The Art Of Prayer
How Creativity Can Hold Our Hardest Moments
The first time I saw an ex-voto painting, I was mesmerized.
It was pinned to the wall of an artist’s studio in San Diego, where I had been teaching a workshop.
At first glance, it looked like folk art—small, raw, almost childlike [my favourite kind, by the way].
But the more I looked, the more I saw.
A desperate moment. A scene of distress. A miracle.
I learned that these paintings, also known as retablos, come from a Mexican tradition of offering thanks—or begging for intervention—through images.
A simple tin painting, paired with handwritten text, would document a moment of suffering, an answered prayer, or a cry for help.
Often, these images were created in gratitude after divine intervention;a way of saying, I survived.
Something, someone, saved me.
I was fascinated. And I didn’t yet know why.
A Moment of Despair, A Moment of Witnessing
Only months later, I found myself in a moment I did not want to be in.
I had been locked in an exhausting cycle of disordered eating for as long as I could remember. I had tried everything - every plan, every therapist, every method of control.
And nothing worked.
One night, in a moment of sheer despair, I broke every single plate in my kitchen.
I wanted to punish myself. I wanted to leave myself with nothing.
No way to eat, no way to keep going. I had reached the end of something, though I didn’t know what.
And in that moment, after the breaking, after the storm inside me quieted, I did the only thing I knew how to do.
I went to my journal.
I picked up a pen. And without thinking, I drew.
I illustrated my own moment of devastation; crude and raw, like the ex-voto paintings I had seen only months before.
And beneath it, I wrote my own plea. My own longing. My own version of the small, desperate prayers written beneath those paintings of old.
I had no idea that, in doing this, I was starting something.
Creativity as Prayer
Since then, I have returned to this practice, again & again.
Sometimes, I paint a moment of gratitude—when something in my life shifts, when an unseen force moves on my behalf, when I see the miracle.
Other times, I capture the ache of a moment that has no resolution.
The uncertainty.
The longing.
The questions I don’t yet have answers to.
I have come to believe that creativity is its own kind of prayer.
To bear witness to our own lives—this is an act of reverence.
To translate pain into something visible—this is an act of transformation.
To give form to gratitude, longing, grief—this is an act of devotion.
And you don’t have to be an artist.
You don’t have to paint, or draw, or do anything fancy. You can collage. You can write. You can simply find an image that speaks to your experience and glue it into your journal.
What matters is the witnessing.
Do The Work: A Creative Witnessing of Your Life 👇🏼
If you’d like to explore this practice, here’s a simple way to begin…
[📖 For paid subscribers: Below, I’m sharing how you can adapt this practice in your own way with ideas & prompts to help you start experimenting with this in your own creative way]