News Alert

Christianity Today, 3/28/08 [Excerpts]: Sybil MacBeth, a mathematics instructor by profession, doodler and dancer by avocation, has written, and doodled, a daring devotional: Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God.

About three years ago, a litany of cancers...struck among family, friends, and colleagues....MacBeth... possessed what she calls a "critical prayer list." Going to the back porch, she doodled a random shape and wrote [the name of someone on her prayer list] in its center. "I [added] 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."

[Then] she...drew another shape and put another name in its middle. She embellished it with lines, dots, colors. She continued drawing...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 about praying in color for two years. She recommends 15 to 30 minutes--half spent in drawing and the other half in carrying the visual memories throughout the day....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.

[TBC: Whether or not MacBeth realizes it, she has developed a prayer technique akin to what Buddhist monks and shamans perform. Nevertheless, she has no biblical basis for her approach to prayer.]