SALT LAKE CITY — Illuminations from the first handwritten Bible in 400 years will form the basis of meditations each Friday during Lent in The Cathedral of the Madeleine.
The Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City is one of 20 nationwide to pilot the visio divina program, which will use illuminations from the St. John’s Bible for participants to ruminate on during the sessions.
"It’s using the Bible anew for evangelization and to ignite the pastoral imagination of people to move it beyond a museum piece to the living word," said Barbara Sutton, director of the Seeing the Word project through the School of Theology at St. John’s University, which commissioned the handwritten Bible in 1998.
The illuminations used in the project will reflect the Gospel readings from the Lenten Sunday readings. Sutton is developing reflective guides for each of the illuminations in the St. John’s Bible; those being used for the Lenten study are the first in the series.
The first session in Salt Lake isn’t part of Sutton’s series; rather, it will be a description of the visio divina process, which is "a way of praying and meditating with the Scripture," said Jakob Rinderknecht, a St. John’s alumnus who teaches adult education at the cathedral. "The things that we’re going to talk about on Friday may be helpful to people and will certainly be interesting but they won’t be necessary for participation."
The process involves "slow, meditative reading, with time taken to meditate, to let the text work on us," he said. Each passage is read several times, and each time those in the group are asked to listen for different things, such as how the Scripture is speaking to the individuals or what it’s asking them to do.
"It’s a practice," Rinderknecht said. "You have to practice doing it with other people, and each time you do it, it gets easier and you get into the groove faster, but no particular session is required for any other session."
The reflections will focus not only on the text but the accompanying illuminations, which were commissioned for the St. John’s Bible. Participants will be asked what the images say not only about the particular scripture passage they reflect "but also our relationship to God as we’re trying to grow into it and learn," Rinderknecht said.
Each person will experience different things from the same illumination, he added, "and that’s OK. It’s not a reason for argument. We can talk about it, but it’s more a question of ‘what does this mean to me right here and right now?’ and when I come back to the text in two weeks it might be entirely different because God might be calling me to a different thing from a different place. It’s a very subjective thing."
The Salt Lake diocese was chosen to pilot the program because Timothy Johnston, the liturgical director, also is a St. John’s alumnus, Sutton said, who plans to use feedback from the 20 pilot groups to improve the reflective guides that she’s developing.
The meditative program continues the Cathedral’s tradition of similar Lenten offerings, Johnston said, adding that it will offer Utah Catholics a chance to gather, ponder on the word of God and what it means in their life, and "hopefully lead to some reconciliation and healing during this season of Lent."
The St. John’s Bible was created "to ignite spiritual imagination of believers throughout the world for the new millennium and to revive a sacred tradition that has been nearly absent from the Christian world for many, many centuries, and that is the tradition of beautiful, handwritten texts," said Tim Ternes, director of St. John’s Bible.
The St. John’s Bible’s creation is being overseen by Donald Jackson, a calligrapher who is the Scribe of Great Britain’s House of Lords. When it’s completed in 2011, it will have 1,150 pages and more than 160 pieces of artwork, Ternes said.
The finished work will be seven volumes, each of which will be 2 feet by 3 feet. It’s written in the traditional way, using turkey, swan and goose feathers for writing and inks using natural pigments. A modern translation will be used, "so it truly becomes not a Medieval Bible but a Bible that brings the scriptures and the experiences of our time into play," he said.
The illuminations are "visual spiritual meditations designed to invite you into the Scriptures, to come together with others to make meaning," he said. "One of the most vital things about the Bible is that it is communal. The Bible is not about me and God or you and God, it’s about us and God. These images are designed to invite you to come together with others to make meaning between that beautiful pairing between word and image. The imagery is designed to speak to people of today. We are a visual society, and if these Scriptures are going to have as long of a life as they already have had, we need to bring them into the contemporary with us and show how they apply to today’s world."
For example, the Valley of the Dry Bones in the Old Testament is illustrated with bones from Killing Fields under Pol Pot, the Rwandan genocide and a pile of eyeglasses from Auschwitz. "Those are real bones of our society of today," Ternes said.
The meditative series at the Cathedral of the Madeleine will be 6:30 p.m. on Fridays starting Feb. 19 and running through March 19.
For more information about the St. John’s Bible, visit www.csbsju.edu/sot/seeingtheword.
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