No, it’s not the prayer said by a comedian before going on-stage, it is a book that explores prayer through comic art written by Heather Annis, Director of Children and Youth Ministries at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Barrington, Rhode Island.
I think comics are a unique avenue for telling stories and eliciting responses and making statements and remembering the past but envisioning the future. They’re not always funny but they connect us all. I think when kids create the pictures they are able to situate themselves within their church history, their church community or broader community in a really personal way that is also visible to anybody else….
…So what led to the book was taking apart The Book of Common Prayer and going over each basic prayer and exploring those through comics—the prayers of the people, the confession, the Nicene Creed, the Psalms—unpacking what is the function of each type of prayer. What does it have to do with you? And is there a way you can draw pictures and tell little stories that both help you to remember the point and also for you to be able to share it with other people?
The kids populated the prayer book with these characters and each has a specific function. For example, there’s Lollipop Dragon whose long, convoluted backstory has to do with the prayers of the people. There’s a whale named Seth who carries the weight of the world’s confessions around in his giant whale head and every now and then the weight of these prayers gets so heavy that he has a little hat that he blows his hat off his head with his blow hole.