On two recent retreats this article about the current Picasso exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario helped shape our approach to prayer together:

One thing visitors won’t be getting is lots of information on the walls. Each object will be identified in situ – but there is only one substantive text panel, at the show’s start, while each of the exhibition’s seven sections will be prefaced only by a single quotation….It’s completely intentional, of course. Didactic panels bunch up viewers and tend to mediate, even “blind” their experience of the art…
“What we need to do is go freely to the work. We have to have the courage to be nude in front of the works. An exhibition is not a text, is not a book. We don’t need any explanation at the first level of contact…to respect it, to put people under its power. What is an exhibition but a machine to exhibit people to the work? We need to be in a direct relation, without any ‘facilities,’ no small stories, no narratives.” (Anne Baldassari, chief curator of the Musee National Picasso, Paris in a Globe & Mail interview April 25, 2012)

The friends on retreat exhibited themselves to the creation around us, the Gospel story we heard, and the presence of God in one another.

A Prayer for Today

Loving God, you reveal yourself in creation, in Gospel story, in the lives of those that cross my path. Free me from past scars and assumptions that blind me and let me be under the power of your loving presence around me….For Jesus’ sake.

© June 4, 2012 Touchstone Ministries Inc.