Visio Divina in Seminary Class

One of the cool things about being in a seminary class is that we can actually engage in spiritual practices and not just talk about them.  On Wednesday, in my Spiritual Formation for Ministry class, we did a session of Visio Divina, after reading Henri Nouwen who talked about this practice.

I reached for my sketchbook, but it wasn't going to be that kind of Visio Divina. It's a class conducted via Zoom, so our teacher pulled up this image, "Emmaus," by Emmanuel Garibay:

On Wednesday, we looked at this image, while our teacher led us through the meditation.  "I invite you to . . ."--much of what our teacher offered was preceded by this phrase.  She invited us to focus on different parts of the image.  She invited us to close our eyes.  She invited us to consider where we see God in this image.  She invited us to consider what God was saying to us in this image.

Then we broke into small groups.  My group was me, another woman, and a man who is also in my CD group, so I knew him.  He's a Seventh Day Adventist, so I wasn't surprised to hear him say that he found the image too disturbing to even have it on his screen.  I talked about how it was hard for me to meditate on the image because I wanted to analyze it, especially the background, which reminded me of both depictions of Hell and Pentecost.

We came back together as a group to discuss.  Not surprisingly, we had a wide range of experiences.  Our teacher reminded us that "God will reveal Godself in any image."  She suggested we try it with images out of the news.  Interesting!

I'd like to try this again, only this time with a less unsettling image.  I found it hard to shut up my analytical brain long enough to let God, or anyone else, speak to me through the image that we used on Wednesday night.  But I'm not unhappy to have had the experience--or to have found the work of an artist whom I hadn't heard of before Wednesday night.

If your brain is like mine and wants more insight into both the artist and the art, this essay by Rob Pattendon in Image is a great place to start.