. In fact, I think my offering of colored dots as prayer is proof that I no longer even want to be everyone’s cup of tea! I am no longer trying to please every person in my life.
And to me, that feels like hard won growth. It has taken me many, many years to claim the authentic self I hid for too many years. From this place of greater spiritual maturity, I have been able to reach out, more meaningfully, to others who come to me with a curious but understandably cautious spirit.
I have found that the approaches I might have relied on earlier in my life do not help me as I need to be now. It does not help me now to do fill-in-the-blank studies. It doesn’t make sense to try to fit into a particular mold with its own strict standards of acceptable and not acceptable. It does not even help to try to be in control and organize stuff (my go-to response to pain).
I so clearly am not in control that it was useless to even try to busily come up with solutions. That focus on solutions is not, actually, where peace is to be found. The best I have to offer is to simply be present. And open. And curious.
It seems to me that there was a beautiful vigilance in waiting and watching through this new way of silent prayer that I have learned to trust.
I find great solace in entering into the presence of God’s divine peace through the gift of contemplative painting. I sit with my paintbrush and my love and concern and hope for people who come to my mind. I try not to have an agenda other than holding that person in my soul. And, surprisingly to me, folks are often moved by the prayers I can articulate only through color. That surprises me and interests me.
Here’s a secret: color is one of my most favorite things that God came up with. And here’s what I no longer want to be a secret: art making has become one of my most meaningful prayer practices.
Art making is a prayer language that speaks deeply to me: I am beginning to understand that I am most truly and contentedly myself when I listen to its rhythms and its intimacies. So here I am. Me and my colored prayer dots. Me and my peculiar creativity. Me and my kinda wacky ideas about knowing God in both new and ancient ways.
I welcome you to this space. May you find some bit of inspiration for your own journey. May it be so.