Many of us are familiar with the practice of lectio divina, or holy reading. This practice involves reading a text many different times without searching for anything.
It commonly looks like this: finding a comfortable seat; taking a moment or two to find your focus and clear your mind (a popular way is to close your eyes and focus on your breath); pray for openness to “hear” new things in the given text; read the text several different times, pausing in between; notice (without judgment) things you may not have heard before - maybe a word, image, or detail; ask yourself if this changes the text or story, what it might say to you today, and/or why that mined nugget is important.
As
we continue in this year’s Narrative Lectionary - looking at the whole
narrative of the Biblical texts, we’d like to invite you to practice not only
the lectio divina, but also the visio divina, or holy seeing, each week.
The texts we will hear on Sunday’s are rich texts both in word and image.
Practice of the visio divina is similar to the lectio divina. Again, it looks like
this: finding a comfortable seat; taking a moment or two to find your
focus and clear your mind (a popular way is to close your eyes and focus on
your breath); pray for openness to “see” new things about the story in the
given image; open your eyes and contemplate the image several different times;
notice (without judgment) things you may not have considered before; ask
yourself if this changes the text or story, what it might say to you today,
and/or why that mined nugget is important.
This week’s text (September 13) is the story of Abraham Sacrificing Isaac, found in Genesis 22.
The picture is Schnorr von Carolsfeld Bibel in Bildern, 1860. In Sunday’s chat, Pastor Thomas mentioned the picture Bible he viewed as a child, where he first became aware of this Biblical text.
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