Friday, February 14, 2014

a little less conversation.




Silence is so accurate.
             - Mark Rothko

main chapel, Sacred Heart Novitiate



The Grand Silence has begun.

This week here at Sacred Heart, thirtysome women & men entered into the stillness & quietude of the thirty-day Spiritual Exercises. A privilege & gift to be back here amongst them, a few months after my own experience of the Exercises this past November.

I brought along my own journal from my November retreat so as to accompany the retreatants each day by taking time with my own journal from November, aligning my own prayer with theirs. What has emerged in rereading my journal entries is how meager, how limited my words are in attempting to seize all that Christ was doing in the midst of those thirty days (and continues to do). The metaphors, the similes... way too many words, way too insufficient.

But a picture can indeed be worth a legion of words. At the end of each of the thirty-odd days of the Exercises, I picked up crayons & chalk pastels (the simple tools from childhood!) and played with colors & shapes. I allowed myself a maximum of 45 minutes each night in what became a daily attempt to capture, to sum up & somehow visualize my hours of prayer for that day.

I know I'm no artist, but those crayons & chalk pastels went a long way. It's astounding how I can now gaze on any of these drawings & recollect that day of prayer & the movements whilst in prayer. Not just a head-knowledge recollection/recognition, but a more crucial heart-knowledge... a return to that day's experience of Christ uniquely laboring for, with & through me.

And while these scribblings may have been borne of my own intimate, personal prayer, I refrain from attempting to "explain" them for a couple of reasons. First off (as mentioned above) words ultimately fail in the attempt to explain an experience of prayer (except maybe for mystic poets like Teresa of Avila or Hafiz - heck, crayons were effort enough for me). Kinda like trying to explain a Far Side cartoon. And secondly, what the colors, shapes, composition elicits in/for me might be quite different than for you. That's one of the many the cools thing about art. We bring ourselves to the experience of art.

So - for your consideration, provocation & amusement, I give you a few days worth of prayer depictions from my November experience of the Spiritual Exercises...

(disclaimer: any similarity between my feeble journal drawings & the work of the astounding mid 20th century abstract expressionist quoted up above is knowingly, emphatically & unabashedly intentional. the more abstract, the better to express the ineffable. besides, i cannot draw people or trees.)














Pictures must be miraculous.
                          - Mark Rothko








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