Praying in Color

I stumbled across an interesting book and website this morning while bebopping through some links on other sites. I went from Holy Experience to Mama Monk's blog which led me to look for a book on the Benedictine Rule on Amazon and after loading a few books into my shopping cart (don't worry Bill, I'm not actually buying any of them...yet...Oh how well you know me!) Somehow from Benedictine books, I found myself looking at some art and creativity books and one titled Praying in Color by Sybil MacBeth really caught my eye. Realizing this is not the best time to be buying books with bills from kidney stone surgery now coming in on top of looming Christmas shopping, I decided to download samples to my Kindle for the time being and leave the actual books waiting on my wish list instead. Praying for Color wasn't available for the Kindle, so I took a quick look at the sneak peek of the few pages Amazon would allow, and realized I didn't need to actually buy the book (sorry Sybil) The gist is simple. You have a name or names of people you want to pray for, or a subject such as hurricane victims, or the names of God, or even a scripture you'd like to memorize. You start with a simple shape or write the name(s) out and begin to doodle other shapes from there. Add some colored pens to brighten the page and viola! You've just doodled a prayer. I'm sure there's a lot more to the book than that, but if it'll save me from spending $12 I don't need to right now, I'm happy to make a quick start from there and run with it on my own! You can check out Sybil's website and her prayer doodling here: http://www.prayingincolor.com Maybe it'll inspire you to break out your colored pens and paper and doodle a prayer or two. It's also a great idea to get kids praying-you can hang finished prayer doodle art work on the fridge for a quick reminder of those on your prayer list or a refresher of the scripture you're working on memorizing. Give it a try! I'd love to see what you come up with if you want to post links to your doodles here!

These are some of Sybil's doodles: