Overview

Connect the Spiritual and Color! Just as Julia Cameron, in The Artist's Way, showed the hardened Harvard businessman he had a creative artist lurking within, MacBeth makes it astonishingly clear that anyone with a box of colors and some paper can have a conversation with God. -Pubishers Weekly Need help communicating with God? Maybe you hunger to know God better. Maybe you love to doodle. Maybe you are a visual or kinesthetic learner, a distractable or impatient soul, or a word-weary pray-er. Perhaps you struggle with a short attention span, a restless body, or a tendency to live in your head. Praying in Color is a guidebook for a new way of approaching prayer, not a coloring book. Draw your own path to God, doodling your prayer requests, moments of gratitude, Scripture study and more. This prayer form can take as little or as much time as you have or want to commit, from 15 minutes to a weekend retreat. A new prayer form gives God an invitation and a new door to penetrate the locked cells of our hearts and minds, explains Sybil MacBeth. For many of us, using only words to pray reduces God by the limits of our finite words. For more information, including author events, examples and contact information to request Sybil MacBeth to do a workshop, visit www.prayingincolor.com. Use Praying in Color to help with: * lectio divina * memorizing Scripture * prayers for discernment * creating a personal Advent or Lenten calendar

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9781557255129

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Reviews

This is the most invigorating and enabling book about prayer that I have seen in years! Phyllis Tickle, compiler, The Divine Hours

<p>Sybil MacBeth would like to help people draw closer to God-literally. She's developed a simple new approach to prayer described in her book Praying in Color, to be released in April by Paradete Press. She talked about her method recently with Associate Editor Mary Jacobs. Here are excerpts.<br>Tell me about your approach to prayer.<br>I would describe it as visual way to pray. I started praying this way about four years ago, when I had a whole slew of friends who had cancer all at once. I didn't know what to pray. I got tired of the saying the same old things: Please, God, make them better, make them comfortable. <br>I'm a doodler. One day I was sitting on my porch doodling and I realized I had put the name of somebody in one of these shapes. I thought I don't know what to say but Jean sit with this person in prayer. I can do that by drawing and coloring and constantly keeping my attention focused on the person and lifting him up to God And that's how it got started.<br>Do you need to have artistic ability to do this?<br>Absolutely not. I can't draw a cat. But I love color. I think that's one of the reasons that it works for me.<br>Describe the steps you take.<br>I night draw a shape first. Then I'll put the name of a person I want to pray for in the shape. Or, sometimes I'll put a name for God in the first shape. I don't try to force words because the words sometimes get in the way. Then I'll draw around the shape. I'll do squiggles or curlicues or lines, just different shapes-just to keep my hand moving and always my attention on lifting the person up to God.<br>I'll spend 3-5 minutes on the person. Then I'll move to another spot on the page and do another shape and pray for another person who is on my mind. So it might end up with one person on the page or I might have ten, depending on how many friends or family members need prayer.<br>Then I'll often carry that sheet with me. Sometimes I'll put it on the fridge, or I'll put the sheet in front of an ico

Dancer and mathematics instructor MacBeth's charming book may be the first to combine the pleasures of doodling with a discussion of, among other things, lectio divina. Here, she shows how simple drawings-often hardly more than circles and lines with names or ideas or places sketched in and enlivened with color-can focus the praying heart, making prayer something better than a shopping list or a chore and helping the praying believer to carry the wishes and thoughts of the prayer through the day. MacBeth's book is not for unbelievers or those who do not pray; it is directed to those suffering something more like spiritual attention deficit disorder. Still, it is one of the most appealing books on prayer to appear in the last five years. Highly recommended. Library Journal May 1, 2007 Just as Julia Cameron, in The Artist's Way, showed the hardened Harvard businessman he had a creative artist lurking within, MacBeth makes it astonishingly clear that anyone with a box of colors and some paper can have a conversation with God. Frustrated by a laundry list of what she calls prayer dilemmas, and the unfortunate situations of more than half a dozen friends and family members on her critical prayer list, MacBeth, a math professor by trade, spent an afternoon doodling before she realized she'd in fact spent the afternoon in prayer. As she takes particular care to emphasize, this method most effective for intercessory prayer, but adaptable for other approaches requires absolutely no skill, merely a desire to connect with God. (Readers should therefore ignore any lingering self-doubt planted by a first grade art teacher.) Amid gentle personal anecdotes, MacBeth illustrates each step of the process, providing not just instruction but inspiration by sharing her own prayer pages as well as those of her students. She even includes a chapter on using one's computer for the process. Readers of all ages, experience and religions will find this a fresh, invigorating and even exhilarating way to spend time with themselves and their Creator. -Publisher's Weekly Starred Review 2007 Sybil MacBeth, a mathmatics instructor by profession, and dancer by avocation, has written, and doodled, a daring devotional. Praying In Color: Drawing a New Path to God**** chronicles her 'experiments in intercession and challenges readers to take pens and paper in hand and, well, intercede. Although the daughter and granddaughter of artists, MacBeth was convinced by her own ugly artworkthat something had gone awry in the tossing of the genetic salad. Her point: The absence of skill presents no barrier to an individual's discoveries linking doodling and prayer. That's because prayer involves trust and being real before God.MacBeth's doodling discoveries came from a crisis. About three years ago, a litany of cancers-lung, brain, breast -struck among family, friends, and colleagues. The suffering within her circle was overwhelming. Worry became her starting point-but not her stopping point. Even now, she writes, worry invites me to prayer. As a teacher facing a summer off, MacBeth had no papers to grade but instead possessed what she calls a critical prayer list. Going to the back porch, she doodled a random shape and wrote a name in its center. The name belonged to one of the people on my prayer list. I stayed with the same shape and the name, adding detail and color to the drawing. Each dot, each line, and each stroke of color became another moment of time spent with the person in the center. When she sensed the time was right, she moved to another part of the page and drew another shape and put another name in its middle. She embellished it with lines, dots, colors. She continued drawing new shapes and names until her friends and family formed a colorful community of designs. To my surprise, she writes, I had not just doodled-I had prayed. MacBeth has been leading workshops in the U.S.about praying in color for two years. Her book contains balloons, labyrinths, vegetables, clovers, triangles, kites, quilts, calendars with prayer requests and names, and purposefully shaped squiggles. She recommends 15 to 30 minutes for the process, half spent in drawing and the other half in carrying the visual memories or actual images throughout the day.Instead of being a prayer warrior, she calls herself a prayer popper, one who prays in fits and spurts with half-formed pleas and intercessions, and bursts of gratitude and rage. MacBeth is transparent, accessible, and human. She exercises what she calls spiritual imagination as she works on, in, and through prayer.She trusts herself enough to experiment, mess up, and try again in prayer. She trusts God enough to guide her as she falters, succeeds, and grows stronger. Her book emboldens others to trust their instincts, too. -Robin Gallaher Branch, professor of biblical studies, Crichton College Christianity Today January 28, 2008

Author Information

Sybil MacBeth is a mathematics instructor, a dancer, and the spouse of an Episcopal priest in Memphis, Tennessee. She has been leading workshops across the U.S. using Praying in Color for two years, now, and will soon be teaching others to do the same

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