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Advent Calendar Templates 2020

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Advent is my favorite season of the Church year. For me, it is like a many-sided, many-faceted star. I tried to write a coherent paragraph or two about its many facets, but the words collided and fell in a boring, incoherent heap. So I decided to just brainstorm all of the things that come to mind when I think about Advent. So many juicy words and only twenty-six days to ponder them….

Using an Advent calendar is my favorite way to ponder and pay attention during the four weeks of Advent. Unlike the store-bought versions, my calendars have no doors, just blank spaces for the days of Advent. Each day I fill one space with a prayer or meditation– in words, doodles, and color. The daily practice of drawing on the calendar gives me a creative and simple way to immerse myself in the Advent experience and to prepare for the celebration of the birth of Jesus on December 25. The accumulation of daily doodlings forms a colorful tapestry and a record of my spiritual journey for the weeks leading up to Christmas. This practice feels prayerful and playful. No artistic skill is necessary! (Examples from previous years are at the bottom of the post.)

2020 Advent Calendar Templates

To download, click on the links below the Calendars. When the image appears as a  google doc, click on the download button at the top (the square with the downward facing arrow). Download first; then print. Feel free to share the calendar templates with others, for individual or group use. I think I have resolved the “gray” background issue that some of the templates in the past had. Please Share this post on your social media platforms. Thanks. These templates are also on my Handouts Page.

Note: Some school system emails do not allow downloads from unknown webpages. If you are from a school or church and having trouble, try using your personal/home email to download the templates. You can also contact me from the Contact Page.  

DOVE  w/Dates      .jpg       .pdf
DOVE  no Dates     .jpg       .pdf

STARS                  .jpg     .pdf
GRID/BOX              .jpg       .pdf

 Ways to Use the Calendar Templates

1) Write the name of someone for whom you are praying in the space. Doodle around the name, add color. Think of each stroke of color or each doodled mark (line, dot, arc, spiral…) as a wordless prayer. If words come to you as you draw and color, pray them. Squeeze them onto the calendar in the shape or along the margins if they feel important. When you have finished with your daily entry, say “Amen” or recite a short passage of Scripture appropriate to Advent like “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” (Psalm 27:1) This tiny colorful mosaic creates a frame around the person’s name. Returning to the calendar each day is a visual reminder to pray for each person again.

2) Choose a word from your daily reading. Combine your calendar with one of the many wonderful Advent books of meditations and reflections. Read the entry for the day and choose a word that jumps out at you. Write it in the shape and start to doodle and color around it. Marinate in the word. What is the word saying to you? What does God have to say to you about the word? Keep a computer or notebook next to your calendar so you can write any insights or “ahas.”

3) Write and ponder an Advent word: prepare, wait, pregnant, hope, watch, darkness, wilderness, longing, light… as you doodle and color. #AdventWord, a ministry of Virginia Theological Seminary, offers a new word each day and the chance to see how others throughout the world have reflected on the word.

4) Write something you hope for each day. Advent is a season of hope. Offer that idea to God as you draw, write, and color.

5) Celebrate the Women and Men of the Bible. Choose a different person for each day and learn what they did and why they are important to our story and God’s story. As you draw, be quiet and listen to what these people might reveal to you about Jesus and God .

6) Write one of the many names for Jesus in the daily box. Here are a few of the many ways we refer to Jesus: savior, messiah, friend, Prince of Peace, Emmanuel…. Use the Bible, Handel’s Messiah, Christmas carols, and hymns to uncover those names. Pray and ponder how that name for Jesus stirs, affects, annoys, delights, or inspires you.

7) Choose a word from the daily lectionary readings for the season. Here is a link to the Vanderbilt University site for the daily readings.

8) Just color and doodle in the space. For smaller children, print the calendar on 11″x17″ paper to create larger spaces. (I do this for myself, too.) Light a battery-powered votive candle and give them a quiet, secret place to work.

Advent Calendars From Previous Years


    “Veni” Grid Calendar by Cindy O.

Notes:

I like to enlarge the 8.5″x11″ format to 11″x17″ card stock. It gives me more room to doodle and color and consequently more time and space with the person or word.

Thanks to Cindy O. for the 2020 Box/Grid Calendar template.

Stones

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The beaches of Puget Sound, off the coast of Seattle, offer beautiful and intriguing gifts when the tide comes in and makes its twice daily delivery. Piles of strange seaweed and sea monsters of giant kelp look like something from a sci-fi series. Dungeness crab shells and half-eaten small sharks float up. Huge pieces of wood and trunks of trees lodge into the sand. And stones, thousands of them, form a blanket of shimmering, giant gems across the beach.

Generous friends have lent us their home for over a month on Whidbey Island, right at the door to the Pacific Ocean. The sound of the surf through our open bedroom windows, awe-dropping sunsets of vivid reds, oranges, purples, and blacks, and crystal-clear views of stars, planets, and the Milky Way keep me wide-eyed and thankful. But at the top of my August and September gratitude list are the unpretentious beach stones. When they are still wet, vivid shades of green, charcoal, red, orange, white, and tan shine on the beach. I wish I had better words to describe their colors: apricot, sandalwood, sage green, mauve, frost, and puce are as good as I can find. Maybe the stones deserve their own color-spectrum vocabulary like lavanite or igneous black or volcanico purple. I ooh and aah at their textures and shapes. And the rustling, crackling, clattering sound of the tide cascading over the piles of stones is hypnotic and musical. I can’t ever remember being so captivated by something as ordinary and simple as a stone.

When we arrived at our friends’ house, they had left a bag of twenty acrylic markers and a pile of stones in a basket in the living room. Earlier quests decorated the stones with their names and the dates of their visit and left them in a basket. Acrylic markers were new to me; but since the day we arrived, I have spent hours on the beach doodling with them on stones. And some of the doodles morphed into prayers. And the stone prayers looked terrific on a big driftwood log. And the log became a prayer altar. I love that the names of the people I am praying are exposed to the salt and the sun and the stars and the sky and the whole magnificent expanse and constellation of God’s universe. Every day when I arrive on the beach and see the prayer stones, I pray again for the people on this visual prayer list.

 

July 4th Prayer for Us and the U.S.

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 The 4th of July is not just a yearly extravaganza for fireworks and picnics—although it is that.  Every 4th of July offers new situations and challenges, new reasons for gratitude and celebration, and new opportunities for our nation’s self-examination and correction.

Here is a blessing prayer for us and our country. Sources for the quotes are below the drawing.

A Happy and Safe 4th of July to you and yours.

1. Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus.
2. America, Our Heritage, Helen Steele–a song I learned in elementary school and still remember.
3. Psalm 91: 5-6 KJV.
4. There’s A Wideness in God’s Mercy, Frederick William Faber.
5. Emma Lazarus.
6. Nelson Mandela.
7. Galatians 5: 13 NRSV/NIV.

Praying in Color Retreat July 10

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Paraclete Press is sponsoring a series of one-day summer retreats online. I am excited that Praying in Color will be one of them. If you have not been to one of my workshops or retreats, I hope you will consider attending. Please invite your friends and Share this post with others.

Below is the description. The cost of the retreat is $65. To REGISTER Click Here. 

Praying in Color: Old and New Ways to Pray

in an Ever-New World

Friday, July 10

with Sybil MacBeth

Prayer is the opposite of multi-tasking. It is the gathering of the mind, body, emotions, thoughts, and spirit into the same geography and inviting God to be present there. In this retreat we will gather (safely) as a community to explore praying in color—the visual, active, and meditative prayer practice introduced in the 2007 book Praying in Color: Drawing A New Path to God and its 2020 expanded/updated version. If you are word-weary, restless, antsy, or anxious in prayer or just looking for a new way to connect to God, come explore the versatile practice called praying in color. Bring paper, a black pen, and colored markers or pencils. Doodlers welcome; absolutely no artistic skill necessary! Check out Sybil’s website and blog: prayingincolor.com.

Schedule:

9am First Session—Intercessory and Blessing Prayers  with Q&A
10:15am Health break
10:25am Join Us for a Tai-chi Virtual Warm Up
10:45am Second Session—Griping, Grieving, Grounding, and Gratitude Prayers with Q&A
12pm Lunch Break with Visual Presentations from Paraclete Press
1:30pm Third Session—Praying With and In Scripture with Q&A


Sybil MacBeth is the author of Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God and other books in the series. She combines her years of experience in the mathematics classroom with her lifelong efforts in prayer to lead workshops and retreats across the country. As an inveterate multi-tasker, she loves to sing, dance, doodle, read, cook, spend time with her sons and grandchildren, and lead workshops. She lives with her husband Andy in Florida while they await the “all clear” for spending a year in Jerusalem.

This retreat is non-refundable unless cancelled by the host.

If you are unable to attend the live retreat at the hours given, we welcome you to register anyways, and if you contact us, we will send you, at no extra charge, the retreat link that you can watch over the following three days.

For questions, please contact Sr. Estelle at [email protected]  To register: Click Here.

View the other Paraclete Retreat Offerings for the summer.

Blessing Prayer Template

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Below is a template for creating a blessing prayer. See my post about blessing prayers from June 5. The “arms” on the template can hold the words of the blessing. If you run out of arms, you can use some of the other spaces for more words. Color and say the prayers to yourself or out loud. Or just sit in the quiet with the blessings as a backdrop for a silent time with God. Add more doodles, lines, arcs, marks…to the existing ones. Next to the blank template is an example of a partially filled-in blessing prayer.

Download the blank template by clicking on the word .jpg or .pdf. below the picture.

Blessing Template .jpg

Blessing Template .pdf

 

Please let me know if the blank template is too gray.  I have been trying to fix that! Thanks.

Blessing Prayers

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Blessing Prayers are one of my favorite ways to pray. In a blessing prayer we address directly the person we are praying for. A very old example of a blessing prayer is in the Book of Numbers 6:24-26:

May the Lord bless you and keep you;
May the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Blessing prayers have a different feel to me than intercessory prayers, those prayers in which we ask God to do something for others. We make intercession for others for a multitude of reasons: for physical healing from illness, safe travel, healthy pregnancies, a new job, or happy and stable marriages. Intercessory prayers ask God to intervene and help. “Please, God, free Maria from her addiction.” “Almighty One, protect our children at college.” Compassionate Healer, release John from the grips of this virus.” “Loving Jesus, fill my child with joy.”

I like the blessing prayer form because it is less specific and more expansive than intercession. Finding the “right” words for my extemporaneous intercessions is difficult for me. Using a blessing prayer format gives me a framework for corralling my words. It stimulates my poetic imagination about my hopes for my friends and the world. Here are a few of ways I pray blessing prayers:

May the God of Love surround you.
May the God of Joy delight you.
May the God of Mystery surprise you.
May the God of Hope sustain you.
May the God of Wisdom direct you
May the God of Freedom release you…

OR

God to enfold you.
God to enliven you.
God to comfort you.
God to accompany you.
God to refresh you.
God to unbind you….

OR sometimes maybe we need to call forth blessings on ourselves as a reminder of who we are and whose we are.

Creator of All, unite us.
Stream of Justice, trouble us.
Path of Righteousness, turn us.
Singer of Love, teach us.
Binder of Wounds, heal us.
Freer of Captives, release us.
Light of Light, awaken us.
Bread of Life, feed us….

Maybe the difference between blessing and intercession is just semantics, but blessing prayers seem like prayers of affirmation rather than just prayers of asking. They focus on the person but also on the infinite nature of God. When I offer a blessing prayer, I imagine I am unfurling an enormous canopy of God’s goodness and power onto someone. I feel like I am anointing a person with holy words and acting as an agent of God’s love. I want the people I pray for to look up and feel covered with the vast, bright gossamer of God.

I love combining blessing prayers with praying in color, ie. doodling prayer. I often use them for cards of condolence, birthday and anniversary wishes, and healing.

A simple way to draw a blessing prayer is to use the “two-stroke” prayer format. You can see the complete instructions in my September 12, 2016 post called Two-Stroke Doodled Prayers. Here’s a quick synopsis.

  • Draw a shape in the center of the page.
  • Write the person’s name in the middle of the shape.
  • Draw lines or arms from the shape, as many as you need for the blessings you want to include.
  • Write your blessings along the arms.
  • Choose two shapes to use–lines and circles or arcs and V’s or…see the instructions and start to draw and add color.
  • Pray the blessings as you doodle and color.
  • You can always sneak in more arms for additional blessings that come to you.
  • The example below uses arcs and lines.

Many traditional Irish prayers follow a blessing format. John Michael Talbot’s God of Life 1980’s album has several songs that fit this pattern. His songs God and Betwixt Me are two especially beautiful examples of blessing prayers. I have kept these songs in my repertoire of memorized prayers and sing them whenever I feel the need for blessing.

COVID Confessions 5–Intercession and Confession

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Intercession: Just about the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning is the wonderful little nightlight my friend Suzanne made for me. (See below). When we moved to Florida I brought it with me and plugged it into a socket into my mother-in-law’s 1970’s bathroom. When I see it in the morning I always say, “Good Morning, Suzanne, Good Morning, Matisse, Good Morning, God.” (The abstract design reminds me of my favorite artist Henri Matisse’s flower paintings.) Saying those “Good Mornings” has become a ritual. Looking at the light a couple of days ago, I thought the design would make a great template for intercessory prayer. The lilac rectangle/vase represents God, the source from which all life emanates; the colored tissue-paper-looking blossoms are the people for whom I am praying. Below is my nightlight/Matisse inspired intercessory prayer.

By the way, my friend Suzanne has written a wonderful book called Bead by Bead: The Ancient Way of Praying Made New. Beads are a visual and tactile way to pray. You can see my review of her book on amazon or the post I wrote about the book on July 11, 2018. My husband and I both have prayer beads she made. We plan to carry them with us when we finally go to Jerusalem.


Confession: A few days ago my husband and I took two paper grocery bags and walked to the next street over. The street backs up to a large Presbyterian church complex and marks the far edge of the church’s property. It is lined with a four-foot tangle of pin oaks, palmetto scrub, and vines. The untended thicket is a perfect place for people to throw empty beer cans and water bottles from their cars. In fifteen minutes, we had filled both bags–Busch, Coors, Bud Light, Icehouse, and Mike’s Harder Cranberry cans. I have to admit to a certain sense of pride and even self-righteousness about being a good neighbor and citizen. Then I thought, “I won’t tell anyone what we did and that will make it a really selfless act.” Then the voice on the other shoulder jabbed me and said, “Self-righteousness is self-righteousness, sister, whether you say it out loud or keep it in the pride box of your mind.” So I’m saying it out loud because it did feel good to clean up the neighborhood. And it felt right. And in cleaning up and saying it out loud I actually feel less disdain for the people who trashed up the road to begin with. Now when I walk by, I’ll get to enjoy the the green stuff on both sides of the road–the Spanish moss, the elegant oaks, the palmettos, Confederate Jasmine, Angel Trumpet….

Confession: I hope a few people have watched the YouTube video of Jana Riess interviewing me about Praying in Color. The interview covers most of the important things I think about praying in color, explains why it “works” for me, and gives examples of several different ways of praying. It is free to watch through Wednesday. After that, there is a small charge, I think . Click on the poster to watch it.

The Feast of Pentecost–Today

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Pentecost, one of my favorite celebrations in the Church year, is vibrant, sensory, exciting, colorful, unpredictable, wild…. Yesterday was an unanticipated Pentecost Preparation Day. I woke up with a little bird, as it were, pecking at my mind for me to get up and read the Pentecost story in Acts 2:1-21. The verses describe the cataclysm of “a mighty rushing wind, the tongues of fire, and the Holy Spirit descending upon the multitudes.” I read the sensational Acts passage and decided I wanted to draw a circular stained-glass window with the Holy Spirit and the tongues of fire inside. A 5-inch bowl made a great template for the window. But when I started to draw, the Holy Spirit refused to stay in the circle. The tongues of fire refused to stay in the circle. And I thought, “Isn’t that just like the Holy Spirit? Try to cage It and you are always in for a big surprise!”

 

When I read the Acts lesson, I also underlined some words in the text and doodled a visual response in the margins of my Bible. I am not a regular Bible journaler, but I like the process of entering Scripture with a pen and some colored markers or pencils. I read the passage or page and then try to be still and listen as I draw. I’m not as brave as some of the people who pray this way and dare to illuminate the text itself with drawings and lettering. (Check out some of the Facebook pages or websites about Bible journaling. Visual Faith Ministry is one example.)

Visual engagement with Scripture helps me to remember the passage for later encounters with it. I see the colorful bookmark-like drawing on the side of the page and I’m back in the Word. This artistic response feels different than Bible study. In Bible study, I feel the need to master the material and get information. I try to dissect and analyze the words, have control over them, and understand them once and for all. “Okay, I know what that’s about, let’s move on.” The hardened quest for information tamps the possibility for transformation. I am like the poetry students who Billy Collins laments in his poem Introduction to Poetry*:

“But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.”

 

If I substitute the word “scripture” for “poem,” the lines describe my sometimes uninspiring and laborious relationship with the Word. When I enter the Scripture, instead, with my backpack of art tools and start to draw, I release the need to pin down the Word and hear its final confession. To give up control of the Scripture feels scary and dangerous, like I’m inviting the Holy Spirit to take me blindfolded on a trust walk or an expedition of uncertain destination. “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8 NIV) Who knows where such an expedition might lead?

 

I remembered the picture below from a few years ago. The big swath of silk fabric behind me was a costume my mother wore, probably in the 1930’s, for her role in The Firebird, a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky. For several years my husband Andy wore it as the celebrant’s garb in Pentecost services. Right before we moved to Florida in April, I found it in a cedar chest. It practically disintegrated in my hands. I’m glad I had it for as long as I did. Firebird feels like a terrific image for the Holy Spirit.
*Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright � 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. To read the whole poem on the Poetry Foundation website, click here.

Prayer for Sheltering and Memorial Day

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High on my gratitude list is the wonderful variety of people I have “met,” either in person or online, because of Praying in Color. These are people I never would have known otherwise. We have met through my website, via email or social media, or at real flesh-and-blood Praying in Color workshops. At the workshops I present, we focus on prayer. We talk about our ongoing efforts to be in touch with and have a relationship with God.

I introduce praying in color as one of a zillion ways people can pray. Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Church of Christ , Mormons, Non-Denominationals,…all flavors of Christians plus an occasional Jew or Muslim attend my workshops. Sometimes I don’t even know where or how they worship. AND I don’t know how they vote or whether they think women should be pastors or if they tithe…. Although these may not be unimportant issues, there is something much more rudimentary and primal about prayer. It bypasses the censoring of the brain and issues from the heart and the gut. For me prayer is a hunger, a need that surpasses my opinions and beliefs. People I have met because of Praying in Color show me how they pray and offer me new ideas to bring me closer to God. I am so grateful.

Cynthia C. is a new online friend. She is responsible for Children’s Ministries at a church in California and wrote to me to see if I could do a virtual Praying in Color presentation for families with kids sometime during the early months of the sheltering-in-place quarantine. I was packing up my house to move and not available, but we have stayed in touch. This morning she sent me a short video called Sheltering in God by pastor David Jeremiah that inspired her prayer time and the visual prayer below. The video shows how many people in Scripture have, for various reasons, been sheltered in the past and how God used the time of sheltering for their spiritual formation. I love Cynthia’s prayer because she connects the sheltering of the Biblical characters with her own sheltering and fears, with all people who are sheltering, and with hope for the healing and renewal of our nation.

This Memorial Day I honor the people who have formed and sustained our country. I pray for families and friends of the almost 100,000 people who have died in the U.S. of the coronavirus. I will also pray for Tom, Cynthia’s 93-year old father who has COVID-19.

COVID Confessions 4–Prayer and Webinar

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Confession: I hope you all will join me on this Zoom webinar on Wednesday, May 20 (2 days from now) sponsored by Paraclete Press. Thoughtful and funny, Jana Riess, author of Flunking Sainthood and The Twible, will interview me about Praying in Color–where the idea came from, how it has changed and expanded in the 15 years since I started doing it. The webinar will last about an hour with time for questions. Click on the picture below or on this Link to sign up; it’s FREE. If you receive these posts as an email, please go to my Blog and Share via Facebook or other social media. Thanks.

Confession: I am a bumbling extemporaneous pray-er.  I get all shy and tongue-tied with God when I try to come up with accurate prayers to communicate what’s in my head and on my heart. Words escape me when I need them most, which is weird because I have always loved words. As a kid, novels, biographies, A Child’s Garden of Verses, encyclopedias, my little red KJV Bible, and Scrabble were constant companions. So I am very grateful for the Sunday School teachers of my childhood for whom words were so important. They taught me the prayers of our tradition and asked me to memorize Psalms, the Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, hymns, and one-line verses of Scripture and proclamations of faith. By the time I was eight or nine, I knew Psalms 23, 91, and 100 by heart. Sixty-some years later they are in the hard-drive of my memory and still accessible. When my own words fail in prayer, I join the unheard voices of millions of other people who recite these several-thousand-year-old hymns as part of their spiritual routine.

A couple of the favorite one-line prayers I learned in Sunday School are: “There is no spot where God is not.” “Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.”* “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”(Mt 5:4 KJV) “Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you.”* “In Him we live and move and have our being.”(Acts 17: 28 KJV) All of my memorized prayers, Psalms, hymns, and simple affirmations of faith are like a wardrobe of prayer shawls from which I can pick and choose. They enfold me and wrap me with the assurance that I am always in the presence of God.

Anne LaMott’s lovely 2012 book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers is a reminder that prayers do not need to be complicated or articulate, just honest. One word is sometimes all the prayer we need..

While I was packing up and getting ready to move from Tennessee to Florida in April, I found a poem I wrote in May 2009 called Three-Letter Prayers.

Three-Letter Prayers

The night in full bloom,
The star-filled sky
Flings paperwhites across the heavens.
WOW!

The open-handed man
In showerless stench,
Asks for my coins and my eyes.
NOW?

A long-loved friend,
Sobered up and free at last,
Dies
WHY?

The 8-hour surgery,
In the hands of Doc and God,
Brings relief and new life.
YES!

 

*Mary Baker Eddy