Reflections

In preparation for our visit this Saturday to the VMFA, our adult formation class practiced “visio divina” together this past Sunday. “Visio divina” translates to “sacred seeing” – essentially, praying with images. (If you’re interested in the steps of visio divina, the Episcopal Church of the Annunciation has a helpful outline.) The heart of it is simply spending more time with an image that you otherwise might, with an openness to being guided by God.

 

I loved getting to hear what emerged for our formation class when they slowed down with works like Henry Ossowa Tanner’s The Savior, Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, or Lee Krasner’s Icarus.

 

As I prepared for class, I was thinking about a podcast I’d listened to about Slow Art Day, a global event that invites people to look at art slowly. While the podcast focused on churches’ participation, the concept seems to have originated with museums and galleries. Articles I’ve read suggest that the average museumgoer looks at each painting they view in a museum somewhere between 15 and 30 seconds. Slow Art Day feels like a response to the underlying belief that the quantity of what we look at means might mean more the quality of attention we bring to our looking. I’m heartened by the idea that both religious and secular spaces are recognizing the benefits that come through slowing down and contemplating beauty.

 

Inviting people to slow down is a gift the church has to offer the world. After all, liturgy functions at a different pace than much of the rest of our lives, especially compared to short, fast, relentless video content we might consume on our phones or content that relies on “clickbait” headlines, which punchily present hooks that may, or may not be, rooted in fact. The faster the rest of life becomes, the more challenging the slow, reflective nature of worship and prayer be – and perhaps all the more important.

 

There are many ways we each might practice slowing down, but I want to especially lift up the opportunity to slow down together. In the undergraduate literature class I assist with at VCU, we recently read an essay by Ross Gay called “Sharing a Bag.” He focuses on two people, seemingly a mother and child, holding handles together of a laundry sack or shopping bag. The sharing slows the task down and leads, initially, to “a kind of staggering.” Ross Gay concludes: “Everything that needs getting done—getting the groceries or laundry home—would get done just fine without this meager collaboration. But the only thing that needs doing, without it, would not.” I pray we might slow down together for the kind of collaboration that provides us, and the world, with what it so desperately needs.