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A recent visit from my friend the artist Bob Gilroy, S.J., has prompted me to write about a project that is well worth your time. Bob is a Jesuit priest, a talented visual artist and longtime spiritual director, based at the Campion Renewal Center in Weston, Mass., whose work is probably familiar to readers of America. (And, by the way, he did not ask me to write about this: I volunteered!) In the past few years his vividly colored paintings often graced our covers. Besides his work in art therapy (which is, besides his training in the fine arts, another other area of expertise) Bob encourages retreatants to consider using the visual arts as part of their prayer--both creating it and contemplating it. You might check out his wonderful website "Prayer Windows," and see if it might help you in your own meditations. Bob places his paintings and drawings and collages within the framework of the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. To the right is my favorite of all of his images, courtesy of Trinity Studios (which carries his art) and which once hung in a Jesuit community in Cambridge, Mass., which we both lived, but which now hangs in the headquarters of a women's religious order in Rome. It's called "Annunciation." Isn't it great?
James Martin, S.J.
