Visio divina

We’ve been working here, at St. John’s, to explore ways in which the new Saint John’s Bible might support faith formation. One of the things we’ve worked with is taking the concept of “lectio divina” — a key practice within Benedictine communities, of which this is one — and exploring the process of developing the illuminations for the bible. The process we’ve been using is something the group here has taken to calling “visio divina.”

It's really a powerful way to experience a text, and I get excited thinking about all of many ways in which we could take this process and try it in other contexts. Here's what we've been doing. We start with a text (in this case, we've been working with texts that have already been illuminated in this bible), and simply read it carefully. Next we think about what we're seeing in the text. Next we ponder how we might represent what we're seeing. That led to some drawing (my drawing skills are awful, but it was fun to have some time to just play with it). At each step of the way we did some of the work individually, and then shared with each other in small groups.

After the drawing, Tim read to us from the commentary that the CIT (committee on illumination and texts) had sent to Donald Jackson (the artist and chief scribe of the Saint John's Bible) in Wales. Then we looked at the illumination that he had made of that text, in some cases with multiple iterations or drafts alongside the comments from the CIT.

It was such a wonderful way into a text! And the collaborative kind of meaning-making, meaning-sharing that was happening was so energizing that we've continued to try and think of ways to embed such a process in a larger process, to support the "ripples" outward.