Lenten Journaling Group: Collage

We began our evening with prayer, and then we went to a table of magazines I had laid out: gardening magazines, photography magazines, back issues of Oprah's magazine, and some spiritual magazines.

I invited everyone to choose a few magazines, and we returned to our seats.

Then I read Isaiah 43: 18-21:


Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
19 I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
20 The wild animals will honor me,
the jackals and the ostriches;
for I give water in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert,
to give drink to my chosen people,
21 the people whom I formed for myself
so that they might declare my praise.


I read it again. Then we looked through magazines, ripping and cutting out anything that appealed to us, words, and/or images.

We turned to our journals/paper. Most of us pasted images to paper in a variety of ways:

I then read the Isaiah passage again, and we discussed what we had put together. Most of us assembled images that we liked. Perhaps they reminded us of our friends. Maybe we thought about places we had traveled. I assembled this image after several weeks of work stress, and it doesn't take a trained psychologist to analyze what it means.

We were intrigued by one approach of one of our group:

She found a solid chunk of text and cut it into strips. Then she wrote the lines from Isaiah in between.

I invited us to return to our images at some point later in the week. Perhaps we want to write more or sketch more deeply. Maybe we want to sit in quiet contemplation. God might use this process to speak to us.

We closed with prayer.