Contemplative Comics day 104

I started making these daily contemplative comics back in August of 2018 as a prayer practice. When I lost my job, I wanted to stop making them. Newborn kid. Job hunting. Crushed spirit. Feeling lost.

Not exactly prime creative material.

I remember hearing Jonathan Martin tell a story about his life being at a similar place of pain and desperation. Shipwrecked. He talked about finding his way into an Episcopal church and receiving Communion. Thus started the journey of a Pentecostal engaging in liturgy.

I was in my own journey into liturgy when I found myself shipwrecked. I was neck deep in planning Advent. So I decided to keep making these comics, expanding on my plans for the Advent worship services that never were.

Each week, the comics follow the Advent readings of that particular Sunday. I used a podcast called Same Old Song as a sort of commentary to help. It has been a sort of preaching school on how to craft sermons around the liturgical church calendar.

I did not face a crisis of faith in Jesus during this season, largely I think, because the liturgy helped me have something to hold onto. Instead of staring at my bible and feeling clueless as to where to start or guilty about being too overwhelmed to start anywhere in particular, there were the weekly readings built into the calendar. There was the Collect framing the theme of each week. And while I wasn’t connected to a church, I was participating in something simultaneously with Christians all over the world following the same church calendar and reading the same passages of scripture.

The Advent liturgy, and working through my pain and my theology by making these comics, formed a kind of tether to Jesus.