“What breaks your heart? What does your soul long for? And, how is that connected to how you are living your life now?” -Maria Shriver
“[E]very time I allowed myself to feel at a loss in the face of the pain I witnessed, every time I touched my own irrelevance, there was this energy of God that would begin to emerge in our midst. All I had to do was say yes to it. The presence of God was there, always ready to pick up the broken pieces from the floor and re-assemble them into something good. . . . When that happened, I realized that my skills were not useless. I just needed to first surrender them to God, so God could use them however God wished. So right words could come. So right ways of being present could manifest. . . . It was often not clear who was helping whom. Because in each of those sacred moments I received just as much as I was giving, if not more.” – Adam Bucko, Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation In this 30-minute video, Adam Bucko and Mark Longhurst discuss Adam’s book.
Welcome to Day 10 of the Wonders of Worship (WOW) series. Today we ponder the Kyrie.
Kyrie Eleison
Christe Eleison
Kyrie Eleison
Kyrie Eleison. Ukrainian Monody of the XV Century
Ways to Engage:
- Practice Visio Divina (receive, reflect, respond, rest) with the painting.
- Download the B&W image. Color it on your own or with a friend. Color in silence or while listening to the talk or music linked above. Let it inspire further contemplation/conversation.
- You do you. Trust your intuition and engage in the way your heart desires.
To download the black and white image for personal use: on a computer, click and drag the image to your desktop; on a phone, press on the picture until it gives you the option to save it to your photos. The image is formatted to fit on an 8.5″x11″ piece of paper, but feel free to print it whatever size you’d like.
Background: I created a series of forty 5″x7″ watercolor paintings inspired by the elements of worship. It was work commissioned by a project with Nourishing Vocation with Children at St. Olaf College, a program funded through Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative.
As the paintings are shared, you may notice a pattern:
- Music = Songbird
- Prayer = Seed and/or Fruit
- Word = Leaf
- Order of Service = Element of Nature
- Season = Insect with a Flower
One final creative invitation for this project remains for me: to paint a Tree of Life holding all forty elements. I plan to share its progress here.
For this series, I am grateful to have used handmade paper from White Dragon Paper and watercolor paints from Natural Earth Paint.
vonda drees art 