Okay now I don’t know how to draw, but…
Walking home late last night, I felt the peace of a cool, quiet evening. In the final block before my apartment, I saw silent neighbors apparently enjoying the same air. Doodled them this morning as I prayed for them. This image has been clear in my head.
I am not at all a visual artist; I have a much easier go of word portraits.
But for years, I’ve been learning about how disembodied my faith has always been. There’s a kind of strange floating-brain concept of prayer in many churches today; “The setting doesn’t matter! What matters is the spirit! Our posture doesn’t matter; you can raise your hands in your heart!” And it isn’t that that isn’t true, but that perhaps the physicality of our bodies can contribute to our experiences with each other and God in a way that the church often neglects.
So this practice of considering the body of my neighbors — their postures, what they were feeling on their backs or elbows or knees — was an interesting way to try to pray for them. It allowed me to meditate on who they were as real people, not just concepts of people.
Arts in a lot of ways are about taking the spiritual and creating some physical representations to help us understand them. Worship music is just physical vibrations in the air — but imbued with deep meaning that almost every church values to bring us closer to God. Stained glass windows have historically carried this significance; liturgies called people to kneel or stand to engage their bodies in particular modes of worship. And of course, God himself took on flesh.
I’m still learning about what this means. But taking the time to sketch my neighbors grew my love for them, and I would encourage anyone to try it.
