Visual Strategies for Adolescent Spiritual Well-being

ABSTRACT Over a five-month period 14 young people participated in focus groups exploring art , kept personal journals, and had individual interviews. Group conversations covered personal issues, environmental concerns, metaphysics, theology, ethics and prayer while their processes encompassed creating metaphor and story, challenging each other to make it personal or justify their stance, and sketching. The theoretical base brought adolescent development and spiritual formation alongside theological aesthetics, while methodology was informed by narrative theory. The resulting composite narratives revealed the way in which parallel strategies – interviews, focus groups, journals – not only functioned as useful data-collection, but more importantly became a unified strategy that undergirded the research and reinforced the findings. Findings included: the role of imagination and processes of spiritual narration; the ways in which art creates sacred space, affects the whole person and addresses the same existential questions as spirituality;embodied response and enactment, and creation of future hope.