The Visual Image as a Means of Prayer

Silence. Light sifting through the curtain filters across the young woman's face, revealing head and eyes lifted, lips barely parted. Artist Shin-hee Chin's image-woven and stitched from threads and recycled fabric-conveys the mystery, the inner movement, the focused stillness, the silence of prayer. As viewers our response echoes the young woman's intensity: we lean forward, listening to the silence, straining to know her prayer, perhaps even moved to pray beside her. Yet, with or without our own words, Silence simply is a prayer.Shin-hee Chins Chinmoku: Silence1 was the lead image in Women at Prayer, a juried online exhibition mounted by the Episcopal Church and the Visual Arts (ECVA), an internet community of visual artists initiated in the year 2000 with the mission "to encourage artists and organizations to engage the visual arts in the spiritual life of the church."2 Women at Prayer accompanied the work of "Anglican Women at Prayer," the international gathering of women held at Virginia Theological Seminary in 2014 that honored women's prayers as an essential presence in the life of the church. The eighty-one ECVA images were projected as a continuous loop before every plenary session, with a number of the plenary speakers referring to the images and alluding to themes raised in the artwork. And a smaller selection of sixteen images-projected at a slower pace and paired with poetry, song, and prayer-was used for a contemplative prayer service. The conference organizers, including Phoebe Griswold (one of the founders of ECVA), elected to integrate these images into the work of the conference out of their conviction that art constitutes a valid form of prayer, and out of their awareness that the prayers offered by images-much like the prayers of women-often go unremarked.The art in Women at Prayer (which is comprised of images of womens prayers but not limited to images by women) exemplifies both those convictions. These images stand in that long tradition in the Western church of art used as a means of prayer (what we might term visual prayer). Women at Prayer, however, enlarges that tradition to encompass prayers that embody the lives and experiences of women. Womens prayers have so often remained hidden, although the remarkable response to Women at Prayer (indicated by the number of submissions to the online exhibition) is evidence that this is a significant omission. In much the same way, visual prayer has passed unremarked in theological discussions and in manuals on prayer. I propose to offer a theological model for visual prayer by applying the more general descriptions of prayer to the act of praying with images and to locate the images from Women at Prayer within the larger Western tradition of visual prayer.We might begin by asking how the work of the artist can be regarded as prayer. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and herself indefatigable in prayer, complained about a narrow understanding of praying. "Since when," she argued, "are words the only acceptable form of prayer?" She maintained that people "pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people."3 Might we not add that artists have prayed through their work and, through their art, offered the faithful a way to pray?Theologian Karl Barth, in a small volume titled Prayer, writes: "At this point it is also important to remark with Calvin that prayer uttered in a language that we do not understand or which the congregation at prayer does not understand is a mockery to God.... We must think and speak in a comprehensible tongue, in a language which has meaning for us."4 Might we include the visual arts as one of those "languages" that Calvin mentions? In his letters to Bishop Serenus written around the year 600, Gregory the Great famously argued that the image was a means by which the unlettered might be taught. As I was finishing this essay I heard a Pentecost sermon in my own church where the preacher, the Reverend Anne Turner, remarked on all the ways that God speaks to us. …