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Pray and Color Now Available

May 18, 2016 by Sybil Macbeth 2 Comments Leave a Comment

My new book Pray and Color: A Coloring Book and Guide to Prayer is now available from amazon, Paraclete, and the usual suspects. It has 32 coloring pages and offers 14 ways to pray using the pages. Here are a list of the ways to pray:

Prayers for Others     Prayers for Myself   Disgruntled Prayers  

Gratitude or Gruntled Prayers   Praise or Adoration Prayers   

Confession or Regret Prayers   Spending Time with God Prayers  

Blessing Prayers   Praying for Your Enemies  Praying a Passage of Scripture

Praying Your To-Do List  Daily Inventory Prayer–Examen   Hodgepodge Prayers

Praying in Calendars

Pray and Color Front Cover

 

 

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: Coloring Books, Doodling and Prayer, Pray and Color, prayer, Praying in Color, Visual Prayer

A Gold Plastic Crucifix

April 28, 2016 by Sybil Macbeth 1 Comment Leave a Comment

I grew up in the 1950’s in an almost-middle-class neighborhood of two-story asphalt-shingled cottages and bungalows. Many families on the street had at least five kids. My strongly Protestant family only had two kids—just my older brother and me. My parents slept in twin beds; all of the Catholic parents slept in double beds.

No one on the street had money to spare, or if they did, they spent it on things not visible in the driveway or on the front porch. Many of the families, however, did fork out the $8 plus “carfare” for a once-a-week maid. Our maid was named Fanny. She came on the streetcar from downtown Baltimore to the suburbs every Friday. She always wore a waist-down apron, smelled like the cheesy chips she kept in her pockets, and hummed all day long while she worked.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, my birthday fell on Fanny’s workday. I don’t know how she knew it was my birthday, but I do remember I was standing next to the family-room credenza when she reached into her apron pocket and handed me her gold plastic crucifix. “Happy Birthday,” she said. I remember I was surprised–both by her kindness and by the gift itself. The crucifix seemed important to Fanny, but the only thing I knew about crucifixes was that they were something Catholics had and Protestants avoided. My Catholic best friend and next-door neighbor had them in her house. Her parents had a bloody one over their double bed and Marian had one hanging from the bottom of her glow-in-the-dark rosary.

My parents thought crucifixes were wrong, maybe even idols. But when Fanny gave me my first crucifix, it did not feel wrong. Later in the day I showed my mother Fanny’s birthday gift to me. She confiscated it, saying something like, “You don’t need this.” Her intent was not cruelty, but a fear of most things Catholic.

Gold Crucifix

My relationship today with crucifixes is different than it was decades ago. I used to think holy religious practice was all about the correct thoughts, words, and beliefs in my head. But when words and theology failed me in my own prayers over a dozen years ago, I’m pretty certain God sat me in a chair, gave me colored markers and paper, and said, “Pray with your hands, your eyes, your heart, and your little child self. Get out of your head.”

Crucifixes, rosaries, prayer beads, candles–all of those religious objects I labeled as superstitious and idolatrous as a child and young adult—are centuries old practices to engage our whole bodies, senses, and minds in prayer. They involve touch and sight. When rosaries first came on the scene about eight or nine hundred years ago most people were illiterate. The faith was shared through oral stories and visual images. As someone who spends 90% of her time tossing words and ideas around in her brain, crosses, crucifixes, prayer beads, and colored markers enhance my appreciation of God’s Word and Story by providing a visual and tactile focus. When I look at them, I do not worship them. Scattered around my house they are flashing beacons in the midst of my chaotic and fretful thoughts to refocus my attention on God.

Crucifix collage

In retrospect, I wish I had protested when my mother took the crucifix many years ago. Fanny had given me something dear to her and it was dismissed. When my mother died and my father moved away from the house, I remembered the crucifix and searched in every drawer and behind every door of the credenza. But I never found it.

As a reflection of my changing theology and practice and maybe a little bit in honor of Fanny, I have several crucifixes in my house. One of them is at the end of a glow-in-the-dark rosary hanging on the lampshade next to my bed. It is the last thing I see before I go to bed. The glowing crucifix and Psalm 139:12 remind me that both the night and the day belong to God: “even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” (NRSV)

And I am still keeping an eye out for a gold plastic crucifix to keep in my pocket.

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: crucifix, Praying in Color, rosary, Visual Prayer

Coloring/Doodling as Spiritual AND Religious Practice

July 23, 2015 by Sybil Macbeth 2 Comments Leave a Comment

With all of the excitement and hype about coloring books, I wanted to remind people about coloring, doodling, drawing, and PRAYER. Many of the reasons people like coloring books are the same reasons I started praying in color. Coloring relaxes, stills the monkey mind, and gives people time away from daily work and social media.

I started doodling my prayers by accident. In a summer doodling session on my screened-in porch, names started appearing in my doodles. They were the names of the people on my prayer list. My doodling had become my prayer. My take on the coloring/doodling process is that it gives my body something to do while I enter into prayer. My normal fidgety, restless body has something to do while I wait for prayer words to come or I wait for stillness. My prayers used to be a flurry of words, a few sentences shot with a bow toward God. Now I don’t insist on words. If they come, I’m grateful. If not, I know I have prayed because I have carved out a time to sit with God and given God the opportunity to enter my mind and my heart. Each line, each swirl, each stroke of color is a non-verbal prayer.

Collage Coloring Prayer 2015 resized

Coloring and doodling can be a spiritual practice, but I also think of it as a religious practice. It is a ritual I observe to worship God, offer my intercessions for others, name my gratitudes, and confess my sins/character defects. I do this on paper, in black and white and in color. With and without words. It is not just in my head but becomes a visual record of the things on my heart and a visual reminder for me to continue to pray. It is my prompt to “pray unceasingly.”

So while you are ordering your coloring books on Amazon or wherever, think about ordering one of these books to help you create your own prayer coloring books. The Portable Edition is a 2013 update of the original Praying in Color. It is about 1/4 new material.

praying-in-color-drawing-a-new-path-to-god-portable-edition-300dpi

PrayingInColorKidsEdition resized

 

 

 

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: Coloring book Prayers, Coloring Books, Doodling and Prayer, Praying in Color:Drawing A New Path to God (Portable Edition), Praying in Color:Drawing A New Path to God--Kids' Edition, Visual Prayer

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