Villa Maria Community Center hosts summer enrichment series
By LINDA M. LINONIS
VILLA MARIA, PA.
Art as the avenue of prayer provided the focus of “Art and Prayer,” a four-day class that was part of the Energize Your Spirit Summer Enrichment Series at Villa Maria Community Center.
Sister Paulette Kirchensteiner led sessions Monday on prayer bowls and Tuesday on mandalas on black paper using white pencils. Sister Margaret Marszal led sessions Wednesday on collages with words and pictures for prayer and Thursday, watercolor works. Both are Humility of Mary nuns.
Sister Paulette said the goal of the classes was to show how “art was the prayer.” “As an artist, I find it a reflective way to prayer,” she said.
She noted the prayer bowls made of clay were made two ways — with eyes open and then closed. “We read a meditation then worked wth the clay,” she said, adding the “focus was to feel the clay.”
Creativity is said to be a function of the right brain, and Sister Paulette said it is her belief that prayer also channels through the right side of the brain, though no research study has detailed that.
“For me, art and prayer are the same thing,” Sister Paulette said. “You come out with a product, but it’s immaterial what it looks like.”
The act of creating the art is the prayer and that’s the key. “There’s never a mistake,” she said.
In the session using black paper, Sister Paulette noted the scale of light to dark provided the contrast and the more light pencil marks made, the lighter the look. “It represents the light of our spirit on paper,” she said. “The light radiates and represents creation.”
To music with a meditative sound, class participants created their designs on black paper, each one different. Class participants were given the suggestion to “work outward like an expanding galaxy ... an expression of spiritual light.”
The music, meant to uplift and inspire, did just that. Sister Paulette called it “extrovert meditation.”
She taught art classes for 21 years with students from kindergarten to college. Sister Paulette is the coordinator of the Prayer Circle Ministry at Villa Maria.
Sister Barbara Lenarcic, a class participant, said she found the session “relaxing” and as a form of prayer. Her design “just happened,” noting she didn’t plan it. “It’s really being present in the moment,” she said.
Carol Huncik of Pulaski, Pa., said she “loves art and thinks of it as spiritual.”
“I think divine energy is involved,” Huncik said.
Nikki Cooper of Wampum, Pa., said she enjoyed the art and the “quietness” of the sessions. She said it was interesting what she created. “I’ll figure out what it means,” she said.
The summer enrichment series took place the week of June 22. Other classes offered included visual language in movies, counted cross stitch, applications for iPad or iPhone, learning to crochet, homemade candy, retreat evenings, labyrinth and animal balloons.