Colorful Prayer

During a staff retreat last week, one of our colleagues spent an afternoon teaching us to pray in color. I must admit that I had earlier seen that topic on the agenda through whatever color of lens skepticism superimposes.

I once had a rich, full, wordy, time-consuming prayer life. I still pray a fair amount throughout the day, but these are short little things compared to the hours I once spent every day on my knees in my bedroom or at a kneeler in some chapel on a college or seminary campus. In recent years, I have struggled to carve out daily time for focused prayer. When I do, it is most often contemplative, rooted in deep breathing and physical and spiritual postures that open me to the presence of God. Brief readings from the Bible usually lead me into this prayer time (Moravian Daily Texts) and a prayer word or phrase focuses my meandering mind. Otherwise, prayer for me is most often wordless silence that is more like listening for and to God coupled with trust that God is also listening for and to me and the various aches and concerns of my own and those of others that I carry in my being.

I must admit that I have agonized over this change in my prayer habits. I was taught in late adolescence that prayer is about speech and specificity: we need to tell God what we need, what the world needs, what we have done wrong, what we are thankful for, and so on. I think someone once suggested to me that it was good to listen once in a while, but that was to be done mostly by reading the Bible; more words. Despite the myriad books I have read and the variegated forms of contemplative prayer I have tried over the intervening years, something about spending most of my prayer time in silence or, more accurately, finding my way toward silence, still doesn’t seem quite right, or enough, or faithful to my spiritual heritage. Yet, try as I might to do otherwise, this is the form of prayer that carries me into an awareness of God’s presence in the world these days.

So, when I saw “The Joy of Praying in Color” on the agenda, I was not convinced that whatever that was would work for me. In addition, the thought of some sort of coloring in the presence of other people – especially colleagues – also raised the rancor of “I can’t draw” anxieties that have been generously fed and indulged in over the years. Nevertheless, good team member that I am, I went to the session and opened my mired mind as far as I could.

As we arrived in the room Carol gave us each a half dozen colored markers and a thin tablet of drawing paper. Using a little book, Praying in Color by Sybil MacBeth, and the experience of a workshop with its author, she then instructed us to use these simple tools to pray a favorite name for God. Immediately, one of the prayer phrases I use in contemplative prayer came to mind and I slowly reflected on that phrase in reference to the colors I rolled over each other in my hand. Before long, unskilled artist that I am, I found myself doodling/drawing. And when Carol dinged a little Zen bell and told us to stop, I could not put down the markers.


The process was almost immediately prayerful for me! As we moved through other ways to “color” our prayers (e.g. praying for others, praying Bible passages), I found myself – despite myself – caught up in a form of prayer that is a sort of hybrid between the deeply silent contemplative prayer to which I have become accustomed and the more focused, worded prayers of my younger days. I was reminded of the monks I read about decades ago who wove baskets of reeds as they prayed. Something about the meditation focused on a person or situation or story found its way into my hands and, through pen put to paper in abstract and vaguely symbolic colored form, became an experience of the presence of God for the world and for me.

Color me purple with surprise and aqua with gratitude for this addition to my prayer repertoire!

Thanks, Carol!