Prayer and Creativity

Today officially begins my last class as a Luther Seminary Student!  It's all very exciting and yet feels completely unreal since I still have about five months left of internship.  Oh well, I will take what I can get!  What might be more exciting than the fact that this is my last class is that this is also my first independent study, it focuses on prayer as creativity and I am being guided through it by Trey Everet out of the Micah Institute in Crookston.

Over the next nine weeks, I will be exploring three different areas of creativity: painting, sculpture and movement of some kind (possibly just walking/hiking and possibly belly dancing...only time will tell).  I am planning on spending three weeks exploring each of these areas of creativity and figure out how they fit in with prayer and meditation.  I'll be honest, this is super exciting and yet I feel completely unprepared for what this will look like and mean for my prayer life; maybe it will work and maybe it won't. 

These first three weeks I'm focusing on painting and with a little guidance from Trey we decided on a basic "formula" to start with.  This "formula" is simple, it's ancient and let's hope it works.  It starts with Scripture (possibly a Psalm), followed by some meditation, painting my prayer to God and then reflecting on the process.  Seems pretty simple right?

The biggest struggle for this adventure is getting out of my own way.  I have never painted before, nor have I ever really sculpted and I have a slight tendency to want to make everything perfect or do things the right way, as I'm sure most of us can relate to.  But, throughout this process, the whole goal is to get out of my own way, to move beyond the mind and key into body and emotion and those other aspects of self that we so often push aside.  The goal is a kind of effortless attention to that which is inside of me and letting it flow out and onto paper.  This is one of the most exciting challenges I've faced in a long time and I know that some days will be easier than others but I am excited to enter into a new spiritual practice, learn more about prayer and figure out how to share it with others.  And most of all I'm comforted that there's really no wrong way to do this.