A Prayer for Artists to Our Blessed Lady

A Prayer For Artists to Our Lady

Our Lady, Mother of All Good Things

We artists are a complex weaving

Our beauty and our pain seek us

Through brush and pen

Through hand and foot

Through drum and flute

Through paper and scissor

Through image and word

Through life and death

Through our desire to be self expressed.

While we are at once struck with joy

at sudden inspiration, we are also

sometimes stuck with a strange halting fear

Fear enough to stay the brush

or halt the tambourine.

Is it worth it to make art?

Am I good enough? Can I sell it?

What will others think? Of me, my art?

I should be doing accounting,

become a lawyer, a doctor or politician,

or clean my house after all,

instead of getting myself to studio or notebook.

We all know –  poets and artists –

are of no value here…there are mouths to feed!

And so we chatter on in this way

Poisoning our ideas with lack of Faith.

Blessed Lady, You have heard all of our complaints I am sure.

For many thousands of years, and as a form of medicine,

have given yourself, Lady, your own image and heart,

to millions of painters, poets and songwriters to keep them

Going. To keep them company in the dark night.

For this we thank you. For this I thank you beyond measure.

You are the most painted, most sung about Lady in all the world!

Blessed Lady I beseech you on our behalf, on behalf of all artists!

I call to you for the artists, whose creative

mind and hand is set to something which is

LIFE GIVING. To self or others, but it is

for LIFE, something which adds light and

does not seek to extinguish it.

Only the artist, not the viewer, really knows

what is truly life giving.

And we must create! HOW WE MUST MAKE BEAUTY!

Blessed Lady! Mother of All Good Things!

I cry to you on the behalf of Artists everywhere!

Hail, Holy Lady, look upon our tribe today!

Call us to the studio to light the candle!

Call us to the paintbrush filled with red paint!

Call us to the piano filled with unsaid songs!

And the anvil and the forging fire and crucible.

And the garden beds of red beet, gold plums and collard greens.

Call us to the creative kitchen where healing soups mend the world.

Call us to the streets for spontaneous soul theater

Call the poets to the café’s for readings again!

Call the writers to the desks and set their pens and keys on fire!

Call us to the blank canvas, to find the messages within.

Call us to the uncarved block to roll away the rock.

Call us to the camera to capture children laughing and the light of day!

Patroness of Artists! Lady of a million paintings!

I call on you to call on us and to keep the Artists creating!

Lady they have taken the art out of so many schools,

this great gift given by God to man and woman

which since time began we have used to express the

inexpressible! Our job has been to chronicle the soul

of humankind, and they have taken it from our children!

Call on those children Blessed Good Mother – give them notebooks and

Artist friends and a desire for the guitar and the quill.

Tell them you will post their drawings on the fridgerator of life!

Lady, the world is torn with pain and grief and greed!

Tell the artists that it is our job to weave our golden and red

threads through the dense matter of oppression

Through the dark fog of injustice and the

tyranny of images sold which do not represent life

but the worst kind of death, the needless kind.

Our creations are an antidote to the violence.

Artists are the monks and nuns of revolution,

the visionaries who record what ‘they’ do not want

us to record – our work is the work of truth telling.

BUT LADY! We struggle with worth and will!

TODAY light the flame on our hearts and hearths

and cause an idea – that blessed spark of light

all artists see – to happen within us.

TODAY if the we do not see the spark, or never feel

Inspired at all, STILL  – CALL US TO THE STUDIO!

Let us not wait for inspiration to know,

to make art is to make life.

It does not have to be good looking to be art.

We can move beyond the starving artist story of old. Hark! Be GONE!

We can get so hung up on our worth!

As if beauty was a quantity or unit of measure.

Call us BLESSED MOTHER to remember who

We are – visionaries of the ages – whose work

Is needed. Energetically needed in our Universe.

We keep the balance in the unseen realms.

Our paintings count as prayers

when we choose for them too.

Hail, Full of Grace, hear my prayer.

Your Daughter,

In Service Through Art,

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened.  Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Rumi

Living Journal – I was up early again, writing at my little white writing desk, I am thinking I need to name it as I have so much affection for this little station of creativity. I light the candle, put on my fuzzy socks, pet the cat and sit to write and paint. Early morning light blesses my fingers as they fly in prayer on keyboard before my household awakes in sweet morning love. I don’t have internet at home, so I write without the fear of answering a beep on my e-mail, a hard master e-mail is. So when I got in this morning, I had this link in my in box with a note from one of my spiritual mothers, Christin Lore Weber, who wrote one of my favorite books, Circle of Mysteries.

‘You are the custodians of beauty.Through your art, you yourselves are to be heralds and witnesses of hope’ The Pope

http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=34901

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