Praying in Color

Praying in Color

“Here are some reasons to Pray in Color:

1) You want to pray but words escape you. 

2) Sitting still and staying focused in prayer are a challenge. 

3) Your body wants to be part of your prayer.

 4) You want to just hang out with God but don’t know how.

5) Listening to God feels like an impossible task.

6) Your mind wanders and your body complains.

7) You want a visual, concrete way to pray. 

8) You Need a new way to pray.”

Sybil MacBeth, Praying in Color, Drawing a New Path to God

 Gifted speaker and retreat leader, Sybil MacBeth, takes our prayer life conceptually from the left to the right brain. This type of prayer is especially easy for doodlers. It can initially be painful to those who theoretically live out of their left brain, those who are more verbal, orderly, logical, analytical, methodical in thinking, but praying in color can take that person into a whole new world of prayer. Those who are more right brained, more creative, imaginative, artistic, will rejoice that they can find a new method of praying that validates who they are. Sybil offers a multitude of ways to use this kind of prayer, as intercessory prayer, as an advent prayer calendar, as a way to memorize scripture, as a way of meditative prayer around a word or phrase,  lectio divina, for discernment, and many more. We start with a simple shape, put a name or word within it and pray as we add or decorate or expand or connect the figure.   This is a recommended adventure in prayer to the logical person who is stuck and the artistic person whose prayer life seems dry and colorless.

 Joanna               joannaseibert.com

from Praying in Color

Leaders Perfectionism Sims Palmer

Perfectionist Bennett Sims and Parker Palmer

“The blemishes in heroes are signs of the profoundest paradox of servant leadership: perfection lies precisely in the readiness to own one’s imperfection..God is not a perfectionist. God cannot be a perfectionist and continue to allow the world to exist, especially that part of the world that follows Jesus and yet looks so little like him- the church… God’s perfectionism is anti-perfectionist..The biggest hindrance to the high quality of leadership that honors the gifts of and freedom of others is the fear of being found out for who we really are: people who are conspicuously imperfect.” Bennett Sims, Servanthood, Leadership for the Third Millennium, pp. 23-24. 1997.

I wonder if the Episcopal bishop, Bennett Sims, and the Quaker writer, Parker Palmer ever met, for their writings cross paths. Parker Palmer writes in Let Your Life Speak, about the five shadows in leaders that led them to failure if they do not recognize them. The first is insecurity about their identity and worth with their identity depending on the role they play or the power it gives to them over others. Second, Palmer describes the shadow of believing that the world is a competitive battleground with allies and enemies. Third, is functional atheism, the belief that the ultimate responsibility of everything falls on us. The fourth shadow is a fear of chaos, bringing about rigid rules and procedures in order to improve rather than empower the people the leader works with. They forget that creativity comes out of chaos.  Lastly, leaders will fail if they deny the possibility of death, resuscitating things that no longer are alive. 

Today Palmer and Sims are reminding us what keeps us from being servant leaders. They are giving us some more STOP signs. When we see these qualities in ourselves, their message is to stop and turn around. We are going in the wrong direction. This path is not leading to the God within us. We also will not be able to see the God in others on this path. Ironically, we often first see these shadow qualities in someone else, realize how destructive they are, and finally turn inward with an awful awareness that we may possess these shadows as well that are keeping us from connecting to God and to others.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Parker Palmer

America the Beautiful

 The Day after July 4, 2017

“America! America! God mend thine every flaw,

confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”

Katherine Lee Bates

The Sunday before the fourth of July we had a patriotic hymn sing along after church. One of my favorites is the music to Katherine Lee Bates poem, “America the Beautiful.” O beautiful for spacious skies for amber waves of grain”. Bates wrote the hymn after she arrived in a prairie wagon on top of the 14,000-foot Pike’s Peak near Colorado Springs in the summer of 1893.

 I became connected to the poem and the hymn when I helped plan a pediatric radiology meeting at nearby Colorado Springs in 1994. I took a sabbatical from Children’s Hospital for six months in order to plan the international pediatric radiology meeting. I had much help from people all over the world, but had a touch of what Parker Palmer calls “functional atheism”, believing I was the “only” one who needed to get most of the work done.

After a year of planning and everything was ready, I vividly remember sitting in a board meeting in May at the event hotel just before the conference was about to begin. I looked out of the adjacent large bay window, and saw to my horror, the beginning of the last snow of winter, in May! I had planned in detail a multitude of outdoor activities that now would never see the light of day. I now keep a beautiful picture of snow on the tulips in front of the hotel to remind me of how little in life I can control.

There were a multitude of other hiccups. We recorded speakers for a meeting video. One speaker did not like his recording and required us to redo his filming at least five times. I will always be indebted to Marilyn Goske whom I had casually asked to watch over the videoing of the speakers. She patiently stayed with the speakers and missed the whole meeting to get this done.  Another hiccup was our evening entertainment after dinner. We had scheduled the Air Force Academy Cadet Choir. Then without warning they were called to maneuvers. Our meeting planner booked a local children’s chorus. I was embarrassed that this would be amateurish and poorly performed. As you might expect, they were some of the most charming, talented and poised children performers I have ever seen. They ended their concert by going to individual members of the highly-educated, sophisticated audience and held their hands and sang directly to them. We all gave them a standing ovation through our tears, remembering that the children we serve as physicians can teach us so much about life as well as “American the Beautiful”.  

 I also learned from this meeting that no matter how hard I try,  I am not in charge, that God provides amazing people around me who will take over situations that are overwhelming, and I especially learned after dinner that when a door unexpectedly closes, the next door that opens often is surprisingly magnificent.

Joanna       joannaseibert.com

The joy of hearing one of the children singing at the dinner.