When we went to Stony Point Center in NY at the end of May to lead a 3-day retreat on biblical storytelling as a strategy for peace, I bought a book in the gift shop called Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God by Sybil MacBeth. It describes a creative way of praying that I thought might be good for my spiritual life, but also that might be adapted for Circle of the Word.

I tried it out this past Wednesday. I wouldn’t say it was a unqualified success since none of the women offered to talk much about what the process had been like for them. But they all paid close attention to the instructions I gave for getting started. They colored diligently with the new markers I had gotten that were definitely appreciated. While they colored I played a seven-minute piece of music downloaded from iTunes for the occasion.

The music was from an album titled “Call of the Mystic” by Karunesh, a piece called “Hearing You Now.” I thought that was a perfect title given the story was about God “hearing the voice of the boy.” I picked the piece because it was Middle Eastern sounding, meditative, and instrumental (less distracting than vocal would have been).

Shown here are the fruits of my co-Circlekeepers’ praying in color exercise. Our story of the day was “God Saves Hagar” (Gen. 21:8-15) so we started out by creating a space for every character in the story.