{"id":5199,"date":"2011-09-25T08:06:01","date_gmt":"2011-09-25T12:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/?p=5199"},"modified":"2011-09-25T08:19:33","modified_gmt":"2011-09-25T12:19:33","slug":"creating-is-praying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/?p=5199","title":{"rendered":"Creating is Praying"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An artist could start his or her work saying, &#8220;Dear God,&#8221; then spend the day writing or painting or sculpting or whatever it is she or he does, then finish with, &#8220;Amen.&#8221; \u00a0 Creativity is the Creator&#8217;s gift.\u00a0 The actual creating is a prayer.\u00a0 Any person, anybody at all can let making something, doing something, living itself be prayer.<\/p>\n<p>Making art does not have to be painting a picture destined for an art gallery or writing a novel.\u00a0 It can be writing a sentence or two in a notebook about the pretty sunrise, the disturbing phone call, the tasty lunch, the easy laugh, the shed tear.\u00a0 Making art can be fastening photographs in an album and writing a caption for each one.\u00a0 It could be picking a flower or three or seven and arranging them in a vase.<\/p>\n<p>A simple act of creativity could be jotting a note on the calendar about what you did today:<\/p>\n<p><em>Took a long walk in the neighborhood. <\/em><br \/>\n<em>Toured the museum.<\/em><br \/>\n<em>Allowed myself a refreshing catnap.<\/em><br \/>\n<em>Called my good friend and chatted.<\/em><br \/>\n<em>Lit candles at supper: turned it into an event.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Imagine 365 brief sentences like that!\u00a0 At the end of the year, you&#8217;d have a diary, a book, a record of creative activities, a year of prayer.<\/p>\n<p>Living can be filled with creativity whether great or common, professional or amateur.\u00a0 Creative living can be, and by its very nature is, a wordless prayer to God: a prayer of thanks, a prayer of supplication, a prayer of praise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An artist could start his or her work saying, &#8220;Dear God,&#8221; then spend the day writing or painting or sculpting or whatever it is she or he does, then finish with, &#8220;Amen.&#8221; \u00a0 Creativity is the Creator&#8217;s gift.\u00a0 The actual &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/?p=5199\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,39],"tags":[255,818,817,35,819],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5199"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5199"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5206,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5199\/revisions\/5206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}