So…Can colored dots be prayer?

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? Well, yes, actually.

Colored dots as praying? This is my theological contribution to our world in need?

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 how much room I find at my table for all sorts of spiritual ideas and traditions. Simply put—I won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. And here’s the truth. 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 had hidden for too many years. From this place of greater spiritual maturity, I have been able to reach out, more meaningfully, to others.

I have found that the approaches I might have relied on earlier in my life did not help me as I needed to be helped now. It did not help to do fill-in-the-blank studies. It did not help to try to fit into a particular mold. It did not even help to try to be in control and organize stuff. (My go-to response to pain.) I so clearly was not in control that it was useless to even try to busily come up with solutions. The solutions were not, actually, mine to find. The best I could offer was to simply be present.

It seems to me that there was a beautiful vigilance in waiting and watching through a way of new silent prayer that I needed to learn to trust.

I find great solace in entering into the presence of God’s divine peace through the gift of contemplative painting. And, surprisingly to me, my people were often moved by the prayers I could articulate only through color. 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.

 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.

 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.